Kickstarter

Have you ever noticed how quickly you recognize songs while flipping through radio stations? Out of the thousands and thousands of songs you’ve heard in your life, you can single one out within a second or two from hearing just a few words - it’s pretty amazing! Music Mania is based on that simple principle and then taken to a whole new level of awesomeness: If I sing two words from a song, can you guess what the song is? I bet you can!

Music Mania is a party style board game. Although there are many complexities to the game, it is based on a very simple principle — can you recognize a song in just a couple words? It sounds pretty tough, but it’s actually really easy. It all started with that one little concept and grew into a whole new beast that resulted in test players rolling on the ground laughing, eyeballs popping out of sockets and even a dislocated joint from an extremely powerful high five (not really). But seriously, check out the warning label before you play, or you can’t hold us responsible for any injuries associated with playing.

Music Mania is meant for people 18 & up. It’s based on the most top recognized songs dating back to the 50’s, so younger players might not know the older songs used in the game...it might also have some cards deemed inappropriate for the youngins'. Aside from that, this is a game that really can be played by anyone, even the tone-deaf...and old people.

It's really pretty simple. Split up into teams of two or more. When it's your team's turn, flick the spinning needle. Whichever color the needle lands on determines which color card box to choose a card from. Pull a card from the box, read the instructions printed on it, flip the timer and go. If you get it right, go forward. First team to the finish wins! Of course, there's more to it than that, but you get the idea...

Each of the cards in the game has a very short one-liner description about how to play the card. If further clarification is necessary, the back side of the instructions has the full description.

The spinning board is a custom made, awesome piece of equipment. If you didn't notice it in the video, go back at take a look! It spins for several seconds. It also has a special cutout window hole, which allows the wildcards to be placed on the inside part of the board. (If you take a look at the spinning board, a wildcard bonus is being triggered because you can see it through the spinner needle).

A HUGE shout out to Noah Hornstein for helping to design the characters. We had an idea of what we wanted, and we found his portfolio through Reddit's /r/forhire section. He was able to put the look and feel of the characters that we had in our heads into an actual design and nailed their look right off the bat!

Right now, the characters are simply cardboard cutouts with little stands. Our plan is to have awesome character molds made, but there's no room in the budget yet. If the project does well, we'll come back to this later...

Let's face it, this game just wouldn't be that fun if you don't know the songs. Nobody likes to pick up a card to play only to lose before they even got to play it. We recognized that potential problem right in the beginning and spent months choosing the most recognizable songs in the solar system.

We started by going through the top 100 Billboard Hits per year from the 50's through today. That got us a giant list of about 6,000 songs. We even added on a few more for good measure - you'd be surprised at some of the songs that never cracked the top 100. From there we went through every single song and listened to them on YouTube, all while tracking the total hit counts to see general popularity. Doing that narrowed the list down to 1,857 songs.

We then sent those 1,857 songs out to a bunch of people from different backgrounds and had them rank the songs as a 2 (I know that song) or a 1 (I don't know it). The ranking process whittled the list down to around 400 songs that just about everyone recognized.

You know how Kickstarter works - it’s all or nothing - and that’s how we’re approaching this game. We’ve made the game exactly how we think it should sit on the shelves - with good quality components and a lot of imagination.

We think that the best Kickstarter products shouldn't cost more than they would for retail. Unfortunately for us, that means making A LOT of games up front. So in order to be able to offer the game to you for $30, we have to front lots of money.

We’re not on here to make a bunch of money. In fact, if it squeaks by and barely reaches the $75,000 mark, we'll be going through a lot of couches to scrounge up some change to pay for the difference.   

Your money is gonna make it rain in a Las Vegas strip club in the near future - Lots of rain...maybe hail...dunno yet, we’ll see...

Pretty much every penny is going toward printing and shipping the game. Some of the things in the game are specially designed, so we need to pay for tooling, setup and development of those. For example, we wouldn't settle for a crappy ole’ spinning board, so we’re having a special one made that can maybe double up for some spin the bottle if you know what we're sayin’. Also, you'd be surprised at how much it costs to pay someone to drag a copy of the game halfway across the country and place it on your doorstep!

We’re approaching this Kickstarter project with an “all or nothing” approach. We don’t want this to be a one hit wonder. We really do believe we’re on the verge of something great - we feel like we’ve cracked the code for making the music board game that you’ll find on Target’s shelves in a 10 year anniversary edition. We’ve set our funding goal at $75,000 - we want to get A LOT of backers and offer Music Mania at as low a price as possible. We don’t see this as a way to make money but rather an opportunity to prove potential.

First off, the normal MSRP of this game will be set at One Gazillion Dollars (plus tax), which means that if you purchase it now, you will not only get it quite a while before the general public will ever lay eyes on it but you will be getting for 99.3141592653589793238% less!   

Now that the money stuff is out of the way, you should back Music Mania because you think the world should have more happiness and laughter in it. If you don’t care about things like puppies and kittens, an ice cream cone on a hot day, waking up before work only to realize you still have an hour to sleep, and laughing so hard that tears roll down your face - then this game isn’t for you - and that’s fine, you just have no soul.

Seriously, though, there aren’t many things stronger than the power of music. Think back to when you heard a song on the radio that you loved 10 years ago and how you can remember exactly what you were doing when you were listening to it then...the smells, the sounds, the sights...this game locks those songs up in a memory vault and throws them at you one after the other until you're fluttering around unconscious on the floor covered in your own urine.

We’ve figured out how to put the power of music into a board game -  it’s like hearing your favorite songs on the radio over and over again. Even if you can only back Music Mania with $1, it will let us know you want this game in the world...and that you have a soul, which is always nice.

Don't you worry your pretty little head - we've got it covered. The whole entire game is based exclusively off of song titles and getting creative in how we used them. There are no lyrics involved in the game, although we did originally put in a lot of time before we determined that the use of lyrics would get us sued faster than Ian's hair is falling out.

You can reach one us at 867-5309 (ask for Jenny). If you’re too shy to talk on the phone, shoot us an email: info@playmusicmania.com or check out our website at www.playmusicmania.com.

Just two people with a simple dream of making the world a better place. We think this is a good first step.

And, of course we have joined Kicking It Forward by pinky swearing to donate 5% of any profits back into Kickstarter. We've already spent that much on Kickstarter anyways, and we'll no doubt spend many time more in the future - Kickstarter has some of the most exciting and innovative projects out there!