An SAT Game's Fast Start

In any new business, there can be a lot of hurry up and wait. For first-time game inventors, making it to market more often than not involves years of testing, tweaking and touting an idea to potential partners before anyone takes a chance on it. Then one day, something shifts, you're “discovered” and all anyone asks is that you rush, rush, rush to meet someone else's deadline. For the two founders of Ottawa, Canada's BE Company, makers of a new S.A.T. test prep board game, that rush has arrived.

BE Co. quietly launched its Test Prep U: S.A.T. Game in September exclusively at Amazon.com. It was the culmination of a four-and-a-half year effort. At last, Test Prep U was on shelves, and regardless that it was only one shelf at least it was one with reach and an audience receptive to a game about something as potentially dry and unentertaining as studying for the S.A.T. exam. But the story didn't end there. After sending the game to Wiley, publisher of the For Dummies book franchise, BE's Elsbeth Vaino and Bobbi Jaimet (pictured), are once again on the hamster wheel.

“We're on a really tight time line,” Jaimet told Playthings of BE's race to re-launch Test Prep U as the S.A.T. Game For Dummies. “Right now, we're working on 'dumbifying' the product—redesigning it, editing the content so there's a specific voice and tone to match the one used in all the For Dummies products, and re-branding it.”

Plans call for the re-named game to hit retail in mid-February 2008, just in time for the second half of the annual S.A.T. exam-taking season this spring. Manufacturing, in Michigan, will begin next month.

The S.A.T. game is the first in what's planned as a branded product line, Jaimet says, with the next versions most likely based on other standardized tests currently in use around the country, such as the PSAT or the ACT, followed by editions for the various post-graduate level entrance exams, like the GRE.