Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
Our quiz offers anagrams on British cities, football clubs, Christmas words and famous British landmarks. Partnering with his brother-in-law, Laurence Emmett, the pair joined forces in lockdown 2020 to create Format Games. 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!
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. I was sent Bananagrams – which I loved – and I would often play card games with my housemates, but I’d never thought about creating my own game. A lot of Format Games are focused on a wordy twist, including giving your answers backwards in The Backwards Game or answering So Wrong It’s Right. If this game has caught your attention, you’ve probably been drawn in by the appeal of a fun word game with friends. During lockdown, Matt used his creative energy and experience of designing games to come up with new ideas.
To bring things full circle – you mentioned at the start about having a bad time with a Home Alone 2 board game. Without playing it many more times, it’s unclear how much this simple formula will keep your interest in the long term.
Matt Edmondson first entered the game space as the inventor of Big Potato’s Obama Llama, and last year he self-published Ansagrams. 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. Television and Sony Award-nominated radio presenter Matt Edmondson established himself as a board game inventor when he created the party game Obama Llama. Along the way, he also taught himself graphic and packaging design, copywriting and learnt about the games’ manufacturing process – everything needed to bring the games to market independently. If you win a card and decide that you’d prefer one in the pot you can swap the card you’ve won with one in the pot.
This means you have to make use of the pot and sabotage others who look like they're getting close to their game-winning word. 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.
Do you think a career creating radio formats that quick to grasp and fun to play primed you perfectly to create party games? Dragger | Counterfeit | Colored Lines | 2048 | Oooze | Shipfind | Rotate | Snakris | Guess the Colors | Rotate² | Chinese Checkers | Masterpieces | Mastercards | Sudoku | Reversi | Mastermind | TwinCol | NumberHunt | Manyland | Minesweeper | Crime Scene | Mahjongg Solitaire | Freecell | What Was There? Self-publishing sounded hard, so I went down the licensing route and I was really lucky to meet Big Potato because they are the dons at doing party games.Partnering with his brother-in-law, businessman Laurence Emmett, the pair founded Format Games and are set to launch two new games this year: colour-mixing card game, Egg Slam, and the immensely replayable trivia game, So Wrong It’s Right. The ones that do it really well are the games that have a fantastic mechanic at the heart of them, like Dobble. I have zero clout in America, for example, so the Asmodee US team just cared about whether the games were good.
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