Party game Time’s Up! shifts over 3m units ahead of new edition

Civ-building card game 7 Wonders and its two-player spin-off 7 Wonders Duel have sold over 1.5 million copies combined, publisher Repos Production has revealed.

Antoine Bauza’s card-drafting Kennerspiel des Jahres winner was first released in 2010, and was followed by Bauza and Bruno Cathala’s slimmed-down two-player-only sequel five years later. 7 Wonders Duel was subsequently Recommended for the Kennerspiel des Jahres – the prestigious German ‘Expert Game of the Year’ prize.

The two games are among several Repos games to receive the Golden Pawn, a label bestowed by France’s Union of Board Game Publishers based on global sales that serves as hobby gaming’s answer to the music industry’s certification of bestselling gold, platinum and diamond albums.

7 Wonders – which Repos boldly claims “holds the distinction of winning more awards than any other board game in history” – was given the Platinum Pawn in recognition of shifting more than one million copies worldwide since 2010.

7 Wonders Duel, meanwhile, received the Double Golden Pawn for selling over 500,000 units in the last four years.

Outselling both games together by a factor of two is Time’s Up!, the 1999 twist on charades and Taboo that sees players describing famous figures across three rounds: one where they can say anything except the answer, one where they can only use a single word and a find round where no words at all are allowed. The game served as the inspiration for the more recent Kickstarter success Monikers.

Time’s Up! was given the Diamond Pawn for selling over three million copies around the globe, with the game’s UK distributor Asmodee UK saying that a new edition of the party game – which has received several expansions and spin-offs over the last 20 years – would be re-released ‘soon’.

Another cryptic guessing game to have hit its stride is Concept, the game of word association where players must give clues using icons on a board representing colour, texture and other simple elements. Having sold more than 750,000 copies since it debuted in 2013, Concept was given the Triple Golden Pawn.

The most recent game to make the cut was another party game based around word association. When I Dream blindfolds one player and has the rest of the group describe a dream card to them using single words, but some of the clue-givers are secretly working against them. The mix of word game and social deduction has sold over 100,000 units since 2016, making it eligible for the Silver Pawn alongside previous winner Celestia.

Other past Golden Pawn winners have included Wolfgang Kramer’s card game 6 nimmt! and dreamy deduction game Dixit – both of which have also sold over three million copies – million-sellers Quarto and Quoridor, Bruno Cathala’s tile-laying Spiel des Jahres winner Kingdomino – which has shifted over 750,000 copies since 2016 – and Colt Express, which joins Dr. Eureka in selling over 250,000 units around the world.

In the UK alone, symbol-matching hit Dobble was recently named the best-selling game of 2018, shifting more than a million copies in the country since it was released in 2011. In 2016, Amazon UK revealed that fruity Scrabble-a-like Bananagrams was the highest-selling game on the retail website since 2000, outselling the likes of Scrabble, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit – and Dobble.