Shopkick: The Boardgame
Shopkick: The Boardgame, is a game inspired by old board games like Mall Madness, as well as the cultural artifact of “the home game” offered by radio and TV game shows as a consolation prize. To win Shopkick: The Boardgame players move their piece around the board to different stores where they can collect tokens. There are three token types, each of which have different point values, and require different actions to collect. Players record their progress by adding points to a counter, and adding collected tokens to their player mat. The game ends after ten rounds, at which point victory tokens are awarded based on various goal conditions like, most points collected, and most of a certain token type collected. This abstract definition while incomplete gives a good idea of the basic game, but to appreciate what the game really is you’ll need to know what Shopkick: The App is.
What is Shopkick: The app
Shopkick is a rewards program inspired by the loyalty programs offered by various retail outfits, which functions as an alternative to classic retail advertisement. Rather than spending money on media attempting to convince customers go to a store and buy a product, Shopkick simply passes the ad money on to customers who actually go to a store and buy the product. If a soup company wants you to try their new soup flavor, instead of just telling people how great it is, Shopkick would just pay you to go to the store, pick up the soup, and buy it.
There are a number of technical systems which facilitate this. The Shopkick app could detect if you went to a store by using in store beacons and GPS. It could detect if you had actually looked at the product by asking you to scan the product’s barcode with your phone. It could tell if you had purchased the product by asking you to submit a proof of purchase, like a picture of your receipt.
As with the board game’s description above, when described in this dry analytical tone, it doesn’t sound particularly fun. But, while saving money on groceries was an important part of why users liked the app, the thing that made Shopkick stand out from other apps was that it played like a Where’s Waldo ARG. Lots of “Shopkickers” would use the app as a game to entertain kids during long shopping trips. Friends would use it as an excuse to get together for shopping trips, even when some were only there to collect points. Most tellingly, there were a number of users who would accrue points, called “Kicks”, well over the amount required to cash out, they were just enjoying the hunt.
Theme as starting point
While I worked at Shopkick there would be semi-annual Hackathons, where employees would pitch small projects which they could whip up a prototype for within 24 hours. After a few years away from game development, I decided I wanted to use one of these hackathons as an opportunity to stretch those creative muscles. So, I pitched a Shopkick game. The fun of the app being a large part of the value proposition of the app, my pitch was that a home game could could further distill that fun into an experience which would remind loyal Shopkickers why they enjoy the app, and could also be used to impress potential new advertisers and show off what made Shopkick so unique.
I purposefully didn’t come to the hackathon with a predetermined outcome in mind. We were going to create something from scratch. So when my team of volunteers first met, we didn’t start by deciding which games to crib from, instead, the first thing I did was ask them what themes would they want the game to feature. We came up with a few core enjoyable moments the game should have: Checking the app to find out the new deals each day. Devising and executing a plan to get the most kicks you can in a single trip. Finding what you’ve been looking for, and getting kicks for it. Earning rewards that let you buy something you might not have been able to otherwise. Knowing that there’s always a way to earn kicks.
These became the core elements of the game. New deals would appear every round by flipping over new cards in a Deals Deck which showed where new tokens would appear on the board that round. The game board would be a map of nearby stores where players would have to decide where to go to get the most kicks each turn. Players would shop for specific products on their shopping lists and would collect Kicks tokens from each store they visited along the way.
We also had to think about what we didn’t want to have in the game. We didn’t want direct competition, that didn’t seem to match up with the experience of using Shopkick. So there would be no attacking or stealing from other players. The competition would be more like a race than a fight. We didn’t want users to have to worry about things like driving or spending money; it’s a game, not a simulation, so we took out the shopping lists and left grabbing Kicks tokens as the main goal. We had started out with dice rolls to determine how far a player could move, but I suggested we cut that and make all locations be one move away from each other. Instead of each player rolling dice to move pawns along empty roads, all players simply got three actions on their turn. For each action they could move to a nearby store, purchase from a store, or collect “Scan” tokens at a store. Now each move was not about what you could afford, but how much you could gain with each of your actions.
In lieu of shopping lists, players would win by collecting sets of tokens from different stores on their player mats, while they got kicks for every token they collected added to their kicks counter. When a player got enough kicks they could either hold onto them, and try to get the most kicks at the end of the game, or spend them to get gift cards, which could be used to take extra turns. Along with awarding kicks for Walk-ins, Scans, and Purchases, we also added online shopping, and even then I was concerned that there could still be situations where a player might think there were no good moves. So we came full circle and we added the option to ‘check the app for quick kicks’ during your turn by flipping over a new card from the deals deck as an action. That would add even more tokens to the board, and give the player who checked a few quick kicks for that turn. Since anyone could collect those tokens, it turned a worst case scenario into a win-win situation for all players.
Essentially a Shopkick game
There were two final elements which made this game specifically a Shopkick game. They weren’t just about gameplay inspired by shopping, they were the elements which reflected the nature of shopkick. These values could have been set any number of ways, and the game would still have been balanced, but I took special care to ensure that these values created an experience indicative of shopkick, and familiar to users of the app. The first was deciding on the specific kick values to award for different actions. The second was deciding on which tokens would appear in which stores.
Kicks awarded in the game would not match up directly with the values in the app for two reasons. We didn’t want a player feeling bad for seeing that they got more pretend kicks playing in the game than using the real app. And for obvious financial reasons, Shopkick gives exponentially more kicks for actually buying something than for scanning products, or just walking into a store. So I simplified the scores down to 5 kicks per scan, 10 kicks per walk in, and 20 kicks per purchase. But that was a little too simple, and didn’t really scream Shopkick, so each token also had a special rule. Walk-ins could be collected for free when moving to a store, because that’s what a Walk-in award means. All Scans at a store could be collected at once, because that’s how most Shopkick users acted. They choose the stores with the most scans available, and scanned every product they could find in one trip. These two ideas came very early in the process, but purchases were a trickier prospect.
The Shopkick app was more than happy to reward spending, but the main user-base was not wealthy. I didn’t think that they’d enjoy a game where they had to manage money, or where the richest player wins. But without money how do we communicate that purchases are a large cost for a large reward. As might be clear by now if you’ve been following along, the only cost in this game is the opportunity cost. So I made collecting one purchase take a whole action, while not being worth much more than the other tokens. This meant that a single purchase was not always the best use of a single action. However if the player could afford to spend multiple actions doing purchases they would get increasing rewards for each subsequent purchase.
Where the tokens appeared also mattered. The first draft of the game had two decks, you’d draw one card from the location deck and one card from the token type deck, to figure out which token was added where that round. Not only was that a lot do do for each token, it also meant that camping out on one or two stores was the best strategy. If all stores were equal, just sit tight and hope for good luck. So we decided to make a deck of predetermined location/token cards. We needed to have more differentiation in the stores, that way players couldn’t get everything they needed from the same store, and with this new deck we could control that.
The stores were roughly speaking analogs for the types of stores that appear in the Shopkick app; Mall stores, grocery stores, discount stores, appliance stores, and superstores. Each store has a recognizable combination of kick types. For example: Discount stores almost never have scans, since their stock is based on whatever product they get a discounted shipment of that week, but they reward for every dollar spent. They aren’t interested in what brand you buy, just how much you buy. Thus the discount store in the game almost exclusively gets populated with purchase and walk-in tokens. Each type of store has a similarly unique character. So we could just model the distribution of tokens per store to match those patterns. Any user familiar with the app would know these patterns instinctively. Any ad exec, or perspective new employee, could quickly and intuitively learn the lay of the Shopkick landscape in only one or two games.
What happened to the game
Within 24 hours we had created a playable game based on the Shopkick app. Not only was it fun, but we actually won the hackathon, and the head of the company gave me the directive to make this game a reality. That was going to take three big steps; finalize the balance of the game, create final art for the game, and find a way to get it printed. It was clear that we couldn’t print without the final art, and we couldn’t have the final art until we had final designs, and we couldn’t have final designs until we worked out some of the rougher edges of the game. The main issue we needed to contend with was that the game we presented to the company was full of arbitrarily assigned values. We had gone with gut instinct and painted in broad strokes. It was a late night, 24 hour hack after all.
The first step was to create a Google spreadsheet for the Deals Deck. I was then able to analyze the full deck, alter it, and even run simulated games. With the hackathon over I lost much of my volunteer team, but those who were still interested would meet once a week for play tests. This iteration phase was slow going, as a playthrough of the game usually got cut short by the end of the lunch break. It was however very useful. It was in this phase where we were able to work out several issues. I was able to fix the tendency for a single player to pull ahead and be uncatchable, and for certain strategies to be overpowered. We also sanded off some overly complicated mechanics, and almost as a surprise, stumbled on a simplified but quicker version of the game.
But this is where the good luck ran out. After a few months of lunch hour development the rules were set, the cards were set, and I was working on the best way to teach the rules. I was ready to move onto art and printing, but in the in the time since the hackathon I had lost some key allies on the project. The head of the company, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of the game, had since left the company. The new leadership who had replaced him didn’t know or care about the project. But the game was fun, and interesting, and I thought that I might be able to make a fresh pitch for the game to the new leadership. My thought was that, if apathy was all I faced then perhaps if I could present the game as a fait accompli it might get across the finish line on momentum alone.
To show that it was a finished game, I created both versions of the game on Tabletopia where they could be played virtually. But, since the new leadership team was not going to be sold on gameplay like the old CEO was, I would still need to sell it on the eye candy of the final art, but that was the last straw. The wonderfully talented artist who had been part of the original hackathon team, was now completely booked for other art projects for the company. Without an ally in management to make the game’s production a priority I couldn’t get the artist assigned to work on the game, and without the artist’s help to create a slick art filled presentation I couldn’t sell management on making the production of the game a priority. So, that’s where the game stalled, and eventually died.
The final irony is that the game is so perfectly built around the Shopkick theme, that it will never be released without Shopkick. I can’t reskin the game with orks, starpilots, or some other generic genre trope, without rewriting every rule and mechanic in the game. This is, quintessentially, a Shopkick board game.
Tabletopia Playable Demos
If you are curious to play the game, I have gotten permission to host the (unpublished) fully playable Tabletopia versions of the game, exclusively here in my portfolio. Enjoy.
All copyrights, artwork, and trademarks above related to Shopkick or Trax, are retained by Trax Technology Solutions Pte Ltd and are used here only with permission.