MINDCRUSHERS
200 Thought-provoking, Funny, and Occasionally Weird Conversations in a Box.
Mindcrushers was the brainchild of a collaboration of old friends who wanted to try some new tricks in the casual party game space. Mindcrushers is one of over 80 ideas that came from a fun ‘brainstorming weekend’ with two of our friends who founded the card game juggernaut Cards Against Humanity, and another friend who is a Creative Director at Apple. The impetus for Mindcrusheres was 99% of conversation starter “games” suck, or take themselves WAY too seriously….so we wanted to bring the fun and irreverence we had as casual friends to an icebreaker game that would be essentially a fun appetizer to a game of Cards Against Humanity.
We developed the idea from scratch, going through multiple iterations, developing internal play testing, doing competitive audits and play tests of competitors & comparers products, until we honed in on a simple but fun and hilarious mechanic for our game. Once we had the skeleton of the game, we launched into writing thousands of prompts for conversations from the bizarre to the outrageous. We tested the game internally countless times, until we felt it was good enough to share with friends and family.
At the same time the pandemic started, and we had to do a hard pivot to virtual testing. Luckily, we were able to quickly build a custom testing harness for the game using socket servers and virtual cards and Zoom calls. All this while also doing our day jobs! YAY!
We did intense play testing throughout the first quarter of the pandemic and parallel pathed creating the brand identity for Mindcrushers. We felt we built a game that we thought was fun, hilarious, and thought provoking for us and our friends & family.
We worked closely with Cards Against Humanity game distributor, Breaking Games, to get the final game into mass production. We worked closely with the sales team at Breaking Games to get Mindcrushers picked up by some of the best known big box retailers in the USA, Target, Walmart, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Amazon.
We launched the Mindcrushers brand and products to the USA in October 2020. By the end of Q2 2021 we had sold through most of our inventory at the big box retailers and Amazon. By Q4 2021, we decided that the game would work best under the day-to-day stewardship of our game distributor, Breaking Games and we decided to sell the game to them.
Mindcrushers games are still available on Amazon if you want to check out the game yourself!
Results
We took Mindcrushers from a hilarious and sticky idea in a founders meeting to a game on the shelf of the major big box retailers in under 1 year.
Within 3 quarters we sold through all of our planned Big-box retailer inventory
We had received interest and articles in high-profile online publications like Buzzfeed, Vice, and Mashable
We learned that the ‘conversation starter’ category is a VERY Niche market
Roles
Co-Founder, Product Marketing, Writer, Growth Marketing, Project Management