Our Back Story
Research and Development
Our business mantra is “Designed & Tested by Kiwi Kids for Kiwi Kids”.
This has been a huge part of our R&D process. Our family is blessed with great imagination, so the process of coming up with new fun car games and working through the development to perfection is enjoyable for everyone, and often something that we end up doing as we travel around New Zealand.
Our first travel game, Kiwi Car Bingo, was relatively simple to perfect. Our newer Kiwi Car Pairs game was a completely new style of game, not seen in the New Zealand game marketplace before. From the thought of playing cards in a car to how Kiwi Car Pairs could have different layers on complexity to appease different ages of children to keep them engaged, it took a fair bit of work to develop.
While we trying to find a new travel game to add to our range, Sam came up with a new idea, but struggled to figure out the rules and other mechanics.
After several months of musing on the details of how it would work, Chris woke up at 2AM one morning having sorted out the glitch in the game and wrote down the answer before he forgot it. He explained the game to Sam when he woke up and after some trialling, Kiwi Car Pairs was almost ready for the market.
While our original games were our starting point, it has been feedback from our customers that has helped us keep developing new travelling games. Many people told us a city edition of Bingo would be a great idea, especially for anyone regularly making the same trip across Auckland, for example.
When developing Kiwi Car Bingo CITY Edition, we needed to develop a quick turnaround game that could be played within 30 minutes to keep our children engaged on shorter journeys. Hence for Kiwi Car Bingo CITY, we changed to bigger pads and reduced the number of items to look for. We also made sure most items were mobile, like a police car or ambulance. That way the game isn’t the same each time you travel along the same roads, say driving to and from school, sports or shopping.
Finding a new sport to adapt to playing in the car took us to Basketball. Taking the principals of Basketball, we worked out how to create an interactive game, keeping our two boys busy. After 18 months, many road trips and various versions we finally settled on our new game. This game can be played on short or long road trips.
We believe we have created a new style of game that will change entertainment in the back seat this summer.
We now have five games to date, Kiwi Car Bingo, Kiwi Car Cricket, Kiwi Car Pairs, Kiwi Car Bingo CITY Edition and now Kiwi Car Basketball. See them on the Our Travel Games page. .
Our fifth game, Basketball, is just appearing in shops now ready for summer. After 18 months of many road trips to perfecting our Kiwi Car Basketball game.
Kiwi Car Basketball is a new way to play in the car, fully interactive, keeping your kids busy looking out their windows as they play each other.
We are all very excited!
