by Matt Fantastic

• An asteroid the size of 29 football fields!
• A boulder that weighs as much as three blue whales!
• A sinkhole the size of six washing machines!

Turns out, people love to measure stuff in terms of other stuff instead of something boring like ounces or inches. There's something so much more evocative about four Siberian tigers than 1,600 pounds. "Banana for scale" has transcended its dumb meme origins. "Americans will use anything but the metric system" is just as much a serious observation as it is a joke. Plus, human brains are also not great at conceptualizing large numbers; is it easier to picture six 18-wheelers or 5,060 inches?

So we decided to make a game out of it. My original note is "How many giraffes long is a battleship", and we stuck with "How Many Giraffes" as the working title since it looked fun on the prototype.

Andrea Pincumbe, the Forever Stoked Creative studio partner who takes my wild notes and random ideas and develops them into real functional rules and systems, and Trish Loter, the studio partner who not only pitches in creatively but also keeps everything running, both jumped in to help figure out how exactly the game works.

We had some great inspiration out there to build on. Wits & Wagers does the number trivia thing well, but this is more a game about the absurd and conceptual rather than knowing the actual numbers. Cardline does a great job of getting players to think about things relative to one another, but still does everything in normal units of measurement. And our own Trash Talk is all about thinking of real world objects in abstract ways. Our goal was to keep things weird, interesting, and funny, while also being super approachable for anyone.

Building out the initial set of things to measure was pretty easy. Of course, we could come up with 20-30 cool things to use. (More on how different and challenging it is to come up with hundreds of them later...) Building on our background writing trivia for games like Everyone Else Thinks This Game is Awesome, we built a spreadsheet filled with data, but also tried to pick things that people would find interesting — or at least funny.


Scoring in a game like this can be a tricky thing. It's tempting to get too clever, to try to impress your friends with witty thematic integration and delightfully elegant systems, but at the end of the day the only reason to have scoring in a party game like this is to give a little shape to the experience and show players where to find the fun.

After a bunch of noodling and playing around with a variety of much-too-clever scoring systems and structures, we decided to keep it to a thirty-second teach and lean on the core fun of the experience. Everyone guesses, say, how many raccoons Andre the Giant weighed*, everyone then chooses who they think guessed the closest, and whoever gets that correct scores a point, along with whoever actually did guess closest.

With this figured out and an adorable prototype from Blaise Sewell, the studio partner who makes everything look awesome, we started pitching it around. After a few folks expressed interest, we ultimately decided to sign with our friends Tony Seribriany and David Blanchard at The Op. They're a well-calibrated machine run by smart, talented people — they're so on top of things you're reading this promo diary! — who are also wonderfully supportive creative partners.

With The Op on board and the rules dialed in, it was time to go nuts creating the content. For a project that needed this much interesting data, we tagged in our frequent trivia-writing collaborators and absolute geniuses — Grace Kendall, Eric Slauson, and Mike Belsole, names you might recognize from their own dope games Smug Owls, MonsDRAWsity, and Bullseye — to help us.

Once we started to get into the writing/data collection, we realized that some of the coolest ideas are kinda impossible to pin down enough to something concrete. Sure, we can know the height of the Empire State Building (for one example of a weird measure), but it's not like every elephant is the same size; if we say "license plate", it doesn't have universal dimensions the world over. For animals, we ended up having to choose the species, then figure out if there was sexual dimorphism (that is, are males and females the same average dimensions), and clarify that we'd then take the average of that average if needed.

In the case of something like a large pizza or a beer can, it's just impossible to pin down without needing to add in a bunch of less fun qualifiers that, while more accurate, are also more easily confused. We lost a lot of great stuff, but as we were adding more and more things to the list, we also kept stopping to share our favorite measures, which was a good sign.


Working with Tony and David, along with Amanda McKee, was great. They were open to our weirdest ideas, but also kept us grounded in the fact that this was a product for store shelves. After turning over our chosen master item list, I got what is perhaps my favorite publisher note of all time: "We sell our games everywhere to everyone, but did you really think Picasso's Guernica was a keeper?" "But it's famously large!" did not win anyone to my cause, so Andrea and I went back to our massive list of stuff, and with the help of the team, we finalized a list that is an approachable mix of things that are still interesting.

At this point, The Op Games team was kicking into gear, taking our spreadsheets and text documents and turning them into a real product, so we mostly got to sit back and enjoy all the cool updates they were sending us throughout.

Now the game is out, and we couldn't be happier with both the final product and the process we took to make it together. It's exciting to see your game on a shelf standing 8.5 human eyeballs tall, and we hope you have as much fun playing it as we did making it.

Matt Fantastic

*Andre the Giant weighed about [o]37.5[/o] adult raccoons.