BOARD GAMES 3: What’s in a name?

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Planet Money has teamed up with the company Exploding Kittens to make a board game inspired by the legendary economics paper The Market for Lemons. We’ve decided we want a mass-appeal party game that quietly sneaks in the economics, so that we can report from inside a world that no other Planet Money project has entered: the real shelves at real big box retail stores.

We have a great game mechanic and a set of rules. Now all we need is a good name and theme.

Turns out, that is way harder and way higher stakes than any of us could have imagined.

In the third episode of our series, we learn the importance of a good game name and theme and try to come up with one for our game.

Find our previous episodes in the board game series, here and here.

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This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Kenny Malone and Erika Beras. It was produced by James Sneed and edited by Marianne McCune, fact-checked by Willa Rubin, and engineered by Cena Loffredo and Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.4	Legend has it. There was a Canadian couple in the 1950s who liked to play this game called Yacht.
0:12.4	They owned a yacht. They play the game on their yacht. But as far as I can tell, that is all the Yacht involved in this game called Yacht?
0:20.7	Yes, Yacht was a dice game.
0:23.6	You roll a bunch of dice.
0:24.6	You try to make sets and pairs and whatnot.
0:27.4	And apparently, friends of the Canadian yachters were like,
0:30.7	this yacht game rules.
0:31.9	You should publish it.
0:32.6	Make some money.
0:33.5	Maybe buy another yacht.
0:34.9	Yeah, why not?
0:36.5	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.
0:47.5	He changed the name, of course, to...
0:50.2	Yotsie!
0:51.4	Yatsy!
0:52.4	Nobody's going to buy and yell Yachts? Come on!
0:55.6	And we share this little tale because a good title or a bad title will absolutely sink a really great game.
1:03.2	That was the very serious warning we got previously on Planet Money Makes a Board Game.
1:10.9	Let's catch everyone up real quick. We're making a game.
1:14.0	We have partnered with the game company exploding kittens to try and design a game inspired by the
1:21.2	Nobel Prize winning economics paper, the market for lemons.
	...

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