Meet the Nigerian board game creator trying to change an industry
Meet the Nigerian board game creator trying to change an industry
Meet the Nigerian board game creator trying to change an industry
By Aisha Salaudeen
September 22, 2021
Summary
In a country that loves games such as chess and Scrabble - even fielding a world champion Scrabble team - Ogbuagu noticed a lack of Nigerian-made games.
With nothing to do, "Eventually, we started playing tabletop games." At the time, he was not sure how to create games, so he used cardboard, stones, and dice from an old Ludo game to make a dice rolling and card drafting game for him and his friends.
Creating made-in-Nigeria games In 2016, a few years after making his first game, Ogbuagu founded a game production publishing company called NIBCARD, which focuses on tabletop games such as board and card games.
"As players are jumping from country to country trying to win the game, they are forced to learn new countries that they probably have never heard of." Nigeria's tabletop gaming industry According to a report in Dicebreaker, a publication focused on tabletop games, the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown period renewed interest in games and increased the sales of board games in places like the US and UK. In the same year, tabletop games successfully raised $236.6 million on Kickstarter, accounting for nearly a third of all the money made on the crowd-sourcing platform in 2020.
"Many Nigerians don't have access to information about where to get games made in the country. There is also no access to tabletop games cafes and other value chains surrounding these games," he explains.
"The cafe is just a space filled with games. People can come there to play," he says, with 60 Nigerian-made board games and another 300 non-Nigerian games.
"We stock games from other people too." "Hut Alive," created by Ogbuagu in 2017, is an elimination card game for up to six players.
Reference
Salaudeen, A. (2021, September 22). Meet the Nigerian board game creator trying to change an industry. Retrieved November 11, 2021, from https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/22/africa/nigeria-ogbuagu-board-game-creator-spc-intl/index.html