FARGO — Monopoly, Trivia Pursuit and Battleship. All famous board games that we've played over the years.
Now some young Fargo entrepreneurs hope their invention will get their original board game into the spotlight.
They will also be the first to tell you that this is not your grandma's board game.
"At the time, we were like, let's do it for fun. Then the idea started to grow from there," says Austin Foss, one of the inventors.
The three creators are college friends, who like many during the pandemic, played a lot of board games.
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Except the friends brainstormed and came up with a bucket list dream: their very own board game. It's called CULTivate.
Jenna Radtke, Austin Foss and Jake Sells all had some kind of creative role that sparked this game
"I think people in our age group are getting fatigued from all the screen time, whether it is working or school, or phones, it is nice to take a break once in a while," Radkte says.
The game uses a lot of sarcasm and humor surrounding charismatic cult leaders.
"We started play testing with our friends and they thought, 'this could be something,' and we thought so to, and we are all avid board gamers and were like this idea could actually go somewhere," Foss says.
The three started their own company, Pops and Bejou Games, and used Kickstarter to raise money for the project.
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The result blew them away. Instead of their $15,000 goal, crowd funding brought in just over $52,000 dollars .
"Super excited and confirmed for all of us that what we were doing is real and people are interested in," says Sells.
Next up is manufacturing and distributing the game.
1,500 people have already pre-ordered CULTivate and some game stores have agreed to carry it.
The young inventors work out of downtown Fargo's "Prairie Den," where they say they have received a lot of support from other entrepreneurs.
You can pre-order CULTivate here: https://cultivate.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
