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. 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. Earlier this year, television and Sony award-nominated radio presenter Matt Edmondson launched a new board game company called Format Games. In the UK, word game Ansagrams is now distributed by Asmodee to a number of major and indie retailers including John Lewis and Waterstones, while Egg Slam and So Wrong It’s Right make their high street debut exclusively at John Lewis for autumn/winter 2021. All three games will launch in other global territories through Asmodee in spring/summer 2022, along with a fourth new game, Noggin, which will also be available in the UK next year. 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.

Not really if I’m honest! We did play a lot of board games and card games because we went on a family camping holiday every year, so we would often take games there. Every Christmas we’d get a new board game, often one that was tied into a movie or TV show. My sister got a Garfield board game and it was quite disappointing, and I got a Home Alone 2 board game, which I was very excited about because it needed batteries… But the gameplay was extremely complicated! There's two PDFs available for this quiz. The first, anagram questions including the answers, the second is a PDF with just the questions. Because of my job on Radio 1, I spend a lot of time creating features and games for the show, many of which are the sorts of mechanics you’d expect to find in board games. Another part of my life is trying to come up with TV quiz shows, and these jobs all boil down to creating killer formats that are easy to understand and fun to play. 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. They told us we needed a distributor, so they introduced us to Asmodee. We really liked them, they said they could distribute the games in the UK for us and then we asked if we could also speak to their US office.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. Well now I’m going to be counting down the days to its unveiling! I also wanted to ask; you’re a TV presenter, you’re a Radio 1 DJ… Do you think being famous has made it easier to successfully launch your own games? You licensed Obama Llama to Big Potato. Did that process act as a bit of a crash course into the games industry? Matt, great to catch up. Before we dive into all things Format Games, how did you get into game design? Were you into games from a young age? 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.

I would never sit down and say “I’m going to do a trivia game, what’s the twist?” The twist always comes first.

Word Puzzles to Download and Print

We caught up with Matt to find out how a career creating formats for TV and radio proved the prefect prep for a pivot into party games. Right! It did a funny thing to my head where I would know the answer, but I just couldn’t get there! It’s funny and I thought I should do that as a board game, but a spoonerism on its own isn’t enough. Mean Girls from Big Potato is another great example of that. They’ve taken Truth Bombs – a great game with a brilliant mechanic – and they’ve put a different skin on it, but at its core is really strong game. Now Matt and his brother-in-law Laurence Emmett have founded Format Games and are launching two new games this year in the form of colour-mixing card game Egg Slam and trivia title, So Wrong It’s Right.