Board game created by former Purdue professor to receive update after 35 years

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. − A 35-year-old board game created by a Purdue professor is getting a makeover.

Ice-breaker game Personal Preference, the brainchild of Don Carlston, now an emeritus professor of psychology, needed an upgrade after all these years. Some 50 fans of the game helped Carlson with the reworking.

After finding himself displeased with games such as Scruples and Trivial Pursuit, Carlston decided four decades ago to turn his research on "person perception" into an ice-breaker game.

"It can be played by either a couple people (a minimum of two) or by a lot of people," Carlston said. "It's a game based on my research, which is called person perception, how we perceive other people, how we get to know (and) understand them...And the basic idea is that a...player in each round draws four cards from any of a number of different categories.

"And secretly ranks them from their favorite to their least favorite of those four things. And then other people attempt to guess what that rank order is."

The number of guesses other players get correct is the amount of spaces they move forward on the board, with the goal of guessing the most amount of rankings correctly.

Carlston retired from his more-than 33 year-long career at Purdue a few years ago. But in the 1980s, he decided to take his field of research and make it into a game.

"Person perception is a sub-area of a broader area of psychology known as social cognition," Carlston said. "And social cognition deals with how people's thoughts affect everyday life."

Over the past three decades, Personal Preference grew a bit dated, and became in need of an upgrade.

That is where both Carlston and over 50 of the game's biggest fans come in.

"The game is 35 years old, and people were still writing me regularly saying, 'Hey, you need to update this game. When's the new edition coming out? And if you're not gonna do it, can I do it?' And several of them were quite persistent."

Carlston further said that after he retired from Purdue, he finally decided to connect with some of these writers to collaborate on an updated version of the game. He further said that the COVID-19 pandemic carved out the time needed to get on Zoom calls with the volunteers to update the game.

Throughout the pandemic, work was done on the game to not necessarily update it but improve it, according to Carlston.

"(The volunteered fans) helped me choose the categories that we're using," Carlston said. "And the game is not just updated, it's actually improved, in that the original game had only four categories...but we redesigned the game so that it could be played with any four categories."

Carlston played a practice round of the updated Personal Preference game. The categories were of topics and ideas, and the four cards were "Executive Pardon" "Cryptozoology," "Aromatherapy." and "Humanism," The J&C were prompted to try to guess, of these four topics, the order of Carlston's most to least favorite.

Brief descriptions of each of the cards' main word are available at the bottom of every card, in case any clarifications are needed.

The J&C guessed Humanism, Cryptozoology, Executive Pardon and Aromatherapy. Two out of four were correct, with only the last two needing to be switched up.

Kickstarter campaign needed to mass produce game

According to Carlston, there are 10 manufactured prototypes of the updated game, but a Kickstarter goal is needed in order to be able to mass manufacture it.

"We're now in a position where we're getting the funding for our first big productions run during the month of May," Carlston said. "And if everything goes according to schedule, the game should be back in people's hands before Christmas. That's the goal.

"The Kickstarter goal is $25,000. And at the last time I looked, which was sometime earlier this morning, we were at $19,200 or something, with almost two weeks left to go in the Kickstarter...Initially, it probably won't be in stores. 35 years ago, it was available in all kinds of stores and sold hundreds and thousands of copies. But I'm self-producing it this time.

"And so the goal, initially, is to get it in the hands of the people who help with the Kickstarter — and then hope word spreads from there."

By Friday afternoon, the Kickstarter campaign had raised nearly $19,500 of the $25,000 goal.

Categories in the updated version of the game include Quotes & Sayings, Artwork & Photography, and more.

The future of Personal Preference, in addition to reaching its Kickstarter goal, hopefully includes a children's version of the game, according to Carlston.

"And actually we'd like to have a children's card deck," Carlston said. "Children can play with many of the cards that are in this. They don't know everything, but the kinds of things that kids like — cartoon characters and TV shows - those are all licensed. So basically, we're not in a position now to get permission to use all those. But we're hoping once the game is out, we can get those permissions and have a separate children's card set."