Storytelling card game The Plot Thickens wins Hasbro’s Next Great Game Challenge

Hasbro has declared the winner of its second Next Great Game Challenge, after whittling down 600 submissions to five finalists.

The Plot Thickens is a storytelling card game themed around noir, science-fiction and romance narratives. Players work together to come up with a unique tale, placing cards representing people, places and things to connect together interweaving stories and earn ‘plot points’. Players can choose to use their own cards or utilise other players’ – thickening the plot. The person with the most points decides how the story ends.

The game takes from 20 minutes to an hour to play with three to six players, stretching form three chapters long up to six or seven.

In the box are 150 cards, split evenly between person, place and thing cards, plus 30 plot point tokens.

The Plot Thickens was one of the five finalists that were given $2,000 and mentorship by Hasbro to take their project to Indiegogo, alongside dungeon crawler Lair, card game Colossal Blob, historical board and card hybrid Plank & Rank and skiing board game On The Slopes.

The game raised just over $10,000 on the crowdfunding site that will be bolstered with the top prize money of $25,000 by Hasbro. The team of designers behind the game – Brigette Indelicato, Mike Callahan and Thomas Rochelle – will also take a trip to Hasbro’s HQ to finalise a full version.

“We are so impressed by the continued support from the global gaming community for each finalist’s concepts on Indiegogo,” said Hasbro head of design and development Brian Chapman.

“We love the clever literary challenge and plentiful storytelling opportunities that The Plot Thickens provides and are excited to work with Brigette and her team to help bring this game to life.”