For media interviews and/or for more information contact: Chris Crouch, Candle Games - (03) 9419 5137

Interview By Bronwyn Thompson - Rolling Stone Magazine

Interview By Craig Mathieson - The Age Newspaper

Interview By Clem Bastow - Inpress Magazine

Interview By Paul Ryan

Interview By Andrew Tijs

	Interview By Bronwyn Thompson - Rolling Stone Magazine Interview By Bronwyn Thompson Indie record label boss and owner of Polyester Records in Melbourne, Chris Crouch has entered new territory, creating the new boardgame, World Domination. Based loosely on Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly, players race around the “world” and answer trivia questions that relate to the region they land on – but instead of hotels on Park Lane or some coloured pieces of pie, players vie for ownership of the entire continent. “People love trivia and I think the timing is right for a new trivia game,” explains Crouch, who originally penned questions for the game in 1987. It’s since been updated by Sydney Morning Herald writer and complier of the Aussie edition of Trivial Pursuit, Bruce Elder, who assembled the 2820 new Q’s. “Luck and strategy play a big part, so the trivia buff doesn’t always win. People have played the game four times and lost big-time, but on the fifth time they’ve achieved ‘World Domination’.” Driven by a childhood immersed in board games, Crouch formed a prototype for a travel-trivia game when he was 15. Now 33, he’s just seen 5000 copies of his creation hit the shelves. And while the nation has no shortage of classics available, Australia is yet to have an overseas boardgame hits. “ If the game goes well, I plan on taking it overseas due to the fact that it’s a global travel game,” he says.
	Interview By Craig Mathieson - The Age Newspaper Interview By Craig Mathieson As board games go, it's an Ingmar Bergman moment. Eighteen years after he first had the idea, Chris Crouch is sitting in a cafe in Fitzroy, a virgin copy of World Domination just off the production line and laid out in front of him. He has watched other people roll the dice and answer questions as a means of fine-tuning the gameplay for years. Now Crouch is playing his own creation with The Age as his opponent. And he's losing. Not that the 33-year-old record-store owner of Polyester Record is bothered. I correctly answer an "Asian" question: "Which Philippine movie star became his country's most popular president until he resigned amid allegations of corruption in 2001 - Joseph Estrada." This enables me to earn money and buy the region. Yet Crouch's hands excitedly flick over the game's playing pieces and he smiles broadly when we discuss successful strategies. Despite the growth of electronic games consoles and DVDs, board games remain a staple of family life. Poke around most houses and you'll find a few in the back of a cupboard, particularly the four monoliths that have come to symbolise the successive modern eras of the industry: Scrabble, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary. A good board game transcends all barriers. Crouch grew up in Gippsland, the second of three sons, and he got an early indoctrination. Board games were a way for the family to compete. At 15, Crouch started to tinker with some old favourites. He came up with four-player chess ("but I could never find three friends willing to play it with me"), a stockmarket game and one based on the top-40 music chart. But his lasting idea was a hybrid of two classics. "I came up with the concept of combining the best bits of Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly," he says. "I enjoyed the former, but after a while you're just playing for bits of plastic. I wondered what the biggest thing you could play for was. Buying the world seemed to be the answer." Crouch wrote to the then leading board-game makers, including Parker Bros and Mattel, which declined. World Domination is still basically what he offered back then: "Five continents, travel the world, answer questions, get money, buy the world." Crouch is persistent. As well as his record store, he also has his own independent music label, Candle Records. "Half the thing about achievement is just doing it. If I've got an idea, I'll do it." Crouch refined the game at university and afterwards into the 1990s, creating handmade prototypes with cardboard and textas. But it wasn't until 2002 that he decided to forge ahead no matter what. With Sydney Morning Herald music critic Bruce Elder, who'd written for the Australian edition of Trivial Pursuit, he came up with 2820 questions and went back out to the marketplace. Crouch found that the board-game industry was even more weighted in favour of the big companies than was the music business. Their preferred business model is to repackage heavyweight titles (hence Star Wars Monopoly), with only a few new titles from overseas released each year. It's been more than four decades since Bob Lloyd created the best-known Australian board game, Squatter. Little has followed since. "I decided that the achievement was not selling the game, but getting it made," he says. "I'd never tell one of my bands to sign to a major label and so I decided to do the same with the game." Crouch arranged for Henderson McPherson, one of the last manufacturers left in Australia - most production has gone overseas - to produce a minimum run of 5000 copies for his own company. His younger brother Jason did the retro-flavoured artwork, his girlfriend helped him bag up 5000 sets of dice and playing tokens (chunky jet planes) and he organised warehousing and independent distributors in Melbourne and Sydney, as well as sales on the internet. It went on sale this week, for $70. There's no profit margin. "I'm breaking even," says Crouch, "but I'm just relieved that it's out. When I got my first copy, a friend said, 'It looks like a real board game,' and that was the biggest compliment I could have asked for." We have been playing for an hour in the cafe. Our game ends when Crouch lands on Europe, a continent I've already bought, and fails to answer the question: "Who invented the first printing press and then printed The Bible?" The correct answer, of course, is Johannes Gutenberg. The fine he has to pay me bankrupts him. But he's the happiest loser you've ever seen. "My work is done," he says. "Hopefully one day I'll go to a house of someone I've never met before and underneath their magazine rack I'll see a pile of battered old board games, and World Domination will be one of them."
	Interview By Clem Bastow - Inpress Magazine Interview By Clem Bastow “What are you two doing, eh”, asks the waitress, incredulously, “playing games? Oh-kaay…” She backs away slowly. She’s probably right to be a little bemused; it’s a rainy morning in Brunswick Street and Candle Records boss Chris Crouch and I are playing a board game on top of her restaurant’s table. The reason? Chris has devised and produced his own board game, World Domination, and is preparing to present it to the public. “When you call something World Domination, people expect big things, but coming from candle it’s pretty low key as well!” he laughs, but, low key or not, the very fact that World Domination will make it onto shelves is ‘big things’ enough. Consider how many new board games you see every year, locally – even if you subscribe to the Milton Bradley newsletter, the answer is probably ‘not a lot.’ It’s a fact Chris is acutely aware of. “Yeah, and I’m doing this myself, which is even rarer. Most of the big games are (put out) by big international companies, so there’s usually two or three made locally. They do well for maybe two or three years, but if you try to think of a famous Australian board game…” I think for a long moment before offering that dusty holiday house staple, the much-maligned Squatter. “Everyone says that! That’s one game I never played,” cackles Chris, going on to note that the little ‘sheeps’ in the board game always ended up in the carpet. Hopefully no such fate will befall World Domination colourful little ‘private jets’ (much classier than a die-cast wheelbarrow). Chris hopes to have made an enduring Australian board game, and judging from our brief but spirited play-off in Joe’s Garage, he could well be onto a winner. World Domination combines elements of Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly in an altogether more novel way. “It’s like Trivial Pursuit, but it’s with money. So, as you get questions right, you get money – and if you get enough money you can buy the world!” explains Chris. The board is split into five colour-coded regions – Australasia, Asia, Africa, Americas and Europe – that you can buy as soon as you’ve answered ten of the related questions correctly, thus providing you with the cash to do so. The trivia cards are also colour coded, so that if you land on Australasia (green), your opponent asks you the ‘green’ question. There are also yellow general knowledge questions that pop up on the ‘borders’ between regions. “With the questions, the hint comes from the region you’re in – so if you’ve landed on Europe, that’s the hint – but it could be a sport, politics or Hey Dad question.” The question concept was devised by Chris and then worked on with his friend Bruce Elder. “Bruce is a friend of mine who is a Sydney Morning Herald journalist and writes all the questions for the Australian version of Trivial Pursuit. I told him about my idea a few years ago and asked him what did he think and he just loved it. So I said, ‘if you love it so much, can you write the questions for it’!” Elder wrotearound ninety percent of questions, which range from the simple (Q. Who directed Mad Max? A: George Miller) to the perplexing (Q: What name is given to the offspring of a male tiger and a female lion? A: A tigon). Chris even managed to print a questions that he’s guaranteed to answer correctly – “There is one Candle Records question, yeah. I snuck one in,” he giggles conspiratorially. Even though some of the questions stumped both of us (and even though Chris was first to buy a region, dammit) what was most exciting about World Domination is the ‘anyone’s game’ element. “It’s a game of luck and chance, because you can’t trade in this,” explains Chris. “that’s the thing about Monopoly; if you’ve got a friend you can sweet talk them into deals. And with Trivial Pursuit, the smartest wins; with this, there’s a luck factor and a bit of a race, like if you get to Asia before I do. You don’t have to know everything about Africa to still win the game. Africa is quite hard because usually Australians only know about five things in Africa. One of the briefs I gave Bruce was that I wanted there to be as much popular culture as possible, so once we got ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’ in there…” Once the game is launched, Chris is happy to let it go forth and prosper; he’s happy just to have brought his long-held dream to fruition. “At this stage I just want feedback, I’m not concerned about selling out the whole 5000. I’m just excited about one day walking into a house of someone I don’t know and seeing they’ve got the game.” Is he expecting Candle Records fans – notorious completists amongst the Australian indie records scene – to snap up the games (which come with a free Candle travel songs sampler CD)? Chris laughs knowingly. “I hope so – they probably will initially – but I had to get five thousand done and not many of our records sell five thousand copies!”
	Interview By Paul Ryan Interview By Paul Ryan Do you detest the stench of sweat? Does running in circles or chasing a ball around seem rather pointless to you? Perhaps your idea of sport demands little more than a keen competitive streak and sturdy wrists for tossing dice and counting money. The last Australian board game to rouse the public imagination was Squatter, more than 40 years ago. It’s certainly been a lean time for backyard barons and matinee magnates. But now there’s a new offering with the potential to lure people back to the original battleground of virtual reality. World Domination was developed by Melbourne record store owner, Chris Crouch, 18 years after originally devising the concept. The game doesn’t involve professors or finely tuned athletes, but it does manage to turn megalomania into both a sport and a science. It’s been described as a hybrid of Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit – on steroids. “I’ve always loved trivia games, but in the end you’re just playing for bits of plastic,” says Crouch. “When I came up with the idea, I asked myself, ‘What’s the biggest thing you can play for?’ I went with the logical extension of buying the world.” Players of World Domination work their way around the board (world) answering topical trivia questions for money. Regions must be bought, then held, and the winner is the player who avoids bankruptcy. “Board games shouldn’t take themselves too seriously,” says Crouch. “When I approached a few game companies, they said that it was beyond people’s imagination to buy continents. But surely it’s also beyond people’s imagination to buy railway stations. Board games require a suspension of disbelief.” Online sales of the game have been brisk, with some interest from overseas. “Judging by the feedback, there are a lot of intelligent capitalists out there who find this game appealing,” says Crouch. “There’s trivia and there’s money. It brings out that competitive urge."
	Interview By Andrew Tijs Interview By Andrw Tijs Nerds unite! From Hungry Hungry Hippos to Connect Four, no matter how many computer games flood the market, nothing can beat the visceral, social zing of playing board games. Now Chris from Candle Records has invented the ultimate trivia game, naturally called World Domination. I am a not-so-closet board game nerd. When I was a kid, I would alleviate boredom by trawling through Trivial Pursuit cards. I kicked ass at Pictionary, was so-so in Scrabble and seemed to never win Kerplunk. But most new games coming out just don’t match up to the classics. That is, until Chris finally bit the bullet and lived out every kids dream: selling himself into hock to produce World Domination – a perfect blend of the megalomaniac leanings of Monopoly and the classic brainbending of Trivial Pursuit. Sitting down to play the game in a café, the box looks surprisingly like Trivial Pursuit. “There’s only a couple of different formats for board games,” Chris says of the only company that makes them in this country. Alongside the typical board and trivia cards, Chris went out and sourced all the little planes used as playing pieces and spent “months of nights sitting in front of the TV stuffing them into bags.” In World Domination, you travel around a hexagonal board, each side representing a continent. There’s little use for Antarctica as questions are all specific to the continent you’re visiting. This can give a slight hint but the 3000-plus questions aren’t child’s play. Trivial Pursuit question writer for Australia, Bruce Elder, has made sure that the game requires a broad knowledge of all parts of the globe. But he still keeps it trivial: I mean, what’s the name of Cartman’s pig in Southpark? Rewards for correct answers aren’t insignificant pieces of pie (or cheese or cake or whatever you called them in your household) but cold hard cash, in whopping denominations. It certainly beats Monopoly when you get to shell out millions for continents, rather than buying a ramshackle hotel on Old Kent Road. World Domination is a slap-yourself-in-the-forehead-for-not-thinking-of-it-first idea. The play is random enough to keep it interesting, but not so much as to make it roulette. It rewards those that fill their brains with insignificant nuggets of trivia, yet also allows junior tycoons to indulge their despotic tendencies. And it follows the golden Tetris rule of gameplay: Keep It Simple. The genius of this game shines through when $1.5 million, and the incipient sale of Australasia, rests on Chris’ ability to dredge up the name of the actress who plays Phoebe Buffet in Friends. “Ah, I can get Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston straight off,” Chris winces and has a flat-out mental block. Nope, it’s Lisa Kudrow! Fork it over. “I’m not going to play with writers ever again after today,” Chris laughs, “Lisa bloody Kudrow.” Chris has managed to get World Domination trademarked for Australia (John Howard must be seething) and is considering going international with it. “I really happy getting it released and people playing it outside my family and friends,” he says. “If it goes well, so be it. I’m just happy that it’s out and it looks good and it plays well and people are enjoying it.” If only world domination could be achieved by smarts, rather than money or birthright (that is, if remembering Eric The Eel’s surname is a barometer of intelligence). Then us nerds would triumph! Barry Jones would be Prime Minister! But for now we can rule the world in our lounge rooms or the nearest bar. Either way, Chris didn’t need to let me win with $9.15 million and three continents to get a rave review. Of course I’m going to think the game is the business; I have achieved World Domination!!!!