Today we’d like to introduce you to Chip Brown.
Hi Chip, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My wife, three kids and I were at dinner at a restaurant in Mexico and my then 13-year-old daughter called our attention to all the other diners and how they were all staring at their phones. There was a group of a dozen college students on their spring break–none of them talking with each other–they were all fidgeting with their phones. Multiple families at various tables, the majority of them on their phones, and several young kids staring at their iPads. “You know, not every family has Walt Disney Imagineers as parents,” said my daughter, “Mom and Dad, you need to help other families get off their phones and learn to be present together in real life.”
Our family talked about how we always gamify our adventures together, whether we’re traveling and even in life’s mundane moments. Part of my wife Dana’s job as a Disney Imagineer is to keep theme park guests entertained while they wait in line for attractions, which is the majority of how guests spend their time in the parks. So, as a family, we began developing and playtesting tools to help families and friends get off their phones and relearn and practice interpersonal communication.
We knew we wanted something fun, rather than something that felt like a chore. We focused on “carrots, not sticks,” meaning whatever tool or resource could help people would be more effective as something they can move toward, rather than making it all about feeling bad about technology and social media, which is more about people posing and posting only their best moments, creating fake relationships and FOMO. And our “communication tool” should be familiar, easy-to-use, intuitive and “non-threatening.”
At the same time, we wanted to lean into and leverage society’s fixation on social media, and how people are already so used to sorting through such a massive barrage of information, all day, every day. In short, people needed help stimulating conversation in a fun, breezy way. Now, let’s look even further back in our origin story.
For the past 20 years, even before Dana and I had kids, whenever we’ve found ourselves on a road trip with friends or family, or killing time at the beach or fire pit, or stuck in long lines at a theme park or even boring places like the DMV, we’ve played this game we made up called THE RANK GAME. For example, we’d ask everyone to rank these four classic rock bands: The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin. Everybody has their own personal preference of favorite to least favorite, and it makes for really passionate “arguments” with various rationale. We made up hundreds of simple, everyday categories like the four seasons: Fall, Spring, Summer, Winter. Everyone has their own preferred order, and enjoys sharing why.
Way back in the late 90’s when a bunch of us friends were standing in a long line waiting for the grand opening of The Getty Center museum in Los Angeles, we added “gamification” to THE RANK GAME. It was kind of like the classic TV game show The Newlywed Game, where the couple had to guess each other’s answer to questions such as, “What color is your spouse’s toothbrush?” in order to demonstrate their knowledge of one another. This combination of sharing about yourself and learning about others while competing with one another was the recipe that has worked 100% of the time for 20 years now. That’s THE RANK GAME, which helps families and friends “TECH LESS & TALK MORE through the GAMIFICATION OF CONVERSATION.”
THE RANK GAME predates smart phones by over a decade. It doesn’t require electricity or learning long, convoluted rules. After constantly noticing people with their heads buried in their phones, and reading articles and research about the decline of personal human interaction, we created THE RANK GAME to give people something really fun to do that at the same time promotes interaction with one another, sometimes on a truly meaningful level. THE RANK GAME prompts personalities to come out and provides instant community–You just add people.
We prototyped, play tested and perfected THE RANK GAME into a “party game” so that anyone anywhere can play at anytime. THE RANK GAME was refined through gameplay thousands of times in the Northeast, South, Midwest and Western United States and in seven countries on four continents.
The excellent quality of our design, materials and production has leveraged the vast experience and relationships we’ve gained in our careers: Dana’s work as a Walt Disney Imagineer and Educator, and Chip’s work as a producer & publisher at Disney Studios and HarperCollins. Our kids did a lot of work on The Rank Game too.
After the success of The Rank Game, consumers and retailers asked us for more games and over the past six years, we’ve launched multiple award-winning, best-selling party games, card games strategy games, card games and playing card decks, including Toy-of-the-Year finalist Razor Deck playing cards.
Everything Storyastic creates helps people build relationships and improve interpersonal communication. All our games use “coop-etition,” meaning you compete but also cooperate to win. With Storyastic games, people need each other. We call our products “all-together games,” in part because they bring people together, but also because everyone plays all together at the same time–there’s not a lot of waiting around for your turn, or being way behind in points and believing you’ll never win.
We’ve found the perfect recipe to help people grow their relationships while having fun by leaning into every individual’s now normal ability to sort massive amounts of information, and their desire to be known and seen. And, also, their desire to compete, People love The Rank Game because they get to talk about themselves and what they like and don’t like, but in order to win points, they have to guess OTHER PEOPLE’s preferences. This naturally encourages and develops interpersonal communication skills and fosters authentic relationships.
THE RANK GAME is easy to play at home, on long car trips, on the beach, at a restaurant or bar…ANYWHERE! The game quickly gets us off our phones and TALKING with one another in eye-to-eye, real world gameplay. So, we get to know each other better.
THE RANK GAME is a really fun way to learn more about the people we feel we know already–our friends and family–and also is an outstanding way to make great conversation and “break the ice” at social gatherings and even work. It’s competitive, fun and really funny!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Storyastic has faced all the typical challenges of a start up, but we’re mostly grateful for our success because of overcoming two massive challenges:
Two months after our successful kickstarter, we launched at the massive, prestigious Toy Fair New York where The Rank Game was embraced by retailers. A couple weeks later, and for nearly the first two years of our company’s existence, our mission and message to help people build relationships in the real world was diametrically opposed by worldwide governmental mandates to practice “social distancing” and “shelter in place.”
So we engaged no sales reps for our first two years but still on our own personal efforts managed to have The Rank Game carried in over a thousand stores, and we had great success with offering the game direct to consumers because people trapped in their homes and apartments needed things to do. We even offered free downloadable “print & play” versions of The Rank Game including a “Quarintentional Relationships” (quarantine + relationships) pack. We also immediately began giving a portion of proceeds of every sale of The Rank Game away to first responders, service industry professionals and not-for-profit organizations on missions to help build family relationships. We still do that today.
Our second big challenge came just as we started to go into mass national retailers at scale. We had two huge containers full of products loaded onto a ship set to depart our factory town in China on April 9, 2025. On April 2, the new international tariffs were announced, to take effect on April 5, and only a few days later they ramped up even higher to take affect on April 9. Our cost of goods almost tripled in less than a week and we actually paid thousands of dollars to take our containers back off of the ship, where they sat in a warehouse for three more months, until there was temporary relief which brought the tariffs down to 30%, which was still three times the 10% tariff that was in place when we manufactured the games.
Unfortunately, in the two or three months while there was confusion and massive tariffs in place, our national retailers all bought as much inventory as they could from big, established suppliers such as Mattel and Lego. That is expected and wise, because they knew they needed “sure thing” products for the holiday season and through the next year while manufacturers all had to figure out their new supply chains. So, we got hit with higher tariffs, cancelled purchase orders and retail buyers who had already spent a year’s worth of their open-to-buy dollars, and had a year’s worth of inventory to sell through before they would even consider buying from a newer, small supplier. But we weathered through that challenge and are just now ramping back up the buying process with some of the world’s biggest retailers. And, all the while, we’ve fostered and maintained great relationships with our special toy and gift retailers, whom we love. These independent “mom and pop” stores are owned by some of the greatest people you’ll ever meet and they are truly the tastemakers that provide wonderful, high-quality, unique new games that create and sustain culture in our communities.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Storyastic makes high-quality tools and programs that help people reduce screen time and connect in the real world. To the average consumer, these appear as games which are super-fun, but they’re always built with something more intentional—to help people connect in the real world, improve their interpersonal communication skills and grow their relationships.
The Rank Game and Storyastic’s other games are very popular with consumers and retailers, but it’s especially exciting to see the unique, effective ways other organizations and institutions are improving their employee and constituency’s communication, collaboration and morale by using The Rank Game’s “gamification of conversation.”
* The Rank Game is used by business leaders and through corporate HR departments as a way to bring people together, to start meetings with something quick and fun, and they use the “Make My Own” pack to gamify determining and aligning corporate and departmental priorities. (Custom content decks and corporate branding also available.)
* The Rank Game is played in children’s hospitals and is sold in hospital gift shops, because it gives kids and patient visitors something light and relational to do.
* The Rank Game is played with patients of Alzheimer’s and dementia, because the right answer to every question is whatever the “ranker” says.
* The Rank Game is provided to incoming freshman at universities to help them engage with each other in real life instead of resorting to “checking their phone” during awkward new social situations.
* The Rank Game is played by international students and in diversity and inclusion programs, because it makes sharing easy, and because it creates “equity” in the social balance, as students take turns being the ranker and the guessers.
* The Rank Game is used in ESL (English as a Second Language) programs, because the “Everyday Life” and “Adulting” and “Leisure Time” topic cards (all included in the main game and also available as standalone “on-the-go” packs) are simple and easy to understand.
* The Rank Game is widely used by educators, for educational purposes as well as recreationally. Many schools, homeschool educators and parents buy The Rank Game in bulk at wholesale prices to gift The Rank Game to neighbors and friends.
* The Rank Game is played by fraternities and sororities to help break the ice, and help students put away their phones.
* The Rank Game is sent to donors of family-oriented not-for-profit organizations, as a way to thank and encourage their donors, while increasing affinity of their own brand.
What sets you apart from others?
Our components and designs are very high quality and my wife Dana and I both used our professional Disney backgrounds to inform product development and design, but one of our big differentiators is the IDEO development process I learned when I was publisher of a large HarperCollins imprint.
The IDEO process uniquely studies consumer in-store and in-home behavior to draw insights that inform product development. This process brought about the Swiffer—Consumers already had a broom, a mop and a vacuum, but studying those consumers’ behaviors revealed that people think the broom and mop are messy, and they hate fighting the vacuum cord and dragging the vacuum around all the corners. The Swiffer was an elegant, easy, intuitive solution to a problem no survey could uncover, and now it’s over $1 billion in sales year after year. The IDEO process also brought to market Schwinn’s multi-geared beach cruiser bikes. People of all ages wanted to peddle like they were 11 years old with the wind rushing through their hair, but they didn’t want to peddle so hard up hill, and at that point the only bikes with gears were souped-up Lance Armstrong racing bikes which were overkill for almost everybody. But the IDEO process taught Schwinn they just needed to put 7 speeds of gears on a basic beach cruiser bike.
The IDEO process also brought about technologies like the iPhone and the iPad and the Kindle. At HarperCollins, my judo move was to use the same process that took people away from physical books to e-books, to discover insights that would bring consumers back to physical books. With massive success from that, I had the training and confidence to use the IDEO process for all our product development. Storyastic doesn’t make games—we make community in a box. The Rank Game is a fun consumer game that leverages the same behaviors consumers are abusing on social media, but it’s also a complete relationship-building system that any leader or educator or parent can use to move a group of people through any narrative, together, in community. This produces community-owned or corporate-owned outcomes, all the while building and strengthening relationships and interpersonal communication.
What are you most proud brand wise?
The stories we hear from so many fans are so meaningful because when they express their gratitude, it’s easy to tell that they are actually describing the increased quality of their relationships. We’re grateful that The Rank Game and Storyastic products have such strong brand affinity, but it is much more meaningful and impactful to us that Storyastic is about THEIR stories. It is humbling to have the opportunity to help so many people excel at what they are designed to do—be in community, growing relationships.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
We’re happy to help people host The Rank Game in whatever community context they’re in. Just reach out to chip@storyastic.com and let’s connect!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://storyastic.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/storyastic/ and https://www.instagram.com/therankgame/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/storyastic/
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/chipbrown
- Twitter: https://x.com/Storyastic
- Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/storyastic
