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. 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. 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? Also, through people knowing my personality because of the radio or having played my previous games, they trust that I like board games and I know what I’m doing. In that respect it’s easier. 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.

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!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. 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. Genuinely, brace yourselves! It is the single best game I have ever played ever. It’s so good. If it doesn’t become the biggest game in the world, there will have been an injustice. I could play it every day and never get bored of it. 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. 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 bashed out the questions in a couple of days, but if a graphic designer watched me try and design it, they would’ve found it hilarious. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’ve always been keen to learn, so using YouTube and TikTok I figured out how to make it. Let’s look at Format Games’ debut line-up. Ansagrams and So Wrong, It’s Right are both fun twists on trivia games. Did you consciously set out to bring something new to the trivia space?I would never sit down and say “I’m going to do a trivia game, what’s the twist?” The twist always comes first. We’ve likened the experience to a couple of guys taking up busking on Monday, then being signed by a major label for a five-record deal by Friday,” said Laurence Emmett, Co-Founder of Format Games. 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. 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. 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?

If this game has caught your attention, you’ve probably been drawn in by the appeal of a fun word game with friends. That’s understandable, word games have definitely become more popular lately. We’ve recently seen the rise of web-based apps like Wordle and Facebook’s Words with Friends. If you haven’t played them, you’ve probably heard of them! 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.I initially took the idea to Lesley Singleton from Playtime PR. She was the only person I knew from the board game industry because she had sent me Bananagrams. She probably had that feeling of dread when she met me of ‘Oh no, another person who thinks they have a great idea for a board 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. Matt, thanks for taking time out for this – it’s been a lot of fun. To bring things full circle – you mentioned at the start about having a bad time with a Home Alone 2 board game. Are licensed games something you want to explore with Format Games?

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. It often starts with simple ideas that you then build structure around. Look at Obama Llama; it’s two things rhyming… Britney Spears using garden shears. On its own, that’s not a game, so that’s why you have to build a world around that concept. That’s what I’m drawn to: super accessible, mainstream party 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. With Ansagrams, it popped into my head fully formed. I just had the idea of ‘Anagrams are fun. You could solve those by taking the first letter of every answer.’ That’s as far as the thought went! He said: “If you design it, I’ll find a way of getting it made and out there.” It was a fun experiment for us, so we made a game called Ansagrams which had been in my head for a while. It’s a very simple trivia game where you get five questions and you have to write down the first letter of each answer. Then, like a Countdown Conundrum, you have to unjumble them to create another word. First person to do that wins the card.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. If this game has caught your attention, you’ve probably been drawn in by the appeal of a fun word game with friends. That’s understandable, word games have definitely become more popular lately. We've recently seen the rise of web-based apps like Wordle and Facebook’s Words with Friends. If you haven't played them, you've probably heard of them! Ansagrams is a fun and intuitive competitive game, mixing general knowledge with assembling words. Let me walk you through what the game entails. Setup