Eyes on the Prize, Or How to Get Gramatic! for Free

Back in the simpler times of 2013 I heard of a spunky little indie card game that came to dominate the party game scene: Cards Against Humanity. The gameplay was simple, the cards were just raunchy enough to be entertaining, and the best part of all was you didn’t have to purchase the game to get a copy.

When my friend came to visit me in CT from New York that year, we knew we wanted to play the game, but it wasn’t popular enough yet to be available in retail stores. We would have needed to buy it online, but it would have shipped too late and he would have gone home before experiencing the sweet sweet NSFW gameplay. But then, a seed of hope: the developers had all the cards available in a .pdf for free. All you had to do was print it out and cut them yourself. Oh Joyous Day!! We played well into the night, the house filled with raucous laughter where otherwise there would have been sullen silence.

All dramatics aside, the fact that a developer would purposefully make their game available to anyone who wanted to play without expecting any form of payment for it really stuck with me. This strategy also didn’t seem to affect sales at all as now 10 years later, it is still a pretty popular party game sold at most game and big-box stores.

This gets me thinking: My biggest goal is to get more eyes on Gramatic! At this point, I want more people playing Gramatic! the more people play, the more they will want to get others to engage with the game. Additionally, I fully believe in the accessibility of resources. Students should not be prevented from learning because of a paywall of some kind.

Therefore, one of my goals this year is to make the base game of Gramatic! a fully downloadable .pdf that teachers and students could access from this website and cut themselves. This availability could help expedite awareness, and hopefully boost interest enough for customers to want to purchase the official game. I will be posting the .pdf on this Sheep Chase website in the beginning of December, once I figure out the logistics, such as instructions, legal considerations, and actually creating the .pdf to name a few.

Stay Tuned!