Hogger Logger, a family-friendly card game, was created by three college graduates. In the break room of a local summer camp nearly seven years ago, a card game created by two friends quickly became something that hooked anyone who tried it.
Today, after three college graduations, two cross-country relocations and one successful Kickstarter crowdsourcing campaign, that card game, Hogger Logger, is being sold in more than 20 states.
It is a turn of events that co-designer Ryan Shapiro, 26, of Marlboro, said amazes him, given the game’s humble beginnings.
“After some toying around with a deck of cards, we came up with this idea of a game where you have to guess higher or lower,” Shapiro said. “When we showed it around to the other staff, it got to the point that every break, people would run to the table to play it.”
Hogger Logger, which was created in 2008, is a frenetic yet family-friendly card game for people of all ages. Players guess whether one of four face-down cards is higher or lower than the face-up card in front of them.
Correct guesses earn victory points. Guess wrong, however, and the next player gets his chance to guess with potentially fewer guesses needed to score a point.
What sets Hogger Logger apart from other “higher and lower” guessing games is that any player can change the face-up card by playing number cards or action cards from his hand.
Although Shapiro said he and his friend, Charlie Winkler, who co-created the game, often thought about turning the game into a sellable product, it wasn’t until 2012 when their fellow Freehold High School alum Shawn Duenas suggested they begin working to that end.
What followed was three years of workshopping the game at events across the country, leading the trio of fledgling game designers on a crash course of a business that has been around since the days of Candy Land and Monopoly.
“We were basically learning the entire industry because we really knew nothing about how to actually get a game to market,” Shapiro said.
According to Shapiro, Hogger Logger’s mix of guessing and card game mechanics resulted from constant tweaking and testing, which proved to be a more intensive process than expected.
“When you actually start showing the game to people and start playtesting, you realize there is a problem here, a problem there, and so you patch up those problems. But new problems happen,” Shapiro said. “You are in this constant cycle of trying to fix what is wrong while adding new things, but everything you add in could lead to something else going wrong.”
Two aspects of the game that did not need a whole lot of tweaking, Shapiro said, were its name and mascot, a lumberjack pig named Pork Chopper. For the name, Shapiro said the three friends found the Swedish translations of the words higher and lower — högre and lägre — sounded similar to hogger and logger.
“We kind of took those words and said, ‘Wouldn’t be cool if there was a hogger logger who was a lumberjack pig?’ And in the game, people would have to guess if it’s ‘hogger’ or ‘logger’ — higher or lower,” Shapiro said.
Once the mechanics of the game were set, the issue of funding had to be addressed. By that point, all three men had invested their own money into the project and the creation of their company, Hogger Logger LLC. To bring a game to market would require much more capital.
That is when the idea of using the Internet and crowdsourcing service Kickstarter came up.
“After going to various seminars and talking to people in the industry, it was clear that Kickstarter was the best way to do this,” Shapiro said.
The trio estimated they needed at least $10,000 to print the first batch of Hogger Logger games for potential backers and retail sale.
In a month, the Hogger Logger Kickstarter campaign raised $12,279 from nearly 350 “backers,” or investors, by promising physical copies of the game and other rewards.
About seven months after the Kickstarter campaign’s final day in September 2014, copies of Hogger Logger made their way to the investors and to stores.
With Hogger Logger now in the hands of gamers, Shapiro said he and his friends have a better grasp of the industry.
“It is definitely a process we will continue because you have these stores selling it and people buying it,” he said. “We certainly don’t expect to make money back overnight, but if you ask me again six months from now, I certainly hope I can say this was a success.”