My day job is in marketing.

That means 25 years in marketing.

As such, I’ve heard many times about “guerilla marketing”. As you’ll see on Wikipedia, “Guerilla Marketing is an advertisement strategy in which a company uses surprise and/or unconventional interactions in order to promote a product or service.”

So when I saw the game Gorilla Marketing, designed by Adam Wyse and published by Roxley Games, I couldn’t wait to give it a try!

We’ve loved all the Roxley Games we’ve played (Santorini, Steampunk Rally, Dice Throne) and a couple of years ago at SaltCon, I met and played games with Adam — including one of the games he designed, Head of Mousehold.

That’s why I was excited to play Gorilla Marketing. And I was especially excited to play with my Marketing team at work. But as luck would have it, the game arrived the very day we all started working from home because of COVID. Major bummer – no more lunch break games of any sort at the office.

But that wouldn’t deter me from giving it a shot with my family.

And I’m so glad I did — because it’s been an absolute hoot!

We have yet to play a game without busting a gut laughing. And we have yet to stop playing after just one game. There’s just too much fun to be had!

 

How to play Gorilla Marketing

The premise behind Gorilla Marketing is that you’re at a marketing agency in trouble. So the CEO replaces the marketing department with gorillas — because they could come up with better results.

Players create ridiculous names and marketing tag lines for products, movies, bands, companies, and more — and then dish out awards.

The game is played over 2 rounds:

• In the first round, players name the thing.
• In the second round, players make up a tag line for it.

To begin, players first chose the theme of categories they want to play and set that leaflet in the center of the table. They can choose from Products, Companies, Organizations, Movies, Bands, College Courses, or Food Trucks.

Then each player takes a dry-erase marker and booklet and they’re ready to go.

One at a time, players draw a die from the bag, roll it, and then match up the result with a category on the chosen leaflet. They write that category at the top of their booklet then pass their booklet to the left. (Each theme has 28 possible categories on it.)

For example, if playing the Movie theme, players may get categories like Spy Thriller, Musical, Action, Sports, Anime, Kids, Sequel, Dance Movie, or even Courtroom Drama.

To begin Round 1, the first player draws dice from the bag one by one and rolls them for a result. They stop rolling if there are 2 red results or 4 total dice.

Then each player opens the booklet they now have to a blank page and makes up the Name of the thing using the letters rolled — in the order they were rolled. For example, if the letters rolled were T, W, B, all players make up a Name using those letters as the acronym. Like “Tonight We Battle” for the Courtroom Drama or “Tainted Water Bottles” for a Sports movie.

Then they place an X on the tab and pass the booklet to the left.

Another player then draws and rolls dice from the bag and everyone writes another Name for the category of the booklet they now hold.

After the booklets make their way back to the original player, it’s time to give Awards.

The first player draws 2 dice from the bag and rolls them. They line up the first result with the list of Awards on the left and the second result with the list on the right. Then they choose one of those to be the Award for the Names in their booklet and begin reading the Names in their booklet.

After the laughter dies down, they choose the winning Name and award a banana to the player that wrote it. They also now write that name on the cover of their booklet.

In Round 2, the gameplay flows just like in Round 1, but instead of Names, they’re now making up marketing taglines for the named thing on the booklets.

Likewise, the Awards are chosen in the same manner — but this time using the Awards list on the back of the theme leaflet. The Award categories for marketing taglines are things like Best Ad Featuring a Mascot, Loudest Commercial, Most Appealing to Seniors, Most Repeated Slogan, Least Money Spent, Most Effective Pop-up Ads, and plenty more.

After all awards are dished out from Round 2, the player with the most bananas is crowned the winner!

 

Can the whole family enjoy Gorilla Marketing?

Gorilla Marketing is a fantastic game for family and friends to play!

As long as you can read and write, you can play — and have a blast.

We know many people won’t think they’re creative enough to play Gorilla Marketing, or feel intimidated about coming up with creative names and taglines, but that should last just up until they actually start playing. In fact, some of the best winning choices are when players just come up with random words using the letters rolled on the dice.

And that’s because the winning names and taglines are based on the Award designation picked. Some responses may even seem bland at first. But as soon as you start looking at them based on a certain Award, they become hilarious.

For example, just think of how your choice of a Food Truck Name changes based on some of these Awards: Messiest Food, Largest Portions, Hardest to Chew, Most Truck Breakdowns, Worst for your Teeth, Most Weddings Catered.

It’s the combo of being forced to use the letters rolled and the random Awards that make for hilarious moments.

And because the booklets keep getting passed around, every entry for a category will have different letters to work with. For example, if the theme is Bands, you may be thinking of a Name for a Rock Band with the letters H, R, U, D while other players are using those letters to name a Kids Band, a Disco Band, a Barbershop Quartet, or a Choir.

Besides the hilarious outcomes, there are a number of other things we also really like about Gorilla Marketing. The first is that play is simultaneous. Everyone is writing in the booklets at the same time. The only time you take turns is when rolled for your initial category and when reading the results. So the game flows nicely.

We also like the reminders of the rounds and rules on the booklets themselves. Just open the game box, dish out the booklets, and play. There’s no need to consult the rule sheet at all.

Plus, while you wait for others to finish writing their ideas, you can read the funny quotes on your booklet. That’s a great little addition to the game. They aren’t just boring booklets.

And we love that up to 8 players can play. (Of course, we could also play with more people using the dry-erase booklets from a game like Telestrations too, but we haven’t done so yet.)

All that being said, we do have a couple of nit-pick with the game.

The first is that not all categories are family/kid-friendly. But those are very easily avoided by just rolling again if that’s the result. 99.9% are fine, but there’s the .1% that we wish would have been left off (thinking of you College Courses). If you’re playing with a group that doesn’t mind such, those types of responses will come out in what people write anyway.

The other thing we wish is that there were more Themes. With 7 Themes that each have 28 Categories on them, there’s definitely a ton of variety in the game that will last a very long time. But once our minds get wrapped up in playing, we also start thinking of other themes that could be awesome. Of course, there’s nothing stopping us from coming up with our own themes and categories. But it’s the combination of those with their associated Awards that make the game shine.

Those really are just a couple of minor items to point out. Overall, Gorilla Marketing is an awesome party game to play with any group!

 

How does Gorilla Marketing score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?

As you can already guess, Gorilla Marketing easily hits the top of our “let’s play again” game meter!

It’s too much fun to stop playing after just one game.

Just erase your booklets, grab another theme, and dive in again.

And it’s not just back-to-back plays that get the game scoring high on our “let’s play again” game meter. It’s that the game is going to be a regular game to grab for game nights.

When not left out on the kitchen table, Gorilla Marketing is front and center on our party game shelf — making it also easy to grab and go to play with friends (like our older boys have done a few times this summer).

We’re not recommending you just give it a try. Our recommendation is that you just straight up buy a copy of Gorilla Marketing and have fun!

And if you want to check out the promo video from Roxley, here you go:

We’d like to thank Roxley Games for a review copy of Gorilla Marketing.