Gesundheit! Galactic Sneeze Dares You to Spank the Yeti

Looking for a way to beat the winter doldrums while cooped up indoors? Look no further than Spank the Yeti: The Adult Party Game of Questionable Decisions, a new, irreverent and interactive board game filled with naughty phrases and funny scenarios—or maybe funny phrases and naughty scenarios.

Created by Galactic Sneeze, a “Brooklyn-based fun stuff think tank” based in Cobble Hill, Spank the Yeti was inspired by another popular game, F-ck, Marry, Kill.

In Spank, a player selects three cards from two decks – one deck contains Action Cards while the other deck contains Object Cards (people, creatures, and things). The player then pairs each of the three action cards to one of the three object cards while the other players try to guess his or her answers.

See the animated video below for more on the instructions:

How to play Spank The Yeti (Video by Galactic Sneeze)

The brainchild of the husband and wife team of Bryan Wilson and Sara Farber, Galactic Sneeze was formed in 2010 (November 11th, to be exact, on the third anniversary of their first date) and their first board game Schmovie, The Hilarious Game of Made-Up Movies was released in 2013 after creating a “passionate, active fan base” on Facebook.

Like Spank the Yeti, the premise for Schmovie is fun and simple, creating “funny names for made-up movies.” About a year before they released Schmovie, Wilson and Farber would post a premise every night at midnight on the Schmovie Facebook page.

“We would say, ‘What would you call a drama about a constipated princess? Can you beat The Princess Tried?’ And people would submit their titles in the comments section. I would make a [digital] custom [“schquid”] trophy…like a squid but with wings…[for] whoever got the most likes by midnight the next day,” Wilson explains from the couple’s Cobble Hill home office.

The two met on Match.com in November 2007, after Farber came across Wilson’s profile and found that they had a lot common (creative jobs, Guitar Hero, improv), so she sent him a message. Wilson was also surprised by how much they had in common but was putting in long hours and traveling a lot for work and having fun meeting new people on Match.

He responded to her message with, “You seem great, but I just don’t have time for a hot, new romance right now. If you’re still single in February, let me know.” Farber shot back, “First of all, if you don’t have time to date, I don’t know what you’re doing on a dating site. And second of all, I didn’t say anything about a ‘hot, new romance.’ I’m talking about a scorching romance!”

Impressed by her sense of humor, he met her that night after he got off work (10pm on a Sunday night) and they immediately hit it off—so much so that Wilson called his mother the next day and told her that he had met the woman that he was going to spend the rest of his life with. He sums it up, “We were made for each other so it worked out.”

Married for 6 and a half years with a 5-year-old daughter, the couple work remarkably well together. Wilson explains, “It really helps that we have different skill sets.” Farber adds, “There’s the creative development we do together. And then once we come up with something, he does all the art direction and I do the content. In terms of the execution, he does a lot of images for social media and I manage our warehouse and inventory, reach out to retailers, [handle] the public relations…and all that writing-involved stuff.”

Wilson, who previously worked as an Art Director for an advertising agency, and Farber, who has worked for Sesame Workshop, VTech Toys, and headed the Content Design Department at Fisher Price, decided early in their relationship to collaborate on making their own fun products. They came up with the concept for Schmovie after suddenly getting an unexpected invitation to pitch some ideas to a game company.

Farber reached out to a contact at one of the big-name game companies to connect an acquaintance to schedule a pitch meeting and was serendipitously offered an opportunity to present ideas as well. She explains, “I said, ‘Great. Sure, we’d love to!’ Then Bryan came home from work that day, and I said, “We have a pitch meeting in 3 weeks…”

Farber continues, “So I went to Starbucks and I sat there all day…I came up with a bunch of game ideas. One of them was this game called Pitch King… where you come up with names for wacky inventions. Like what would you call powdered water?” “Or a car that runs on coffee? Or high heels for sexy cats?” adds Wilson.

“It was funny but it wasn’t super re-playable,” Farber says. “Like once you saw all the cards—it didn’t have a mix and match element…. One of the things about a good game is you want it to be varied and re-playable so that your experience is slightly different the next time.”

She adds that Galactic Sneeze was also working on a screenplay for an animated children’s film at that time. “We were reading a lot of books about screenwriting and it was on the top of our minds, so we thought, ‘What if we did a spin-off of Pitch King that was movie themed?’”

The couple brought prototypes of Pitch King and Screen Play (Schmovie’s working title) to their pitch meeting, and while there was genuine interest, the company passed on them. “And so did everyone else—half a dozen companies passed,” Wilson says. “But at that point, we had been working on the brand [for Schmovie], like the Facebook page, and we thought, ‘This game has an audience. Maybe we could just make it ourselves.’ So we started to build a brand around it and redesign[ed] and rename[d] it.”

Initially launched as an ages 13+ adult game, Galactic Sneeze produced 3,000 copies of Schmovie and brought them to the Chicago Toy and Game Fair where they sold every copy. Wilson recalls the Galactic Sneeze table was “swarmed by 8 and 9 year olds, because 8 and 9 year olds want to tell you what they’d call a movie about a smelly ninja, or an evil booger.” Farber says that it dawned on them that, “this is a family game!” Wilson adds, “We made a game for grown-ups and now apparently 8 and 9 years olds really love it. It’s for everybody.”

So for Fall 2015, Schmovie was re-released as an ages 8+ family game with new and improved components and a smaller box. Wilson explains, “You make a lot of mistakes,“ but “You learn things. The original box was really big…too hard to carry to a party….” While the game originally came in a standard size game box (similar to the classic Trivial Pursuit), since it’s a party game, it needed to be redesigned so it’s easier to transport.

Farber adds that they received some much-needed, friendly advice along the way. “People are so helpful in the industry… At these conferences and conventions we’d go to, we would strike up conversations and sometimes…another husband and wife team, or a family-run business…would say, ‘here are the manufacturers we used,’ ‘here are some things to be aware of,’ ‘here is the price you’re trying to meet,’ and we sort of cobbled it together and figured it out.”

Along with the Facebook page, Schmovie has a Twitter handle where Wilson and Farber host a hashtag game every Monday at 11:00am where players are invited to tweet their Schmovie title ideas for topics including #SnackSchmovies, #ResolutionSchmovies, and #SportySchmovies. They receive thousands of tweeted responses each week from across the US, UK, and Canada.

After the release of their first game, Farber says, “We thought we’re never going to make another game because that was so much work and it’s so time-consuming…” The pair initially assumed, “’We made a game. That’s the hard part, right?’ And then we very quickly realized that it wasn’t the hard part.” After creating all the content and designing Schmovie, they then had to “find a manufacturer, figure out how to ship it, to warehouse it, and have it distributed.”

Wilson adds that another challenge was “getting anyone else to give a sh-t that you made a game.” But sure enough, the ambitious duo developed a second game, Spank the Yeti, figuring “Yes, it’s a lot of work, but it’ll be easier the second time.”

Farber describes how she developed the concept for Spank the Yeti—“I went to Starbucks and I thought about FMK (F-ck, Marry, Kill). In that game [there are] 3 actions—F-ck, Marry, or Kill, and 3 [people] usually, celebrities…. So I thought, how do you take that game and put it in a box and expand on it.”

She decided the game didn’t have to consist of just 3 actions, f-ck, marry, or kill, it could include funny scenarios like: “Take a bubble bath with,” “Sniff the underwear of,” “Go on a booze cruise with.” And the objects could include anything ranging from celebrities (like Jeff Goldblum or Donald Trump), “to a squirrel who’s all up in your business,” “a coked-out unicorn,” or “a robot who just wants to feel real feelings.”

She went home, grabbed some index cards and wrote down as many funny Actions and Objects she could. Then she says, “Bryan got home from work…before he even had his coat off, I said, ‘I got a new game. Let’s play!’” Wilson says it was fun because, “while I knew her very well, I very quickly realized that I didn’t know which one [object] she was going to choose to do this [action] with.”

After testing their new game out with friends and taking it to several game meet-ups around the city, the couple redesigned and refined the game based on the feedback they received, adding 1,2,3 and A,B,C cards to make it easier to keep track of everyone’s answers and putting dots on the back of cards for scoring purposes, eliminating the need for pen and paper.

Released in November 2016, Spank the Yeti is a 17+ party game for adults. Instead of dipping into their savings this time around, the couple turned to Kickstarter to fund the new game. Wilson explains, “A lot of people asked us when Schmovie came out, ‘Did you use Kickstarter?’ It just seemed like a lot of extra work on top of what we were already doing…. We’ve learned over the last few years that one of the big advantages of Kickstarter, other than having some starting capital, is building some brand awareness and some excitement for your product before it even launches…So for Spank the Yeti we thought, ‘We’ll just try it out.’”

One of the tricky things in developing content for Spank the Yeti was “finding that balance of things that an 18-year-old thinks is cool and a 50-year-old thinks is cool,” Wilson explains, and including content that will still be relevant a few year from now. He continues, “a lot of people who play these adult party games are 17-21 years old, and we are not that anymore….” Farbers adds that their initial cards included too many “1980s geek references,” courtesy of Wilson, and were “filled with 1980s wrestlers.”

They said in selecting current pop culture figures, neither of them had a clue which celebrities 19-year-olds think are “hot.” Farber says, “We were like Arianna Grande or Selena Gomez? Let me text message my cousin.” They cleverly settled this by seeing who had the most followers on Instagram. (It was Selena Gomez.)

Wilson describes Galactic Sneeze products as “super fun and simple —you understand them in just a couple of seconds.” With a mission to create “contagious concepts,” or fun “ideas that get stuck in your head,” Galactic Sneeze’s upcoming projects include collectible digital toys, a Schmovie App (available Summer 2017) and a Spank the Yeti geek-themed expansion pack, and possibly a 1980s- or 1990s-themed pack.

Producing humorous games requiring quick thinking and sly wit, Galactic Sneeze is contagiously fun.