Happy Camper is a new U.S. publisher that will launch its first title at PAX Unplugged 2023: an English-language edition of Kaya Miyano‘s card game Trio, a.k.a., nana. (Technically, the game is available now through the Happy Camper website, but the public debut will be PAXU 2023.)

For those not familiar with the game, here’s how to play:

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In short, Trio is gamer Go Fish. You’re searching for cards to make sets, so you have a memory aspect as to who has revealed which cards, along with a deduction aspect as to who has not revealed cards…assuming you can keep track of all the info you see.

For the team play, team members sit opposite one another and exchange one card before play begins (pulling cards from their hand and adding them below the table to hide their location), and each time an opposing team collects a set, your team can swap again.

nana debuted in 2021 from Japanese publisher Mob+, then French publisher Cocktail Games licensed the design and re-branded it as Trio. The word “nana” in Japanese — ナナ — is one way of saying 7, so the title emphasizes the winning condition. “Trio” instead relates to the sets you collect, and I would imagine it’s a more meaningful word for casual game buyers than “Seven”…which would undoubtedly inspire endless “What’s in the box?” jokes. (Answer: It’s cards. Cards are what’s in the box.)

How did a new publisher land the license for Trio? Probably because Happy Camper is run by Jason Schneider, who was vice president of product development at Gamewright for more than twenty years, with several Gamewright titles, such as Imagine and Happy City, having been licensed from Cocktail Games. (The licensing went the other way as well, with Cocktail releasing Gamewright titles like Sushi Go! and Super Mega Lucky Box in France.)

I’ve talked with Schneider multiple times over the years at NY Toy Fair, Spielwarenmesse, and other conventions. He has a great eye for what’s appropriate for his audience, and he can pick apart tricky elements in a design immediately, making suggestions to move the design toward being mainstream appropriate. Compare, for example, the back of the box on the Cocktail and Happy Camper editions of Trio:

Cocktail uses a long header (“Who will be the smartest…”) that doesn’t stand out that much from the other text around it. The Happy Camper box strips that header down to “Can you find three of a kind?” Boom! Now you know what the game is about!

I’ve watched enough people in game stores (creep alert) to know that you don’t have much time to catch their attention. Most people don’t even flip a box over to see the back of it, and those who do don’t spend much time looking at it. The Happy Camper edition has a gold cover instead of a yellow one, so that will stand out from other games, while also mirroring the gold color of the 7s that you’ll find once you open the box.

Similarly, Cocktail highlighted the phrase “only the lowest or highest number” in orange, which is good since that element of the game is a neat hook, but then Happy Camper changes that to make “lowest” orange and “highest” blue…which mimics the card colors adjacent to the text, adding a bit of hidden resonance.

In my opinion, pretty much every element on the back of the Happy Camper box is better than what’s on the Cocktail box. (The Cocktail box isn’t bad; it’s just that the Happy Camper one is better.) The only drawback, at least from a gamer’s perspective, is that the Happy Camper box is larger than Cocktail’s. I don’t think this would make a difference to the average person, but I wanted to point it out.

In any case, I wish Jason well with his new venture because I respect his approach to development and marketing, as well as his knowledge of the industry as a whole. Also, because Trio is great, so it’s nice to finally have it available in the U.S.!