On Her Game
On a cold winter night in 2003, Kate Reiling T'09 and a group of friends were itching to play a game. Instead of reaching for the same old board games sitting on the shelf, however, they came up with one of their own: a charades-like competition in which players guessed the winning word, chosen from a dictionary, while a teammate built clues to the word with improvised props like Jenga blocks and glass beads. A games junkie since childhood, Reiling developed the game on her own over the next couple of years, collecting new props from surplus supply stores and refining the rules while playing with friends and family.
"The vast majority of people who played it said that they'd like to buy it and they'd recommend it to their friends," says Reiling. The feedback made her realize she had the seed of a successful business and helped set her on the path to Tuck, where she hoped to acquire the business skills to take it to market. The game, now known as Morphology, became Reiling's First-Year Project, a term-long, core curriculum course in which students tackle hands-on consulting or entrepreneurship projects.
Reiling refined her working prototype at Tuck, vetting the pieces, words, and rules through focus groups. She then built 15 prototypes to send to friends of friends and family around the country for more feedback. Last spring, the game's First-Year Project student team helped formulate a business plan and evaluated the feasibility of launching the game, then finally presented the project to a group of venture capitalists.
"It was a typical student presentation, but all of a sudden, these reviewers were sussing out whether they could be investors in her company," says Gregg Fairbrothers D'75, an adjunct professor of business administration at Tuck and advisor to Reiling. "The look on her face was priceless. I think the deal got a lot more serious after that in her mind."
Fairbrothers, founding director of the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network, was smitten by Reiling's presentation. After hearing it, he offered Reiling nearly twice her planned suggested retail price for a prototype.
This spring, Reiling had a manufacturer produce 1,000 copies of Morphology, which she is distributing herself in specialty retail stores and through online sales. The game includes scorecards, game pieces, word cards, die, and instructions.
"I really think this game has potential to be a great platform for future development," says Reiling. "One thing that's really interesting to me is how people could play it online and in other gaming platforms like Facebook, the iPhone, the Wii. I'm hoping it's the start of a career for me."
