April Fools!

One of my favorite holidays is April Fools Day, but ever since I started running a board game company, I’ve avoided playing any pranks because I don’t want to confuse our customers.

I finally found a loophole, though: Instead of joking about a fake product, we needed to make a real product that pokes fun at ourselves.

We discussed a bunch of ideas, and we settled on two of them. I’m not sure if readers of this blog follow my company, so I’ll provide extra context. To be clear, these are 100% real products that are available in our webstore now.

The first is a set of chocolate-colored candy egg trays. We publish a game called Wingspan that features clear plastic trays and solid plastic eggs that look a little like Cadbury eggs, and I’ve seen multiple people place both types of eggs on their table in the trays while playing. While I don’t think people eating plastic eggs by accident is an actual problem, we’ve decided to solve it by creating these trays:

The second is a response to some feedback we’ve gotten about the text/icon size in some of our games. As a way of poking fun at ourselves, we’re presenting a solution for this problem: Instead of using larger text and icons (which I actually am much more aware of now and will do in the future when possible), we’ve made a magnifying glass embossed with our logo. It magnifies text and icons up to 30x.

I had fun making these products, and I’m curious if any other companies this year are release real-but-also-joke products. Let me know in the comments if you hear of any!

5 thoughts on “April Fools!”

  1. I think the classic April Fools “Prank Sales Item” is FFG with Barkham Horror. I have not played the Arkham Horror LCG, but I am soooooo tempted to order Barkham Horror.

    Reply
  2. In the Western NY town I grew up in a locally owned ice parlor always had a joke flavor for April 1st. They really produced and sold it in limited quantities. I don’t remember any exact flavors 20 years later but I think things like Pickle or Chili Pepper is the spirit of it.

    Reply
  3. Every year, Petersen Games does an April Fools Kickstarter for a real but “odd” product. They made a cat themed expansion for Cthulhu wars in the last, for example. This year, they made another mini for use in three of their games along with a thematic energy drink.

    I haven’t backed any of these items but they do well with them each year and they’re very unique.

    Reply
  4. I glanced at your stonemaier email but hadn’t read it yet. I thought those first items looked remarkably like Cadbury chocolate eggs! My immediate thought was, “Jamey loves April Fools, but he wouldn’t mess with his business!”

    Reply

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