Wacky, connected and clever, Cranium takes board games to a new level

Every week, a bunch of friends (who happen to slightly resemble the cast of "Friends") gather in Lincoln Davis' cool bachelor apartment with its abstract paintings, view of Seattle's Space Needle and blue leather couch. Usually, they watch the drama "Lost." But if it's a rerun, as it often is, they skip TV to play board games. Their favorite is Cranium.\nDeveloped eight years ago by two Microsoft stars who quit to become entrepreneurs, Cranium blends elements of Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit with word puzzles, sculpting, humming and charades. Cranium has won the Toy Industry Association's Toy-of-the-Year game award four out of the past five years, and along with a dozen sibling titles, has sold more than 15 million games in 10 languages and 30 countries. The privately held company won't reveal its actual revenue, but compares itself to Pyramid Breweries, which last year reported $50 million in sales. In the toy industry overall, unit sales are down 6 percent; for Cranium, unit sales are up 50 percent.\nSo are Cranium marriage proposals. The company knows of six guys who proposed using the Cranium game, several of them requesting, and receiving, customized game cards.\n"S--M--NTH-- W--L-- --O-- M--R--Y --E?" read the card special ordered in February by 20-year-old James Bates, of Tennessee, who gets multitasking bonus points for watching the Super Bowl while playing Cranium and popping one of life's most important questions. "There was hugging," he says, "and then we went on and played a couple more games."\nCranium is not just a lucky smorgasbord that happened to hit it big. Underneath the purple sculpting clay and wacky questions, there's a philosophy ("Everyone Can Shine"), the theories of intelligence developed by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, and an unlikely confluence of '90s venture capital, Dilbert cubicle backlash, and a couple of dads burned out on playing Candyland.\n"What Cranium did was it rewrote the rules," said Chris Byrne, aka The Toy Guy, who reviews toys for www.toyguy.com and other media. "Where board games fit into the adult world is their ability to foster communication and interaction. We're on the Internet, Blackberries, cell phones. But what's our face time? There's a warmth, a lightness from the interpersonal interaction that comes from Cranium. People are hungry for that kind of connectedness."\nAt the moment, in the bachelor apartment, something weird is going on. The card in play calls for someone from each team to act out silent clues, like charades.\nOne of Lincoln's friends, a tall, skinny guy in a baseball cap, puts his hands together as if in prayer. Another alternates reading from an imaginary book while knocking on a pretend door. The third guy jumps onto the blue leather couch and appears to do sets of rather provocative push-ups.\n"Pray!" someone yells. "Priest!" "Archdiocese!"\nNo, no, no, the actors shake their heads and keep praying, knocking, humping.\nMeanwhile, as sand streams through the timer, the guessing goes wild.\nThis is a Cranium Moment. Dating yupsters interacting with each other, laughing, bonding, high-fiving on an otherwise humdrum weekday night.\nIt's exactly what Richard Tait and Whit Alexander had in mind as they set out to make a better board game.\nCranium headquarters sprawls over two floors in an unremarkable building. Dilbert would not recognize the place. The rooms are painted lime green, sunflower yellow, tomato red, aquarium blue, accented with purple brains and designed to look, from above, like a Cranium game board.\nThe corner offices, with stunning views of Elliott Bay, are not reserved for the chief executives, but instead open to all employees as brownbag lounges and meeting rooms. The staff (about 100 including several in the United Kingdom and China) is young and hip: plastic retro eyewear, funky jewelry, groomed eyebrows. Their business cards sport fun titles: Head of the Hive (creates a buzz about products), Keeper of the Flame (publishing), Chief Cultural Attache (international division), Concierge (receptionist), Chief Culture Keeper (human resources), Edgar Allen P.O. (purchasing).\nFounders Tait and Alexander are, respectively, Grand Poo Bah and Chief Noodler. "We're yin and yang -- I love that our personalities blend," Tait said, describing each of their strengths in Cranium parlance. "I'm star performer and creative cat. He's datahead and word worm. If there's a problem, my solution is PowerPoint. His is Access. We think in different applications."\nTait's office is dominated by gumball machines, wind-up toys, brains in every shape and size, autographed sneakers of Michael Jordan, John Stockton, Karl Malone.\nAt 42, the Grand Poo Bah is spry and stylish. He has wild red tresses, a soul patch, a Nike cuff watch, an iTunes library with 47,000 songs, a wife and three young children, a touch of brogue from the Scottish homeland he left when he was 21. Every morning, first thing in the office, he phones Scotland to chat with mum.\nFrom his mother, Tait inherited a love for family togetherness; from his father, a pioneering spirit. "In Scotland, you do what your parents have done before you," Tait said. For generations, his relatives had served the Templeton family, his grandfather as a chauffeur. Tait's father was expected to become a household servant, but instead went his own way, eventually running the largest Polaroid manufacturing plant in Europe.\nEarly on, Tait was an entrepreneur, his mom constantly fielding phone calls from the parents of schoolboys who'd traded away their best Matchbox car for something Tait knew they wanted more.\nOn his paper route, the aroma of bacon fired his imagination. People buried in their newspapers, chomping on hot pastries called bacon butties. A Sunday Morning Moment. Why not deliver fresh bacon butties along with the newspaper? The idea was so successful, he hired other boys to help him with an expanded route.\nAfter earning a computer-science degree at Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University, Tait went to business school at Dartmouth, and from there, straight to Microsoft, where Bill Gates selected him employee of the year in 1994. Tait resigned in 1997 after a decade with the company. Remember the late-'90s dot-com frenzy? Venture capital swirled in the air. Tait itched to strike out on his own.\nWhat to do? For weeks, he pondered, sometimes padding around all day in his pajamas, dressing only before his wife, Karen, came home from work.\nThen, in what has become Cranium legend, he and Karen spent a rainy weekend playing board games with friends in the Hamptons. When it comes to Pictionary, the Taits have a psychic connection; he scribbles a squiggle, she yells, "MOUNT RUSHMORE!" Of course, they cleaned up. On to Scrabble. The other couple was so good, they'd posted previous high scores on their fridge. Again, no contest. Not much fun.\nOn the plane back, Tait thought: Why not make a game where everyone can shine? Where everyone can demonstrate their special talent and seem smart and funny in front of family and friends instead of feeling like an idiot?\nWhen Tait proposed the business idea to his Microsoft buddy, Alexander's first reaction: "You gotta be kidding. YOU can call my dad and tell him I left Microsoft to make a board game"