Edwin Lowe, yes the Beano… uhm Bingo guy took all he learned and created Yahtzee. You need to be observant.

Dave Young:

Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is… Well, it’s us. But we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.

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Dave Young:

Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here alongside Steven Semple. And as we always do, Steven… Wait a minute. You didn’t whisper anything in my ear during the countdown?

Stephen Semple:

No, I didn’t this time

Dave Young:

We’re going into this blind. I have no idea what we’re going to talk about.

Stephen Semple:

I didn’t this time, but there’s one thing I ust wanted to mention before we got into it is we’re north of 156 episodes. I think this is 157 or 158. And when you think about it-

Dave Young:

Isn’t that crazy?

Stephen Semple:

It is crazy. We’ve crossed the three-year mark. And for you and I, we haven’t missed, we’ve not missed a week in that three years.

Dave Young:

I’m amazed. That’s double the number of birthdays I’ve had, at least.

Stephen Semple:

I wanted to recognize that because I was looking… when I was doing the preparation and looking at this, I went, “Wow, three years. That’s quite amazing.” When we started this adventure, I knew we had committed to a year, and here we are still at it, which I think is pretty cool.

Dave Young:

It is. I don’t have any stats handy, but I know that podcasting, this is one of these things that is like, “Oh, this is going to be fun.” It’s going to be fun to do a podcast. And it is. My participation in it is a lot of fun because I show up, you do a countdown, and I chat. But I know that it’s a heavy lift, and people thinking that they’re just going to start podcasting, unless you’re just going to just start your own live morning show without any back-end production, it’s not an easy thing to do. And you’ve got a whole team working behind the scenes.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. There’s you and I. And then we have an outsourced person who does the production, and then Dylan Bernier turns all this stuff in the shorts and whatnot. And then Matthew Burns and Gary Bernier get it all posted to the social media. And I’m going to say, if this group of people were not working on it, this would not still be going today. And I think last I looked at the stats, most podcasts I think are 10 or 12 or 14 episodes or something like that. They-

Dave Young:

Yeah. That’s as far as you get.

Stephen Semple:

As far as you get. And then all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, this is a grind. This is more work than I thought it would be.” And things along that line. So, well-

Dave Young:

You’re like, “I’m going to go back to grad school,” and, “Oh, God, what was I thinking?”

Stephen Semple:

Exactly.

Dave Young:

I started podcasting in 2010 and got 30 episodes in before I gave up. And I think it was just because the shine came off, the shiny object, for me, and nobody knew what a podcast was in 2012. So-

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. So I just want to thank you, thank the team, and just recognize this milestone. But onto the reason why people actually have tuned in, it’s not to hear us chat back and forth.

Dave Young:

It’s not.

Stephen Semple:

Well, it’s not about that. It’s not about praising ourselves. What we’re going to talk about today is a game called Yahtzee.

Dave Young:

Yahtzee. I grew up with Yahtzee. I mean, Yahtzee’s been around for a long time.

Stephen Semple:

Sure has. Yeah.

Dave Young:

And I never played it until, I think after I got married. My wife was really big into Yahtzee.

Stephen Semple:

Oh, is that right?

Dave Young:

And I’m in my 30s before I actually experienced Yahtzee.

Stephen Semple:

Okay. Cool. That’s cool.

Dave Young:

And then, of course, it became an app. You can just do Yahtzee against your phone all day long if you want to.

Stephen Semple:

Everything’s in app now, isn’t it?

Dave Young:

Mm-hmm.

Stephen Semple:

So Yahtzee was created by Edwin Lowe on April 19th, 1956. It went on to be sold to Milton Bradley for 23 million bucks in 1972. That’s like 150 million in today’s dollars.

Dave Young:

That’s a big cash-out back then.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Yeah. And at its peak, Yahtzee was selling more than Monopoly, so it really did well. And the origin of Yahtzee goes actually back into late 1920s, early 1930s. And Edwin Lowe is a door-to-door toy salesman. He’s an immigrant. His father is a rabbi. And one of the things he learned is be successful. You have to be confident and determined. And one of the things he does is he stumbles across a community night. And he saw this gambling style game called Beano, where you would put beans on a board, and when you got it in a row, you would yell out, “Beano.” So it was easy to learn and it was fun to play. And friends got excited and a friend of his got excited when was playing it. And instead of yelling, “Beano,” he yelled, “Bingo.”

Dave Young:

He was confused.

Stephen Semple:

And Lowe decided to package the game as Bingo. So take the game Beano, print up cards, make the little pieces, and sell it as Bingo.

Dave Young:

Does this predate Bingo as we know it? Or does this just a ripoff of the word Bingo?

Stephen Semple:

Well, Beano predates Bingo.

Dave Young:

Really? Okay.

Stephen Semple:

Yes. And then his friend yelled out Bingo, and he packaged it as Bingo. He took the game Beano, packaged it as Bingo.

Dave Young:

And is that the Bingo that we know-

Stephen Semple:

Today. Yes.

Dave Young:

Today? I would much rather go to a Bingo parlor than a Beano parlor. Just saying.

Stephen Semple:

Just saying, yeah.

Dave Young:

Especially if you’re in Florida. And who knows what all the old people playing Beano have been eating.

Stephen Semple:

Here we go.

Dave Young:

I’m sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead with your little story.

Stephen Semple:

So in 1930, he sets up his own toy company and they mass produce Bingo cards. And at its peak, he has two factories making these cards. And Bingo really took off because it was this low cost and got deeply accepted in church communities, but it quickly got imitated and the market got flooded, and he tried to trademark the name Bingo, but he wasn’t able to trademark it. He even tried to get the rights to it. He goes through like 40 lawyers. It’s just not possible.

Dave Young:

Well, so Bingo was a word in the vernacular then. It must have been-

Stephen Semple:

Must have been.

Dave Young:

… if that guy yelled out Bingo. Yeah. Okay.

Stephen Semple:

Must have been.

Dave Young:

It just wasn’t a game yet. And he couldn’t trademark it. Huh. Okay.

Stephen Semple:

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And I was never able to find out why. It was just he tried over and over again. It wasn’t possible. So he needs to find a new idea. So he starts remaking old games because now we’re into World War II, and he creates little mini versions of games that can be used by soldiers during the war, like little tiny chess games, little tiny checkers games, any game that he could find that he could miniaturize. That’s what he’s doing. But these aren’t new or unique, and he still wants something new or unique. And it’s 1954, and he still hasn’t come across any of that. And he really wants to find a game he can own, and he finds it.

Here’s how the legend goes, and it’s an unconfirmed legend, but here’s how the legend goes. He’s hanging out with some upper-crust folks who are on a yacht playing a dice game. Turns out it’s a Canadian couple that invented this dice game that they called the Yacht game because they played it on their yacht. There’s versions of this game that has been played over the decades called Yam, and Crag, and Cheerio we’re not even certain that this rumor is true in terms of how he came across the game.

Dave Young:

Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

[Empire Builders Ad]

Dave Young:

Let’s pick up our story where we left off. And trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.

I used to play a game as a kid. My dad played called Ship, Captain, and Crew.

Stephen Semple:

Okay.

Dave Young:

And it’s a game played with five dice. You roll all five. And it always reminded me of Yahtzee. Maybe that’s why we didn’t play Yahtzee, because Ship, Captain, Crew is a much simpler game. There’s no scorecard. You’re not keeping track of things. It’s just one round.

Stephen Semple:

Interesting. Okay. Hold that thought.

Dave Young:

Okay.

Stephen Semple:

So again, this is a rumor in terms how he came across the game and it’s unconfirmed in history, whether he made a deal to buy the game from this couple or what happened here. But so now he needs a name that he could trademark and own. So he decided, “I want to take this game and I want to be able to trademark and own it.” So instead of the yacht game, it’s Yahtzee, and he could own that name. So now he’s got a name for his game. And in order to make really good money and reoccurring income from the game, he made some modifications. Now, one of the modifications he made is he added cups to make the game a little bit differently for rolling the dice and scorecards. Because what’s great about scorecards, you need to buy and replace them.

Dave Young:

Sure you do. And little tablets. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. But the other thing that he noticed when he had observed Bingo is there’s this magical shared moment when you yell out, “Bingo.” So what did he add to the game? You yell out, “Yahtzee.”

Dave Young:

It’s when you get what? All five numbers?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

Or six numbers?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

It’s not the winning yell.

Stephen Semple:

Right. But there’s still this moment where you get to yell out Yahtzee, which is yelling out-

Dave Young:

Throws a little adrenaline into the game.

Stephen Semple:

Right. Which he saw from Bingo. So he took that idea from Bingo. He took the idea of the cards from Bingo. He saw this other game that was out there, named it Yahtzee because of what he had learned from Bingo. He needed a name he could control. And then created these little scorecards so that there was ongoing recurring revenue from the game. So you can see all of this came from his learning around Bingo. So he launches it and it doesn’t do well because it’s hard to describe the game in marketing. He found it very, very hard to describe. So what he realized he had to do was get it into people’s hands so that they could experience the game. That’s what he figured what he had to do.

Dave Young:

I feel like I’ve heard this story before.

Stephen Semple:

How many times?

Dave Young:

This is the strategy, get people playing your game.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. So what he did is he started doing these Yahtzee parties, and he would give people the game to hold these parties, and eventually got enough people knowing and liking the game that after three years, the floodgates open. And he’s selling 9 million units of this game. And actually, as I said, at the peak was more than Monopoly. And then along comes 1972, and he sells the game, the Milton Bradley, for a nice tidy sum of 23 million bucks, which is like $150 million today.

Dave Young:

And then I hope that he got invited back onto the yacht where he stole the intellectual property of the actual game and said, “Look what I did?”

Stephen Semple:

But here’s the interesting thing, that rumor, which, if it’s true, he had actually paid them for the game. Not a lot of money, but he did actually pay them. So the rumor is he saw this game and he actually did buy it from this couple. It’s an uncertain part of history. If it’s true, he actually did purchase the game from the couple. That’s the good part. So let’s believe all of that happened. But here’s the interesting thing. To me, there’s a couple of really interesting lessons in here. And first of all, to me, what was really interesting is when you look at what he did with the game Yahtzee, all of that came out of his learning from Bingo.

I need a name. The card’s a really good idea because that had been the revenue generator for the card. So he created a scorecard, the shared experience of yelling something out, that little adrenaline hit. All of that, gets really interesting when you line it all up. All of that came from his learning, from his experience with Bingo. And I think too often we don’t transfer this learning forward. So I thought that that was really cool.

Dave Young:

It just shows that even with a game, I think probably, especially with a game, you’ve got to factor in the personal experience of someone playing the game. There have to be these moments, even in something like Monopoly… I think one of the things that keeps bringing us back to Monopoly is these little dopamine moments that happen every time you roll the dice, right?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

Oh my gosh, I went to jail. Oh my gosh, I got a chance to buy Park Place. Or Oh crap, I landed on Boardwalk with a hotel on it. Right now I’m done. So there’s just moment after moment. And with a dice game, there’s always a fun moment when you see what happens with the dice. But when you add that little tiny bit of dopamine about yelling something out.

Stephen Semple:

Well, it’s also kinesthetically anchors it because you’re actually doing something physical as well. But the other thing I thought that was really interesting is he’s clearly very observant because it was the Bingo part that he observed, and it was the Yahtzee game that he observed. Now again, he did little minor modifications to them, but what it showed us, he was out looking around. But the key one is this whole idea of demonstration in even non-game products, we’ve come across things where people have had to demonstrate the value, they had to get it in people’s hands or get people seeing it. And I even find when I’m working with business to business companies, it’s about what’s our opportunity to demonstrate our expertise? How do you demonstrate the game? How do you have it being felt and experienced rather than just talking about it, especially if it’s something that’s very difficult to explain in marketing. I thought that that was really, really cool that he landed on the, “Yeah. You know what? I got to do these parties, and I got to get just this game in people’s hands.”

Dave Young:

It reminds me just a month or so ago, a couple of people at Wizard Academy are trying to get a new game off the ground.

Stephen Semple:

Oh, is that right? Okay.

Dave Young:

And it’s a game… It’s got these moments, but I feel like it’s a game where you have little, almost like Frisbees, like the little tiny Frisbees that they use in Frisbee golf. These are just little ring toss Frisbees. And you play it like bocce ball. You throw a target, ring out 10, 15 feet away, and then you try to get your rings closer to the target than your competitor. And everybody’s got four or five rings, and then you pick up all the rings and start again. And if I had to say it was missing anything, it would be that there’s a bit of adrenaline moment or a dopamine moment right at the end when you figure out who’s scored. But there should be some kind of rule that says, “Oh, if you land one that touches the target ring, you have to yell something.”

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Yeah. There some bonus moment.

Dave Young:

Or it’s instant point, right?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

You can’t have that point taken away from you or something.

Stephen Semple:

Right. Yeah.

Dave Young:

Because that’s what it needs. So as you said, you deconstruct games and experiences that we are all familiar with and that are already popular. And see if you can insert some of those elements, some of those little moments back into your game. And I think if I may listened to this episode, but if we’d recorded this episode before that guy showed up, I might even suggest to him that it just needs to have that little dopamine rush. And I think with the long form Frisbee golf sort of things, that dopamine rush comes with your throw. You watch it arc off into the woods, or you watch it sail straight towards the target, and one way or the other, you have this little rush.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. When I’ve got this produced, I’ll send it over to you and you can send this episode to them.

Dave Young:

All right. And if you don’t have any scorecards or anything like that, but you do have five dice in a cup, Google Ship, Captain, Crew, it’s a fun game too.

Stephen Semple:

There we go.

Dave Young:

And you don’t have to buy it, you just need dice.

Stephen Semple:

You just need dice.

Dave Young:

You just dice and a couple of people. That’s fun.

Stephen Semple:

All right. Awesome.

Dave Young:

Thanks, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:

All right. Thanks, David.

Dave Young:

Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com.