Haley Horn (Questrom’19) and business partner Pierre Pellan show off the packaging design for their new game, Spillin’ Beans. Photo courtesy of Horn

Alumni

Alum Launches New Adult Party Game

Entrepreneur Haley Horn (Questrom’19) is raising money for raunchy, hilarious game Spillin’ Beans

Would you rather suck the big toe of the person on your right or French-kiss the person on your left? What is your most embarrassing moment in public? Who in the group is most likely to eat magic mushrooms in their cereal for breakfast?

These questions appear in Haley Horn’s raunchy new adult party game, which is set to be released this summer.

Horn (Questrom’19) and her business partner, Pierre Pellan, started a Kickstarter campaign on March 23 to raise money for the game’s launch. The project has been a labor of love for Horn and Pellan (who are also engaged), and Horn says they see the Kickstarter launch as an opportunity to bring their vision to life. 

The game has its roots in Horn’s time at Boston University. She developed the tabletop game along with her team in the Cross-Functional Core, or “Core”—a graduation requirement at the Questrom School of Business, where students work in groups across several courses to create a full-fledged business plan.

Finding and fleshing out this idea was, in part, thanks to one of Horn’s mentors, who she met through Innovate@BU’s Summer Accelerator program. This mentorship has been vital to all of her entrepreneurial projects, she says. 

She describes her time at Questrom and at the Summer Accelerator as instrumental in getting where she is today, both in her career and with the launch of Spillin’ Beans. 

“When it comes down to the business sense of how would I do this? or how would I create this model? I think it was extremely important that I had those types of classes,” she says. “I absolutely loved going to BU and graduating from Questrom. I think it definitely helped me prepare.” 

After graduation, Horn started a job as a customer experience solutions engineer at Oracle Commerce, but she knew she wanted to keep pursuing entrepreneurial projects. Using her research from the Core project as a springboard, she knew there was a gap in the market for a type of open-ended social party game you can play repeatedly. It wasn’t long before she and her fiancé were testing their new game on friends and family.

“We were like: we’re really onto something here,” Horn says. “People keep saying, ‘I’ve never played a game like this before—it’s so fun.’”

Spillin’ Beans is played with four or more players and comes with cards and a pot of fake beans. Cards have challenges for players with questions like, “Would you rather…?” or “Truth or dare…?” or “Who’s most likely to…?” and are purposely designed to get players laughing. The crude, comedic content of the cards will have friends knowing more about one another than they ever had (or maybe ever wanted). 

Players earn or lose beans for completing tasks or answering questions and can bet beans during the game’s trivia portion. Whoever has the most beans at the end wins.

Horn says she’s noticed that other adult party games require expansion packs to keep them interesting. She says she designed Spillin’ Beans to be different every time you play it, with open-ended cards and competitive bean-turnover. One of the expansion pack they’ll sell is the “Grandpa Approved” pack, which will allow fans of the game to open up the fun to the more innocent-minded. 

This pack, along with a prototype of the original game (they made about 400 of them), will be sent to backers of the Spillin’ Beans Kickstarter. For the past year, Horn and Pellan have been printing and cutting thousands of cards to put the games together.

They are hoping to reach $10,000 on Kickstarter, and they’re about two-thirds there. Horn says her goal for the launch is to make their backers feel like they’re really part of something. 

The Kickstarter launched with a monthlong virtual taco party. “Once you back us, you get invited into a Facebook group, where we’ll have contests, prizes, and cocktail recipes for margaritas,” she says. “If you can get 10 friends to back us, our Kickstarter will bring a physical taco party to you.”

In addition to wanting to create a sense of community with the launch, Horn says one of her main priorities is incorporating a social mission into the product. Currently, the Spillin’ Beans team is donating a can of beans to a food pantry for every game purchased. If successful, she says she wants to continue to expand on what they can do to help the community.

“I think we’ll always have some type of a fun social mission around our game and around our company,” Horn says. “Because, at the end of the day, we wanted to create something that brought people together through comedy and culture, not only at the fun level, but also with something bigger behind it.”