{"id":61229,"date":"2019-02-13T14:00:06","date_gmt":"2019-02-13T14:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/?p=61229"},"modified":"2019-02-13T14:00:06","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T14:00:06","slug":"rats-to-riches-interview-with-entrepreneur-eugene-lim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/2019\/02\/13\/rats-to-riches-interview-with-entrepreneur-eugene-lim\/","title":{"rendered":"Rats to riches: interview with entrepreneur Eugene Lim"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rats to Riches<\/a> is a finance strategy board game. It featured in the London Toy Fair, caused a mini-viral sensation in the UK\u2019s board game community, and it was invented by a guy I met in my first year. Eugene and I met at a society social, and throughout my course, I witnessed his game grow from a modest student beta test into a huge startup success all on my Facebook feed. In the past two years, I began growing a fascination with how a normal, full-time university student could create something so… complete. From conceptualising and designing a game, making the tokens and cards, and actually having people who want to buy and play it. How did Eugene do it? What had happened in between the time we met at the single social to when he was suddenly giving Ted talks about his game?<\/p>\n

I sat down with Eugene at the Bright Building. It\u2019s an open space floor plan and professionals with lanyards are brainstorming over coffee, and it\u2019s all very impressive. \u201cIt\u2019s actually not part of the University. It\u2019s just a random building for start-ups. My office is actually just around there,\u201d he points around a bend while we\u2019re walking to a table. I learned that Eugene actually earned his office space through an accelerated start-up program provided by the Entrepreneurship Society at the University. But by that the time he applied for the program, he had already begun work on a board game.<\/p>\n

The story starts when Eugene is volunteering with Enactors, teaching secondary school students in Manchester about economics. But early in, Eugene noticed that there were often consistency problems. During the exam season, volunteers could not commit to the hours, leaving Enactors short-staffed. \u201cI wanted to make a board game that could teach economics even if we weren\u2019t there.\u201d It made sense; Eugene already found that volunteers needed to make games out of complex concepts like interest rates, lending, trading.<\/p>\n

With just a humble idea began the steep learning curve at the beginning of Eugene\u2019s second year. Youtube videos of board game reviews and of game design were a must for someone who had never played much more than Monopoly. Eugene also became invested in gaining knowledge through the board game community. He would show up to board game events he found on meetup.com with scraps of paper so people could test his proto-game, catalysing incremental steps of feedback and the product design of Rats to Riches.<\/p>\n

Whilst talking to him, it was clear a lot of this feedback wasn\u2019t always easy to hear. Criticisms of an early version of Rats to Riches at a game developer meeting was particularly harsh, \u201cYeah, they just ripped my game apart. \u2018It\u2019s too convoluted. There\u2019s no element of luck or skill. The game plays the player etc. etc. They basically told me my game was shit\u2026But that just made me want to prove them wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rats to Riches was already in the throes of intense development when Eugene was chosen by the start-up program. With that, he suddenly had \u00a31500, an office, and a mentor network program to support him. \u201cI had no idea what to spend the money on. This board game takes like, what, \u00a32 to produce? It\u2019s just cards and tokens.\u201d So, rationally, Eugene decided to make 1000 sets of Rats to Riches Beta (yes, he prints the word \u2018BETA\u2019 on the box).<\/p>\n

He uses these sets to test the game with students and friends, but even late iterations of it were heavily criticised. 10 minutes of gameplay with one of his lecturers ended with a damning face-to-face review. \u201cIt was true. He told me that my game was too confusing, that it should be simple like chess, which only has six pieces but can interact in really complex ways. But it was hard. I realised that to incorporate his advice, Rats to Riches would look completely different to what I already had made.\u201d In a move that speaks volumes about Eugene\u2019s devotion to improvement, he did end up scrapping main elements of his game to design it from the ground up.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it wasn\u2019t easy. I know when I\u2019m telling it to you, it just sounds really fast. But it really wasn\u2019t.\u201d Early on, Eugene was putting in 13-15 hours of work a day, and his mental health began to deteriorate. \u201cYou just try so hard to make something out of nothing. And you\u2019re just so aware all the time that it could so easily go back into nothing.\u201d But something was born out of nothing. Using the remaining sets of Rats to Riches Beta, Eugene and one of his course mates began launching huge social media campaigns, asking board game savvy influencers to test their game and say their thoughts. Soon, Rats to Riches was a mini-sensation on Instagram.<\/p>\n

Eugene was eventually invited to a meeting in Liverpool with Accentuate<\/a>, a company that stocks board games in huge distributors like John Lewis and is backed by Dragons\u2019 Den investor Peter Jones. \u201cI just thought they wanted to talk. But I arrived and everyone was wearing suits while I just had a t-shirt and jeans on.\u201d Accentuate had booked out the entire floor of a restaurant, and as Eugene sat down to dinner, they revealed that they wanted to buy the licenses to sell Rats to Riches. \u201cI just remember listening to all of this and going, \u2018No.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But eventually, with some more time to process their offer and iron out the exact terms, Eugene decided to partner with Accentuate. His board game will be sold all across the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Science Editor Jacklin Kwan interviews Eugene Lim, the founder of Rats to Riches, a strategy board game, about his journey in making the product and the creative challenges he faced along the way. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1832,"featured_media":61433,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[24779,8498,24780,3987,164,24583],"coauthors":[22197],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61229"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1832"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61229"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=61229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}