We have a game coming out next year called Noggin – which I genuinely think is the best game I’ve ever played, not just invented! – and it has that same kind of thing going on.

After the initial announcement that we’re behind these games, they’ll live or die based on whether they’re good. That won’t be truer than when they land in other countries. I have zero clout in America, for example, so the Asmodee US team just cared about whether the games were good. We did a Dragons’ Den-style Zoom pitch to the Asmodee guys in the States and we were offered a global distribution deal that covers the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. They wanted the games I’ve mentioned, plus our newest one, Noggin. We can’t think of a better partner for global distribution than Asmodee.Play continues with a different quiz master so that everyone has a roughly equal chance to play. The end-goal is to use the cards you win to spell out a 3-letter word with your winning cards. The ones that do it really well are the games that have a fantastic mechanic at the heart of them, like Dobble. It means the licensed versions of Dobble, like Dobble Gruffalo, give you the best of both worlds; you get a fantastic game mechanic while introducing people to Julia Donaldson, or you’re introducing Gruffalo fans to a new fantastic game like Dobble. It’s a good partnership. Great stuff. Now you said there that self-publishing sounded hard, but fast-forward to today and you’ve launched your own games company in Format Games. What changed your mind? Format Games’ credibility as an indie games label has been given the seal of approval by Asmodee, which first signed it up for UK distribution in February 2021. Seeing the potential of Matt’s designs, and recognising the worldwide appeal of the game formats, August saw Asmodee follow this up with an exclusive global distribution deal covering the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.

Television and Sony Award-nominated radio presenter Matt Edmondson established himself as a board game inventor when he created the party game Obama Llama. Last year, he followed it up with the sold-out-success Ansagrams, which he published independently. There's two PDFs available for this quiz. The first, anagram questions including the answers, the second is a PDF with just the questions. Earlier this year, television and Sony award-nominated radio presenter Matt Edmondson launched a new board game company called Format Games. It has to be a two-word answer to be a spoonerism, so I thought what if the words swapped around. So then I had two things! Then I thought you could just give the correct answer normally – so now I had three elements.

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Its outer box boasts that Ansagrams takes 30 minutes to play and 2 minutes to learn. Whilst this may be true for some, I’d recommend learning by doing and having the first round be a trial round. My brother-in-law Laurence hasn’t got a creative bone in his body, but he’s fantastic at logistics. He was also going through a bit of a tough time with his cleaning business. It shut down because he couldn’t send cleaners to people’s homes during the pandemic. He had nothing to do and I had nothing to do, and our skill-sets matched up. I have a thing called cyclothymia. It’s like a watered down bipolar. It means I have waves of incredible productivity followed by a lowness where I feel like I’m never going to have another idea again. In those waves of productivity, I feel very alive with creative energy and feel inspired by things I see and hear. At some point, you feel like ‘BAM – I’ve got it!’ and at that point, I feel like I need to purge myself of the idea. In that space, I feel I’m able to accomplish things that ‘everyday me’ couldn’t. Then I thought, rather than switch the letters, what about if you had to ditch the letters? That was the fourth thing sorted. Then I thought, maybe there’s one element where you have to deliberately give the wrong answer. Now I have a quiz – and it’s a quiz where you could answer one question in five different ways.

Ansagrams and So Wrong, It’s Right are both unthreatening trivia games. The questions are quite easy, but you have to do something special with the answers. That’s the magic of these trivia games. The idea that someone would say ‘we have this movie, turn it into a game’, I’d love that! I’d find that joyful. That said, the big question with a licensed game is: Is the game going to be any good? I don’t want people to have the experience I had with the Home Alone 2 game. Ha! It’s smart – and I suppose it also means you don’t have to necessarily be a trivia whizz to be good at it.I come up with games a lot, and I usually don’t do anything with them. When the pandemic hit, loads of my time got freed up. I was going to be making a TV show, that didn’t happen. I was doing radio but from home, so I had loads of extra time. I get bored very easily, so I set myself a couple of projects. One was to make an album, because why not?! It was a fun thing to experiment with. The other thing that kept me sane was one was to try and get one of my board game ideas made. Television and Sony Award-nominated radio presenter Matt Edmondson has launched a new board game company called Format Games. I’ve played strategy games that have clever mathematics underpinning them, and I could never come up with one of those. They are genius! What I can do is identify a feeling that’s fun and find a way to give you lots of that feeling in a game.