BOARD GAMES 1: We're making a game

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We want to make a board game. It must, of course, teach the world about economics. It must be fun. It’d be nice if it sold lots of copies! How hard could that be!? (Monopoly and Catan are hugely popular and basically little economy simulators, after all.)

Well, turns out, it’s quite hard!

We’re in a golden age of tabletop games. Thirty years ago there were around 800 new games each year. Now it is more like 5,000. Just a handful of those get to be hits.

In the first episode of our new series, Planet Money sets forth on an epic quest to beat the odds.

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This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Erika Beras. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Emma Peaslee and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.9	Check one, two, check one two.
0:09.3	It's opening in one minute.
0:10.3	Here we go.
0:11.2	We are packed like sardines inside a convention center hallway waiting for the main doors to open.
0:18.2	The crowd is surging.
0:19.6	Is it open yet?
0:20.7	Hopefully. That is some random guys squashed up next to open. The crowd is surging. Is it open yet? Hopefully.
0:21.9	That is some random guys squashed up next to us. I was hoping for some large
0:26.4	announcement, but... The announcement is the screams of the week being trampled.
0:31.2	This convention is called GenCon. It is the largest tabletop gaming convention in the country.
0:38.0	We're talking board games and card games and role-playing games.
0:41.4	And the sea of people we're with are all waiting to get into the exhibition floor
0:45.4	where all kinds of new games are on display, from big companies like Hasbro,
0:50.6	all the way down to little independent game designers showing their first games ever.
0:56.1	It's happening. We're going. We're going.
0:58.2	We spill into a room as big as what feels like three football fields,
1:03.1	full of so many kiosks with so many people selling so many games,
1:07.6	and I instantly regress into a giddy little child.
1:10.8	Oh my God. Oh, my God. It's overwhelming. Okay, so, why have we come here? Well,
1:16.8	board games rule, obviously, A, but B, let's just call it for now, market research.
1:24.1	Do you want to tell me about the game you have? Yeah.
	...

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