Lunch group proclaims their game ready for the masses

Engineers marketing

By sandi carpello
Staff Writer

Lunch group proclaims their
game ready for the masses
By sandi carpello
Staff Writer


DAWNMARIE SANNWALDT The creators of Proclaim! play their game at the East Brunswick home of Raj Kittur Monday evening. From left, are Joe Pisano, Scott Sayers, Kittur and Bob Henderson.DAWNMARIE SANNWALDT The creators of Proclaim! play their game at the East Brunswick home of Raj Kittur Monday evening. From left, are Joe Pisano, Scott Sayers, Kittur and Bob Henderson.

EAST BRUNSWICK — Scott Sayers stares thoughtfully at the clue card. With a clever grin, he folds his arms and shivers, simulating coldness.

The clue is "house," he says.

He flips over the sand timer.

For 30 seconds, the four players are quiet.

"I proclaim," yells out Raj Kittur.

The word is "igloo," he says.

A good guess, but then again, he knows the game well. The game in question is Proclaim!: The Thoughtfully Ambiguous Word Association Game. Those playing it in Kittur’s East Brunswick house on this night — Kittur, Sayers of Jackson, Joe Pisano of Matawan, and Bob Henderson of Eatontown, are also its inventors.

Collectively, the group makes up Lunch Table Inc., the business they recently formed in order to manufacture and market their game, which is now being sold in some local stores and on the Internet.

The four engineers, who have been working together at a major telecommunications company in Middletown for more than a decade, came up with the board game over time during their lunch hour.

It all started several years ago when the employees received a memo from their company’s human resources department encouraging workers not to talk shop during lunch, but instead to have fun.

"We thought playing games while eating lunch would be a good start to having more fun at work," said Sayers, 40.

For months, coworkers crowded around the cafeteria tables, playing classic games such as Password and charades. The premise of Password, coupled with several twists and turns, led them to the concept of Proclaim.

"It kind of evolved as we went along," said Henderson, 42.

"The scoring process probably took the longest time to evolve," Sayers said.

The game itself is more challenging than it seems. For example, the answers all contain more than three letters, and different approaches can be used to give clues.

The game was played for years with a shopping bag full of "about a thousand" pieces of ripped-up paper, Henderson said.

Now, nine months after forming Lunch Table Inc. and years after deciding word games worked well during lunch, the board game now comes packaged with a 30-second sand timer, three dice, Proclaim! scoring cards, 10 game tokens and 1,000 word clues.

In contrast to other brain-teasing games where players can take turns that last several minutes or even hours, in Proclaim! the players are all playing all the time, Sayers said.

"The game is so flexible. Someone can leave, and the game can still go on," he said.

The game is for four to 10 players.

The goal of the game is to get around the perimeter of the cylinder-shaped game board.

The faster a player guesses the word, the quicker he moves. The more answers players get wrong, the more they regress.

"The main principle [of the game] is that the first clue is ambiguous," Sayers said.

Marketing, copywriting and packaging the game have cost the group approximately $60,000, which the men split four ways.

Saying it is unlike investing in stock, the members feel confident in their investment.

"This is something we can control," Pisano said.

After testing the game out on family members and several groups of friends, the men said they have found that Proclaim! appeals mostly to people ages 12 through adult.

However, Sayers said, the game can be played by younger children as well.

"My 8-year-old daughter played," said Sayers. "She didn’t get any special treatment, and she won."

"Proclaim! appeals more to the creative thinker," said Pisano.

The game was "a big hit" when introduced at a Nov. 14 Game Night for teenagers at the East Brunswick Library.

"They didn’t want to quit. We couldn’t get them out of there," said Kittur, who said his two teenage children love the game.

The game can be purchased for $27.95 at locations including Jackson Pharmacy in Jackson; The Reader’s Corner in the Route 18 Market, East Brunswick; or at The Game Room Store in the Freehold Raceway Mall, Freehold Township. It can also be purchased online by visiting www.proclaimgame.com.

"At the moment, we are introducing Proclaim! into the market at a local level, but we have plans to take this effort nationwide next year," Kittur said.