PlayMonster The Game Of Things.

Product Information

My experience as an Assistant Director has taught me how creative businesses work. I am familiar with the amount and type of labour that’s involved in taking a concept and seeing it through to the end whether that be the movie theatre, the TV set or the store shelf. If you're wrong, you're still in the round but the chance to guess passes to the player on your left. You remain in the round until someone matches you up with your response. Should I assume, for instance, that the best, most efficient way of having the quantity of hot water I need, when I need it, is to keep 170 litres of hot water stored in the basement? Would heat-on-demand technology save energy costs? Imagine walking into an appliance store and seeing that shiny new refrigerator. Imagine that, among the options, I can have this refrigerator as a service, for a price that reflects not just the cost of the refrigerator, but includes it’s actual energy cost too.

The problem is that unless the manufacturer’s tests are somehow consistent with the use I’m making of these appliances, then the data is meaningless. I might have committed myself to unnecessary energy costs. How would I know? How would anyone know? Imagine buying not a heat pump, but contracting for a temperate home, as a service. Year-round, your home will be 21 deg.C. Imagine the appeal of a service like that for people on fixed incomes. The analytics tells me (or perhaps the manufacturer of my refrigerator), that the best way of running my refrigerator is to anticipate my habits by over-cooling prior to me getting to it in the morning, so that when I’ve finished with it, the temperature inside my refrigerator is still in the ‘normal’ operating range, and needs only to maintain temperature, rather than recover. In the evening the refrigerator does the same thing. Using this kind of smart analysis, it’s possible to optimise the energy consumption of my refrigerator to do what I need it to, and no more. I’m told that it’s possible that I could save 30-40% of the current energy consumption of my refrigerator in this way. This is definitely the case with The Game of Things as the score keeping really distracts from the game itself. Basically the scoring aspect of the game involves players trying to guess which responses the other players came up with. Once every player has written down their response the reader reads all of the responses and the players then take turns guessing what the other players wrote down. Players score points by guessing the other player’s responses and being the last player remaining in the game. To start the game you need to choose one player to be the reader for the first round. They choose one of the cards and reads it out loud. The Topic cards are not questions so there are no wrong answers which makes this a great game for those with little to no general knowledge.

Object of the Game

I love finding new games to play as a family especially as we get closer to the festive season and I have heard great comments about The Game of Things over the last few months so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy of the game to give it a try. Mark, Ted and I became partners and together we designed it and wrote the topics and instructions. A year later we launched THINGS… at the Canadian Toy & Game Fair. We are now approaching three million copies sold. We played it for almost five years with family and friends and it was always a hit but we didn’t seriously think about putting it on the market. I was busy making Hollywood movies as an Assistant Director and Ted was in Yemen teaching at a private school. While this scoring system is not perfect either it works a lot better for the game because it emphasizes the best element of the game. Using these rules players are focused on making the best/funniest answers instead of trying to pretend to be someone else. This makes the game significantly more enjoyable as most of these party games are enjoyable because they can make you laugh. These type of games are usually more of an experience than a game. With this type of scoring system it doesn’t detract from the game’s best quality since it rewards the most creative player. Once we had defined the simple concept for THINGS… – of providing a prompt for players to respond to – we soon realised that if we gave our friends the right prompts, we could illicit hilarious responses from them even if they were not inherently funny people.

When only one player has not been matched to his/ her response. The person to the left of the last Reader now becomes the new Reader. The game ends whenTo score the game you get 1 point for each correct guess and 2 points for the person left at the end of each round. You must keep everyone engaged at all times so that their attention does not wander when it’s not their turn. There are lots of devices to accomplish that, but we found that keeping people laughing even when they were not writing responses or guessing “who-wrote-what” worked for us.

The Game of things box contains 300 topic cards, 8 pencils, a score pad and a response pad. Setting up the game couldnt be easier with one player taking score and every player taking a response sheet and a pencil (if more than 8 players then you will need more pencils). The topic cards are placed face down with reach of all players

While I wouldn’t necessarily consider this a problem, I would recommend trying to find more then four players for The Game of Things. As I have already mentioned if you plan on using the game’s official rules, they work terribly with only four players. Even if you play the game with the alternative rules, I think the game would be better with more players. The game is fine with four players but as a party game I just think it would be more enjoyable with more players. The game probably needs an upper limit though because the game otherwise might drag on for too long. From dealing with Keifer Sutherland on a film set in Hollywood to conceiving and launching the party game, The Game of THINGS…, Tom Quinn’s journey into the world of game design has been a interesting one. The reason that’s important is that most of the products we buy reflect a capitalised service or experience. A refrigerator, for example, is the capital investment that delivers cold food. A heat pump is the investment we make in a temperate home. We buy these appliances, believing that they will go on delivering the service we need, over a period of years. The service of cold food is partly an amortised investment, and partly on-going energy cost. Another thing that film taught me that works in toys and games is to think big. It was on my first film job in my early twenties, The Fly, that I saw an entire apartment/laboratory film set literally turning upside down while shooting to make it look like Jeff Goldblum was walking on the walls and ceiling. After that I thought “anything’s possible”. And that was before computer animation. But get the right group of players, the right atmosphere, and the right amount of alcohol involved and this very soon descends into a huge amount of laughter and fun. When, in response to “things you wished you knew beforehand” you can get your mother-in-law to read – out loud, of course – some very perverse sexual thoughts (as more than one of us did throughout our various games) you know you’re onto a winner.

Each player writes a response to the topic on one strip of paper from their response sheet and passes these to the reader. The response does not need to be the truth, it could be funny, silly, a complete lie or even something that you think someone else might write down. The aim is for the other players not to know that you wrote that response. When all of the players have written their response then the reader reads all of them out loud. The oldest application for this kind of technology is predictive failure analysis — monitoring characteristics of a device, so that failure can be predicted and ultimately avoided. The technology is already in place on a lot of large-scale equipment such as locomotives and heavy transport equipment. Predictive failure analysis used to be the holy grail of data centre management. The science hasn’t evolved that much, but the current generation — the Internet Of Things — promises to operate at a whole new level of ubiquitous scale. If you can read and write, you can play The Game of THINGS... but parents can take a look through the cards and remove any topics they think the kids might not understand. They are still going to make you laugh. If I were you I’d get a copy in for the upcoming festive period, and grab it off the shelf when you go and fetch more wine later in the evening. You won’t regret it.There’s a lot of buzz around the so-called “Internet Of Things.” As ifto emphasis the real value of time, those in-the-know shorten it to "IoT." The true object of the game is laughter, but if you're concerned about winning... here's how you play: in each round players write a response to a topic. Your response can be as outrageous or as straight-forward as you'd like.