While designing Balloon Lagoon (a non-competitive game which allows kindergarten-age children to try each of four activities, including flipping frogs from a pond and spelling with the letters fished from a "word pond"), Cranium co-founder Whit Alexander and his team met an unforeseen challenge: The 30-second sand timer caused unexpected friction.
"One kid would take on the self-appointed task of being the sand-time watcher," Alexander recalled after watching children during a play-test one day. "And they'd be sitting there tapping the timer and going: 'Time's almost up! Time's almost up!' The trash-talking would start as soon as the timer went on. I said to the team, 'Well, we've done a great job of making the Your Time Is Almost Up game!'"
[Fortunately another designer hatched a solution: They simply "hid the time" by replacing the sand timer with a music box. The result? Instead of taunting one another, the children actually cheered each other on.]
Sources
The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 28, 2004, p. 52
