It is called Bubble Brain. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/22854

Good luck, try not to get sued over it.

Hi, Phil Harding the designer here.

Bubble Brain is certainly very similar but it has a different point: guessing which person wrote what caption. This deduction element is not part of my game.

I did a lot of research to try and find if any games like this had been released already, but did not come across Bubble Brain (probably because it doesn’t use the words ‘caption’ or ‘photo’ in it’s title or blurb). If I had, I may well have decided not to publish Caption If You Can!, because they are very similar. But now that I have pulled the trigger on my release, I do feel there is probably room for both games.

Furthermore, I think it is pretty clear that this game idea is more or less ‘public domain’. My press release even states that plenty of magazines and websites run similar sorts of games. However, many boxed party games are essentially versions of public domain games. The reason they succeed as products is because they conveniently package the game, and provide the most honed elements to play the game with. For example, Balderdash gives you hundreds of really funny words instead of having players use a dictionary. Or Time’s Up, which gives you well known personalities on cards instead of asking people to write their own. Getting a great list of good words and names in a handy card deck is essentially why people buy these games instead of playing their ‘parlour’ versions.

So the value of any ‘caption-writing’ style of game is going to be how well the product packages the idea, and primarily how good the photos are that it supplies. I have taken a long time to assemble a collection of photos that I think will work very well for players, and I realise this is essentially what people are buying (not the game idea itself). Plus they get some pencils, a pile of caption slips, an easy way of scoring with gems and a nice little box.

I hope this post clears up what I was trying to do with Caption If You Can!, and that any readers trust I wasn’t out to make a quick buck by copying Bubble Brain.

Thanks for reading!
Phil

Sounds very different to your other games Phil, I’ll be very interested to have a look!  Provided we’re both at the Aussie Games Expo in January, we’ll have to catch up!

Cheers,

Giles.