Game.com UK Portal

Hasbro’s board games are the most well known in the world and are vital to the company’s business success. In today’s world games consoles and the internet have relegated board games to the dusty shelf in households.

The challenge was to continue to grow interest and desire within the people that play board games – kids.

Game.com was therefore conceived as ‘an online board games playground’ – somewhere to encourage trial, (which board games are not well suited to given that they’re stacked in toy shops, wrapped in plastic, with only their cover art to hint at the fun within.

By creating a world of gameplay ‘tasters’ online, the idea was to engage kids with the central ideas and activities behind each of Hasbro’s board games and use the internet to provide kids with the crucial first few minutes of play to get them excited about the games. To get them having fun that only the board game itself could deliver more of.

Skive was commissioned to design and build Game.com for Hasbro. The objective was to provide a place to showcase and provide online demos of offline games from Hasbro's portfolio of classics and in so doing encourage their purchase and drive sales.

The target audience was primarily kids aged 4 to 15, with a secondary market being their mums or parents.

It was paramount the site and its content be presented in a clear, colourful, modern, fun and exciting way, with simple navigation, and the site needed to work on Hasbro's hosting platform.

Skive's design incorporated a mix of Flash and HTML, allowing for animation to instantly engage the young audience while also working with SEO in mind. The home page features a rotating carousel of Hasbro's games which can be easily updated or amended to promote certain games in line with other promotions, with a strong call to play a demo.

Skive animated some of the lead characters from the portfolio, such as Mr Potato Head or Miss Scarlet, who amble on randomly every time the site is refreshed.

In order to encourage return users, Skive built in a registration mechanic featuring a rewards incentive: users can personalise the site with their favourite Hasbro character, and then earn points by playing the demos in order to unlock areas of the 'Secret Zone', such as the Print Station and the Think Lab - where users are able to submit their own ideas for games.

Another important facet was the Wishlist, where kids can circle the games they want for Christmas or Birthdays and print them out to give to their relatives. Parents are able to click through to buy any of the games on the site from up to ten major online vending partners - all updateable via a CMS.

Skive also built many of the the demos, and had a lot of fun bringing the likes of classic games such as Kerplunk, Mastermind and Downfall to life.

This new approach has performed fantastically for Hasbro. Since the September 2006 launch, we had over 750,000 unique visitors within a year, each spending an average of seven minutes on the site per session.

The £150,000 investment paid back to the tune of £1,000,000 in equivalent kids' TV value of one visit per user alone. With high repeat visiting, the true value is well beyond even this.

Now a permanent feature of Hasbro’s marketing plan, Game.com has truly got board games on a roll.