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.

Zatu has an excellent range of games and for most of them the best prices too. Delivery is always fast and I have never received a game in bad condition. 10/10 would recommend. 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? 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! 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.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. 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. 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.

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. the NASPA dictionary is the official dictionary for Scrabble play in the United States and Canada. It has approx 117 000 words.the standard dictionary (the original one) has approx 40 000 4-9 letter words, with a mix of US/UK spellings. Great online store for board games. They always arrive perfectly and undamaged which is important to me. Well, I love formats. Most of things I do creatively in my life are based around formats. I don’t think I’m particular good at free-form stuff, but if someone says “We’ve got a problem with a quiz show, how do we fix it?”, my brain can figure that stuff out.

You licensed Obama Llama to Big Potato. Did that process act as a bit of a crash course into the games industry? 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. Matt Edmondson first entered the game space as the inventor of Big Potato’s Obama Llama, and last year he self-published Ansagrams. 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 would never sit down and say “I’m going to do a trivia game, what’s the twist?” The twist always comes first. 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. 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? 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.