Yeah, I oversimplified—hobbyist games are absolutely taking off.
I was thinking of the casual, “game show board game”, “fun for the whole family” adaptations available at Target for $20, which I haven’t seen much of in a while.
Matthew Hudak, toys and games analyst with Euromonitor International, agrees, citing a recent market report that sales of games and puzzles grew by 15 percent in 2016. “It’s something that has been bubbling up for years now, but 2016 was the most influential year for board games,” he says. “It’s massive. There were more than 5,000 board games introduced into the U.S. market last year.”
According to Hudak, traditional board games are still the bulk of the market, but hobby board games, catered for adults, pushed the category’s growth to the next level. “It’s become a new go-to social activity,” he adds.
A premium game with high-quality miniatures of a wheel, a small Plinko board, IUFB price tag holders, a big Rumikub-esque display with number tiles and a bunch of game overlays, and other movable prop replicas would be really, really cool, and I’d pay a three-figure sum if it was executed well.
TPIR is a game show, after all, and most pricing games have an element of “show” that helps them play well on TV. It’s hard to fit that in a box for $20—you’re left with just the games, and I don’t know that the games are particularly strong enough to stand on their own. It’s hard to compete with a deep, layered, ever-changing strategy game like Ticket to Ride or Pandemic.
Plus, if you want to set it up, you need a lot of people (5+) to play TPIR—and one of them always has to sit out to host and set the games up. And most games only involve one other person, so everyone else is sitting and watching.
So I think if they want to compete, they have to do one of two things:
1) Use the TPIR license to make a new deep, engaging, endlessly replayable game on pricing knowledge that’s “inspired by” the show, that can compete with these new games
2) Make a limited-run, premium, high-quality game at a premium price point targeted to hardcore fans, available online—it won’t sell much, but fans will rave about it, and you can dominate that niche market of “hardcore game show fans”
What they’ve been doing is throwing together as many paper tiles and dry-erase games they can fit in a box for $20 and targeting it to the casual market. Low risk, and I assume low-reward. It gets pulled out of the box once or twice, and it’s “close enough” to the show, but I’m a huge fan and I don’t even like trying to get my friends to play it more than a few times.
