Can a card game featuring adorably animated eggs, toast, and bacon become a hit in the toy aisle? Hasbro thinks so.
Fortune reported this summer that the toy maker behind Monopoly and The Game of Life, was working with Indiegogo to invite designers and inventors to come up with ideas for new games. Hasbro (HAS) picked five finalists that were invited to launch campaigns on the crowdfunding website. To the winner? A $10,000 prize on top of what it raised on Indiegogo and a chance to work with Hasbro’s marketing and manufacturing experts at the company’s headquarters in Rhode Island.
Irresponsibility: The Mr Toast card game is the big winner, Hasbro announced on Friday. The game raised over $10,000 on Indiegogo—far above its $3,500 goal.
“I am thrilled to be working with Hasbro,” said Dan Goodsell, the Los Angeles-based inventor behind the game. “To get to work with them on a Mr Toast product is amazing.”
Goodsell has been a longtime inventor in the toys and comics space, working on a Mr Toast comic for over a decade now. In the card game that he conceptualized, up to four people play as Mr Toast—with the objective to try to “get out of life’s responsibilities and just have fun.”
While Hasbro already owns many popular legacy games, hits have churned up outside the traditional toy product development pipeline, most notably a game called Pie Face that became a viral video hit earlier this year. The Internet-driven game became so popular, Hasbro bought the rights to manufacture and distribute Pie Face, and media reports are saying it has been a huge hit this holiday season.
The toy maker has kept an eye on the grassroots movement of game development for several years now, even forming an internal team called “The Gaming Lab” to help nurture new games developed from independent inventors. Brian Chapman, head of design and development at Hasbro, said the company realized that to stay ahead of the competition, it would need to tap the crowdfunding world that made Cards Against Humanity and Exploding Kittens massive hits.
With Mr Toast, Chapman said Hasbro was drawn to the character development, art style, and broad appeal of the game for families.
“I think the use of humor and satire were why this game appealed to us,” Chapman said.
