Senior Blake Wunderli’s “Momination” board game began as a sweet gift to his mom for Mother’s Day, but, after his family fell in love with playing it, it has become much more. After being given support and encouragement from his mom and family, Wunderli was inspired to take the game to the next level and have it professionally produced.
Although Wunderli’s creativity has never previously gone so far as creating a professional board game, according to his mother, Kathy Wunderli, he has always created fun projects for the family to enjoy. Momination proved to be a new outlet for his imagination, and quickly became much more than a simple present.
“I was fortunate to receive the board game in its original, first form, which is a paper form, as a Mother’s Day gift for me. We played it as a family, and everyone just absolutely loved it,” Kathy Wunderli said. “We played it, we workshopped it a little bit, and [because] we realized that it was so much fun for our family, we thought that maybe we could really share it with a lot of other people and have it professionally produced to be a product on the market.”
The game has relatively standard objectives: make it to the end first, with movement based on dice rolling. The unique twist of the game comes from the cards players must pick up as they travel along the board.
“At certain points, you have to pick up either battle cards or mom cards. A battle card is a mini competition, like a thumb war or a rap battle. And then a mom card is something specific to mom. [For example,] it could tell you to say something nice about your mom, but most of them, we leave blank so that whoever buys it can fill it out about their own mom,” Blake Wunderli said.
“Momination” allows players to incorporate their own families’ inside jokes and details specific to their own mothers into the game, creating a highly individualized experience. The cards can also move players back, depending on how they perform in the mini challenges.
“On certain [places on the board], there are battle spots. You draw a card, and if you win the battle, you move forward. But then there’s also death matches, where you have to take a battle card, and if you lose, you go back to the start,” Blake Wunderli said.
For Wunderli, he hopes this year will mark the beginning of something big. After being lent $5,000 by his mother to get fully situated, Wunderli began by creating an official board and getting it into stores. Wunderli also used some of his budget to hire a professional designer to create the board’s layout. Each game set is priced at $49.99.
“I made [the game officially] available a couple of weeks ago. We’ve sold about 11 games, and we have put 10 games into a store called Card De A [in Riviera Village]. So we got some shelf space there,” Blake Wunderli said. “We want to prove that we can sell the game. Ideally, we’d like to break even this year, but we see ourselves next year taking it to the next level, getting it into bigger stores. We’ll probably redesign the game and tweak things based on feedback we receive this year.”
Although Kathy Munderli views “Momination” as a successful investment opportunity financially, she also profits from the experience and learning opportunities presented to her son as he navigates the trials and errors of running his own business.
“It was really fun to see someone who knows that they want to go into business learn about some of the details that you have to focus on when creating something from scratch, including hiring people, interviewing them and making sure that they get the work done,” Kathy Wunderli said. “I like to say that this investment in the game was also an investment in Blake learning and growing as an entrepreneur.”
