Dream Teams

David Blanchard – Director of Party & Family Games at The Op Games – looks at why engaging with inventors beyond the licensing moment can really pay off.

After building a reputation in the industry as the company that “does more with less (SKUs)”, 2026 is going to be the largest slate of original IP that The Op has ever brought to market.

As the success we were having with Tapple, Telestrations, Hues & Cues, Blank Slate and Flip 7 started to snowball, so did retailer demand for more new products. And while our amazingly talented internal creative and development teams have repeatedly proven their ability to churn out incredible work, bandwidth is bandwidth. There’s a cap to what you can expect from your internal resources.

Knowing that we needed all hands-on deck to bring these items to market – and knowing how passionate the inventor community is about their creations – we made a concerted effort to get the inventors of games we license into the fold as much as possible. Whether that was helping us generate additional content for a game, playtesting rule changes, collaborating on the engineering of a custom component, or simply writing an inventor’s note at the end of the instruction sheet… Their additional involvement was a win-win for both parties.

In fact, a few of our new games coming out in 2026 come to mind that we might not have been able to bring to market had we siloed the workload and shut out the inventors.

Hummingbirds by Jason Tremblay
This is arguably the most beautiful game I’ve worked on in my 20-year career – both in the way it looks and in the elegance and simplicity of the game mechanics. But the prototype, despite being meticulously made, included a substantial, complex component that was unintuitive for the customer to build and wouldn’t fit the retail box size we needed. Jason went above and beyond by reengineering the design and construction multiple times until we were finally able to deliver a finished product that’s even better than I ever could have dreamed.

Cat’s Knocking Things Off Ledges by Sen-Foong Lim & David Killing
The prototype we received was so well-designed, so well-constructed, and so meticulously thought-out that it was virtually ready to go into production right out of the gate. Obviously, the creative team loved that the lift was easier on this one – however, we really loved that we were able to bring a final product to market so close to the inventors’ original vision. This is an excellent example of when inventors take a risk by putting in the extra work to have entirely written rules, invest in close-to-finished art and confidently make a bet on the theme – success with this approach is not guaranteed, of course. Still, that risk really paid off in this case.

Red or Yellow by Sasha Jelten
This is going to sound like a dig, but I assure you it’s not… Sasha pitched us what might be one of the worst-looking prototypes we’ve ever seen. Cards were handwritten in Sharpie, with crossed-out words, misspellings and grammar issues – and included some pretty terrible hand-drawn scribbles. However, this was absolutely the best way to pitch this particular type of game! It was dripping with authenticity and charm, thanks to the hand-made prototype’s juxtaposition with the realness of the gameplay experience. In fact, it was so effective that we asked Sasha to handwrite additional content for the game as we worked tirelessly to reproduce the prototype’s imperfections in our final production art. This intentional so-bad-it’s-good art direction will definitely stand out on the shelf once it hits stores in Q4-2026.

In the end, we can totally understand why some companies may license an item from an inventor and never talk to them after the contract is signed and “the cheque’s in the mail.” And sure, the licensee always needs the freedom to finish developing the product however they desire, based on retail opportunities, industry trends, and general experience… But why not tap into the passion and creativity of the person who came up with the original idea in the first place?

More often than not, that inventor has several other hidden talents up their sleeve that your team might be able to utilise. You never know, they could become the most valuable collaborator (MVC?) for that particular product in addition to already being its biggest ambassador!

Thank you to all of the inventors we have worked with over the years, regardless of your varying levels of involvement – without you, The Op wouldn’t be where we are today.

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