This made-in-North Bay board game pits players in a race across North America

After five years of fine-tuning and polishing, Éric Boutilier, of North Bay, Ont., is releasing his first board game.

“So try to imagine Snakes and Ladders meets The Amazing Race,” he said.

In Tripped, up to eight players race to be the first to visit six cities on a map of North America. 

Different cards can help players speed up their own progress or slow down their opponents with things like flight cancellations and various natural disasters.

To make his idea a reality, Boutilier teamed up with Mark Sherry, a veteran game designer, also from North Bay, who created a card game called The Game of Things that has gone on to sell five million copies since it was first released in 2002.

Éric Boutilier, left, and Mark Sherry, right, worked on Tripped for five years to fine-tune the game for its official release on Nov. 12. (Submitted by Mark Sherry)

“I thought Éric was on to something because the game had really good gameplay,” Sherry said, recalling their first meeting at a local restaurant.

“And like most games, it needed to be polished.”

Over the next five years, they redesigned the game three times, and changed the name as many times as well.

On Nov. 12, Tripped will be available on the online crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, which has become a popular place for board game creators to launch their new products, or to raise the funds needed to get them off the ground.

Sherry says the website has changed the industry.

When he made the Game of Things more than 20 years ago, Kickstarter didn’t exist.

“We basically went to family and friends to raise our first funds and we made our first 500 games with our children around the dining room table,” he said.

“Now, if you have a great idea, you can put it on Kickstarter and people will pay you to actually make the game. And so you’ll see a lot more of that happening.”

Sherry says that has made the board game industry more competitive with a lot more games on the market.

In Tripped players race to visit six North American cities as they get in each others’ way with cards that can slow down progress. (Submitted by Mark Sherry)

Tripped will launch on Kickstarter as a complete game, though, and will cost $70 to purchase an early copy.

Sherry says there’s a special incentive for people from northern Ontario to purchase an early copy because both North Bay and Sudbury are featured as cities players can visit on the map.

“The next map, we may mix it up again,” he said.

Boutilier says they held an online poll to decide which northern Ontario city should be featured in the game.

“The demand was just just [so] incredible from both sides that we just decided that it would be wrong to have one city and not the other on the map. So we decided to include both,” he said.

Boutilier says Tripped will only be available to purchase on Kickstarter at first, but if it does well it could show up in retail stores in the future.

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Publish date : 2024-11-10 21:00:00

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