The rise of the Game Kings

It all started in a Hamilton shed.

Out of all the things Eliot Jessep could have sold and shipped out of his parents’ garage, it was a card game. 

Eliot, a young man who after the death of his mother dropped out of school without any qualifications, already had some business ventures on his plate including a costume business, when he noticed an opening in the market while struggling to find a New Zealand retailer stocking Cards against Humanity. “A party game in which players complete fill-in-the-blank statements using words or phrases typically deemed as offensive, risqué or politically incorrect printed on playing cards.” 

A few years later, he is at the head of an up-and-coming retail business and game publisher Game kings, with the assistance of business partner Ben Hawken who I sat down with to ask how they got here.

Ben had tried his hand at other business ventures in the past, most notably an attempt at launching an internet auction, sales and trading platform similar to trade me in 2016. “We gave it a shot, It was me and a mate hustling trying to create an app, he built it all from scratch, and we ended up with something pretty cool. But, we didn’t have the resources to get it to the market.” 

Ben went on to do a stint in banking before becoming involved in Game Kings when he returned to Hamilton to help out Eliot, his old flatmate, with managing his “side hustle” of selling games, while Eliot was on tour working as a technician for acts and bands. “I used to live with Eliot and knew he was ambitious, good at selling things and getting deals done. I helped him out for a while, and he appreciated my tactfulness and analytical abilities. So, one day I was like ‘Yo, we counterbalance each other pretty well and I think if we start seriously working together, we could make something really cool out of this. “

It was during one of Eliot’s tours that Ben noticed a demand for a New Zealand Themed expansion that players could shuffle into a standard game of Cards against Humanity.

“When we pitched the idea of Kiwis versus morality, we thought it would get a bit of attention, but, we didn’t quite realise how much attention it would get when we launched the Kickstarter we were fully funded within four hours.” 

After a misunderstanding caused the news media to publish that they were publishing a full stand-alone game rather than an expansion, they decided to roll with it, “It was only meant to be a little expansion pack. But, when people started expecting a full game, we decided to eat the extra costs that it would take to write and print 200 extra cards. It was insane.” 

In a week and a half, Eliot and Ben had written, designed and formatted their first game and within a couple of weeks, they had it printed and ready for sale. “It was at that point we knew we weren’t just a retailer; we had become a manufacturer.”  

Ben attributes the success of Kiwis versus morality primarily to Eliot’s audience building,” Eliot had been running the business for a while. He was good at understanding the informal and fun-loving nature of the following he was gathering online. He kept posting tasteful memes and other silly things that kept an audience of about 6000 people engaged.”

Cards against Humanity, whose themes are mainly the U.S. and Eurocentric, had a lot of names, places and historical references that are irrelevant to the average New Zealander, so to help brainstorm they put out a survey to get their audience involved in the creation process, “We kiwi’s love laughing at ourselves and cutting everybody else down to our size for fun, we enjoy reflecting and joking about iconic things and moments in our past,” like John Key’s three-way handshake with Richie McCaw and Bernard Lapasset. 

Kiwis versus Morality and Cards against Humanity are both similar to the 90’s game apples vs apples where players took turns at drawing a green card which featured an adjective. The other players would submit red cards which featured nouns to that player’s judgement. The winner would be the player who submitted the funniest noun to the drawn adjective. 

Cards against Humanity and Kiwis versus morality have swapped the adjective for an unfinished sentence and replace the nouns with opportunities to complete those sentences; it is also notable that they are both intended for mature audiences. 

Though he can’t address the producers of Cards against Humanity directly due to legal reasons, he speaks very highly of them, “You have to give them a lot of credit, they created a straightforward card game that you can understand how to play just by looking at it, and people love it. They also are responsible for the popularity of the party game genre, which has completely reinvigorated the board and card gaming. It has changed the minds l of people who would have once seen the hobby as too nerdy, niche, childish, or intimidating to get involved in. They suddenly think to themselves; games are fun and kind of cool, and they delve deeper into the hobby.”

“With Tākaro we wanted to do something with Te Reo, we knew that there were a lot of people who wanted to learn Te Reo Māori. The interest in the language over the past couple of years had gone through the roof. We were also aware that there are a lot of people who want to understand and want to learn but are maybe too scared to apply for a class. So we thought to ourselves, what is something we can do to help introduce these people to some basic every day and around the water cooler words and how can we help ease them into the learning process. So we started discussing how do we make a game out of that and what kind of model would achieve our objectives?”

They expected some resistance to them producing this new game, so they decided to approach the subject of creating Tākaro with respect for Māori and Te Reo. “we wanted to make sure we did this properly, as properly as two Pakeha guys could, we didn’t want to be tokenistic, we didn’t want it to be us just profiting off of the observed market demand, and I think because we made this obvious everybody was on board with it, generally speaking, we talked to so many people before we even launched the Kickstarter who saw the benefit of it and the consensus was people asking ‘why has nobody done this before.’ 

So we went through a process with a good friend of ours who did all the translations for us, we talked to people within Tainui and Waikato university.”

They also roped in a few other institutions and individuals to help guide them in treating the subject matter of Tākaro with the appropriate amount of dignity and respect, and to inform them of how they can continue to give value in a way that is a net benefit for all who are involved. This resulted in small things like allowing people who invested in their Kickstarter fundraising campaign the option to donate a copy to a school free of distribution costs.

When designing the look and mechanics of Tākaro, they decided to apply the principles of simplicity they had learned with Kiwis versus morality and make a game that people could understand by looking at its parts and not having to read through a lengthy rulebook “people are quite intuitive, if you lay things out correctly they can figure out in a minute or two how to play and what kind of value playing the game provides them.”

They also got the audience involved with more surveys “people love getting involved in the process; people love getting a chance to submit feedback and be heard. When creating games, we have made a point to involve our audience, and this is something that we hope to continue. We reach out to our audience by saying ‘hey look we’re making this game, this is how it works, what are some things you think need to be in it?’ and I think we benefit from this in multiple ways. It gives you a lot of potential content, a lot of the suggestions will be similar to things that you already have planned so you can gauge whether or not your game design is moving in a direction that appeals to the crowd and some of the good ideas are things we would never have thought of ourselves”

The relationship they have with their audience and how they handled the development of Tākaro led to a product launch that was void of the anxieties that two white guys launching a game about a language that neither of them was fluent in, would expect.

Where to from here?

It has been over a year since the successful launch of Tākaro during Māori language week 2019. Since then Ben and Eliot have released multiple Tākaro expansions with two more on the way for Christmas, and they have invited a few more players into their game. 

The first being the lady who Ben claims “runs the show from day to day,” Poppy Taylor-Moore who they brought on at the end of last year when Eliot and Ben found it difficult to balance managing the retail, secretarial and customer service side of things with the warehouse, game development and other behind the scenes aspects of their business.

Like most people they did not have any foresight of the impending covid pandemic, yet, despite the troubles other businesses were having when the lockdowns closed shop doors nationwide, Game KIngs saw a bump in business, “this is something I hesitantly say because I am very aware that covid has negatively affected a lot of people. But, covid helped us, we got permission during the lockdown to sell our games because our games are educational and give people something to do which keeps them inside learning, playing and doing things with their family in a safe environment. Also because we can operate with zero contact due to us being online retailers, and because suddenly everyone was stuck at home. So there were a lot of people who suddenly had time to play games and the board game industry as a whole kind of benefit from this.”

They were so secure in their finances that they were able to move out of their old CBD tower building office after level four of lockdown. They have moved into a warehouse with a small shop out front on Kahikatea drive, allowing them to efficiently run a little walk-in retail business under the same brand as their established online presence. 

Covid aside, Ben thinks the industry is going to continue to grow, “in a sense it’s kind of hard to know what’s going to happen in the world, this year has been a good example of that, but the market for games has been growing steadily for the past five to ten years, and we can expect it to keep growing at quite a good rate, I think there is a projected growth in the market of 10% to 15% over the next five years.”

Once again, Ben says this comes down to the shifting trends in our culture that are making board and card games less taboo, and the new games that are making the hobby more attractive and accessible. 

Despite their success, Ben and Eliot are still taking a humble approach to the business “by the end of this year we will have seven or eight games and expansions in our catalogue, but we are still very fresh on the market, so we still want to learn, we still want feedback, we still want to be better then we are, and you can’t become better if you don’t ask for other people’s input. People always have ideas and suggestions for you. But if you never give them the time and space to share that with you, you are never going to improve.” and who better to ask than the paying customers. 

Community involvement and interaction are quintessential to the Game Kings brand, on the back of every box of every Game Kings ever made is the following request “if you have any suggestions, recommendations or things they would do differently we would like to hear so send us an email at hello@gamekings.co.nz.”

Ben also points out that getting the customer involved in this way creates an endearing relationship between them and the brand, when they see their suggestion has been heard and acted upon, “we have a lot of people who are invested in the creation of our games and our journey because of the way we have interacted with them.”

The Game Kings plans for the future involve them growing their identity as a developer, “I think the big thing for us is focussing on our own games we now stock over 2000 card and board games, but by far our biggest sellers are the games we produced ourselves, so we want to concentrate on making games for the New Zealand Market for now eventually we would like to go overseas, but the New Zealand market is what has given us our success so we will focus on our home before we try selling cool things on the big markets.” 

They also have plans to expand into being a mentor and publisher for those who want to develop their own games, “we do want to grow our retail, but there has been a shift in priority towards creating our own games and also supporting other Kiwi creators. There are a lot of people planning and designing new games, and alongside suggestions to improve our own games we get a couple of emails from schoolkids and amateur developers who have great ideas and want some help bringing them to market, so we want to become the people who you come to when you have an idea for a game. We already have a few people who don’t want to publish their games themselves; they want to share their ideas and do something with us. We also have people who don’t want to partner with us, but we are happy to give them advice, and we want to be as beneficial as possible to all New Zealand game developers and foster a strong community.”

Right now is the busiest time of the year for Game Kings. The Warehouse out the back of their new store is inhabited by Oscar and Winston full of shelves, five rows deep and loaded with the games that are expected to be snatched up for the Christmas season, “We get our largest amount of orders over the lead up to Christmas and most of our year usually involves a lot of preparation for the big sales towards the end of the year.” 

A good game and a group of people at a table are powerful because with a bit of peer pressure; you can force even the most miserable person to sit down and have a good time.

Ultimately Ben and Eliot’s motivation comes from their theory that “Games are something that incentivises people to put their phones down, socialise and engage with other people creating shared experiences. The next generation will be looking back at us. How we are now, We are a generation that is lonelier than ever, we’re more isolated, anxious and on edge than ever, it’s normal to go to a party and see everyone on their phones not engaged with one another. Creating something that brings everyone into a shared and enjoyable experience is quite beautiful; it immediately breaks the ice and creates collective memories via associated experiences. It’s the laughing, the frustration of losing, the joy of winning, the bonds built during co-operative gameplay, these things though small build rapport between people and bring us closer.”