BOARD GAMES 3: What’s in a name?

This is Planet Money from NPR. Legend has it, there was a Canadian couple in the nineteen fifties who liked to play this game called Yacht. They owned a yacht. They play the game on their yacht. But as far as I could tell, that is all the yacht involved in this game called Yacht? Yes. Yacht was a dice game. You roll a bunch of dice. You try to make sets and pairs and whatnot. And apparently, friends of the Canadian yachters were like, this yacht game rules. You should publish it. Make some money. Maybe buy another yacht. Yeah. Why not? And so the unnamed Canadian sold the game idea to a game entrepreneur who then made the very wise decision to not sell the game as yacht. He changed the name, of course, to Yahtzee Yahtzee. Nobody's gonna buy and yell, Yahtz. Come on. And we share this little tale because a good title or a bad title will absolutely sink a really great game. That was the very serious warning we got previously on Planet Money Makes a Board Game. Let's catch everyone up real quick. We're making a game. We have partnered with the game company Exploding Kittens to try and design a game inspired by the Nobel Prize winning economics paper, The Market for lemons. That paper is literally about asymmetric information in the market for used cars. But broadly, it's about how making deals when one side knows more than the other causes chaos, distrust, and and ultimately destroys a market. In our game version, players have cans of cards, and they're offering each other deals, trying to get the best cards. But they can trick their friends into accepting terrible cards because asymmetric information. Yeah. You only ever have to show part of the deal. We chose to make a mass appeal party game that sneakily brings the economics, the partial information, the mounting distrust, the spiral into joyful chaos. Instead of a complex, hardcore, nerdy economics game. And that is because we're hoping that this game can be our Trojan horse into reporting and learning from inside a world that no other Planet Money project has gone. The real shelves at real big box retail stores. Yeah. We think an Exploding Kittens party game gives us the best chance of sneaking into that world. And in our previous episodes, we faced our first huge test. That test was named Jamie Wilansky. Jamie is a longtime game consultant. She's legendary, convinced Target to carry Settlers of Catan way back when. And Jamie had two notes on our joyfully chaotic deal and distrust card game. Note one. Okay. I am constantly on the lookout for a new game mechanic that no one else has ever done, and there is not a game out there that I can equate this to. She loved our game. But note number two, she told us, don't mess this up now. The most critical thing at this point …