23-year-old Commack game inventor takes on Cards Against Humanity

When John McNicholl created the card game Deceiver two years ago in his family’s Commack basement, he set out to claim a sliver of the billion-dollar industry that churns out 4,000 board game titles per year.

Monopoly, the aging juggernaut, measures success in millions of units moved. The modern hit Cards Against Humanity became the top-selling game on Amazon.com and sold out three printings.

McNicholl’s goals, for now, are more modest. He paid $15,000 — savings from years of work at a Friendly’s restaurant in Commack — to Noida, India-based manufacturer Ace Card Co. to print 1,000 copies of his game. Since last summer, he has sold more than 445 copies of the game, at $29.99, mostly through Amazon. It recently ranked 77,450 in the Toys and Games category and 551 in the "dedicated deck card games" subcategory, where the current top-seller was an "easy family-friendly party game" called Exploding Kittens.

Holiday sales

"I hope to break even after the holiday season" and maybe attract interest from a game publisher, McNicholl said in an interview this fall.

Inspired loosely by the parlor game Mafia, a game of social deduction where players try to identify the "killer" in their midst, Deceiver asks players to answer a series of mostly innocuous (but sometimes embarrassing) yes or no questions printed on cards.

"Have you ever stolen money from someone else’s piggy bank?"

"Do you think someone in this room is attractive?"

"Is home your favorite place on earth?"

Each player gets a seemingly identical card and, together, they answer each question by raising (or not raising) their hands. The twist is that the Deceiver’s card doesn't bear the questions; without knowing what the questions are, he or she gauges how to respond by watching others, or by guessing. At the end of a round, players vote on the person likeliest to be the Deceiver. At this stage of the game there is typically accusation, ratiocination, denial; shared histories come into play, as does the ability to lie convincingly to one’s friends and family. The tagline that McNicholl printed on the side of the box, after two months of considering and discarding close to 100 drafts, is "The party game of observation, deception and laughter." The game is intended for players 12 and older.

McNicholl, 23, graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in May with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master's in engineering management. He grew up in a house with hundreds of board games and a family that played them together.

'You’re probably going to laugh'

The genre McNicholl calls the party game is "all about social interaction," he said. "It’s usually very simple, very easy to understand. It’s all about jokes, sarcasm, making fun of things, figuring things out and laughing. … If you’re playing [the strategy game] Magic: The Gathering you’re not going to laugh. If you’re playing Deceiver or Cards Against Humanity, you’re probably going to laugh."

Juli Lennett, U.S. toys industry adviser for NPD Group, the Port Washington-based market research company, tracks board games as part of a category that also includes preschool, children’s and family games. That category is worth $1.3 billion a year in U.S. retail sales, she said. The adult game sub-category, which includes titles like Cards Against Humanity, does $188 million in annual sales after two years of rapid growth since the pandemic struck.

"Consumers have really leaned in," Lennett said. "You might do dorm entertainment or college entertainment in your residence and invite a few friends over," she said.

The odds are stacked against newcomers and independents like McNicholl, she said. "You’re talking about bumping up against some of the biggest toy companies in the world, who have deep relationships with retailers, who have marketing machines and large staffs of inventors and creators, and, frankly, lots of market research on what works with consumers."

Brenna Noonan, president of Quillsilver Studio, a game consultancy and development company with studios in New Hampshire and Australia, said many of the games she helps bring to market use crowdfunding site Kickstarter to sponsor an elaborate rollout: "sending prototypes out to influencers in the board game space, reviewers, posting on Discord servers, running a demonstration of the game at conventions, making the game available digitally and doing social media marketing."

McNicholl is a one-man marketing team, and much of his promotion takes place on social media platforms including TikTok, where a 20-second video he posted has gotten more than 522,000 views. It starts with a close-up of a rejection letter he got from a game company in June 2020, with choice bits underlined: "The concept is not strong enough to compete with products currently on the market." It ends with a shot of him sitting in front of an open carton of newly delivered Deceiver boxes, grinning as he looks to the future.

But what makes a good story in TikTok’s highly compressed format does not necessarily make for good marketing: Clicks did not convert to sales. The video "didn’t show anything about the game," McNicholl said. "I need to try to show people playing the game, help people understand the dynamic, how fun it is." Subsequent videos explaining game mechanics and showing people playing the game garnered only a few thousand views.

Grassroots marketing

A more effective strategy, he has found, is approaching strangers at Long Island parks and breweries and asking them to play the game with him. This turned out to be far less nerve-racking than one might suppose. "How I convince myself to do it now is that, no matter what happens, in 24 hours from now they’re probably not going to remember me," he said.

Few people actually turn away the clean-cut young man in a Deceiver T-shirt who introduces himself as a recent college graduate and inventor of a board game, and many welcome him.

Many of his sales so far, though, have come on Amazon. For a customer, he reasoned, the website carries a valuable imprimatur: "I know I’m going to get it on time. … I know it’s going to be good quality."

For the independent game creator, that imprimatur is costly: The website takes $10.50 on each sale on top of his $15 production and shipping cost, cutting his profit to $3.50.

Typically, Noonan said, a manufacturer’s suggested retail price in board gaming is about four times landed cost, which includes manufacturing and shipping. By switching to a printer in China, where the industry does most of its production, McNicholl might cut his production cost to as low as $4 per unit, she said.

There may be reason for hope, though. Both Noonan and Philip Hatch, a Guilford, United Kingdom-based consultant for All About Games Consulting, said the industry was roiled from time to time by breakout hits.

"There is a voracious appetite for new games and new content," Hatch said. "It doesn’t matter that there’s plenty of well-established social deduction games out there. … Ultimately it’s up to gamers to decide."

McNicholl is pressing on, posting more TikToks of people playing his game. Soon, he said, he plans to release Deceiver After Dark, a version of the game aimed at an older audience, containing some questions of the risque variety. "I always want to try to advance and keep trying to improve," he said.

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.comspanglernewsday

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.