The seed for Easy Answers began three years ago when two friends began formulating an accessible party game that can be taught in a matter of minutes.
“Our little tagline is ‘the party game so easy, even you can play,’” said Justin Speer.
Speer developed the game with friend Jon Treas. Easy Answers is a party game where players try to come up with unique answers to simple prompts. The game comes with 280 cards, 10 dry-erase boards and some dry erase markers.
Treas said they wanted to produce a game with fewer parts in response to having previously worked on a more ambitious game.
“Our previous game … had lots of components. And so when we tried to start sourcing that sort of thing out, it's like, ‘Whoa, we're getting in way over our heads,’” Treas said. “So that's why we kind of scaled back on this game, making it more just boards, cards, markers.”
How to play is pretty simple: A dealer draws a card with a prompt, comes up with an obvious answer for that prompt, and then shows the card to the other players. The players with the most unique answers earn the most points, while players with the same answers as the dealer garner zero points.
“You can play it again and again, because even if you get a same card in a future game, it's still dependent on the group that you're playing with, and there's a lot of dynamics that still come into play,” said Speer.
For many independent game publishers, access to cheap manufacturing overseas helped contribute to the growth of board game sales.
With the onset of the Trump administration’s tariffs, independent publishers might face fewer options and significant delays in the shipping of products.
Despite the simple components inside Easy Answers, Speer and Treas ran into this particular problem because their game was manufactured and assembled in China.
Tariffs jumped from 10% to 20%, which raised the partners’ costs by about $1,200, Speer said.
“That's where we had to make that decision: Do we go now or not? And thank goodness we did, because the week after that, it went up to the 135%.”
W. Eric Martin, a news editor at Board Game Geek, an online database and forum for all things tabletop games, said that most independent publishers have to look overseas to get their games manufactured. Any manufacturing in the United States is limited or relegated to big game companies.
“Most of the (production) that I know of in the United States is … for cards, or you have certain facilities that are set up to produce games for Hasbro or Mattel, and they're operating on an incredibly different scale of volume,” Martin said.
“Most hobby publishers are producing a few thousand games and that's it, whereas Hasbro is going to be doing 100,000. … A vastly different scale.”
Martin said other game developers who’ve run into issues with tariffs have not been as lucky.
”There was a designer, self publisher that I talked to had a very small card game, and he estimated best case scenario he would lose $3,000. That's the best if he got the copies of the game and sold everything. So he wasn't sure what to do at that point, because he hadn't received them yet. He was just looking at the tariff cost. And now, do I want to go ahead and lose this money for this passion project, or do I just wait and then what?”
Easy Answers was able to make its Kickstarter goal, but late pledges are being accepted if you want to purchase the game online. It’s also currently being sold at The Workroom in downtown Wichita.
As for Speer and Treas, time and money permitting, they hope to produce an expansion set for the game.
“There's a lot of different things that we could do in the future if it was successful, you know, to be able to kind of expand the game a little bit,” Speer said.
