We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Juliana Moreno. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Juliana below.

Alright, Juliana thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

Interactivity! We work in Board Games, Escape Rooms, Theme Parks, Location Based Entertainment, Film/TV Marketing, Music Festivals and more, and the thing that connects all of them is INTERACTIVITY! Folks are no longer content to be passive spectators. If they’re going to engage with an experience, they want to feel like they have choices and that those choices matter. It is thrilling to actively discover a story, and even more thrilling to feel like the things you do and say will change the course of that story.

We recently worked with Hasbro and Right Angle Entertainment to bring the game of CLUE to life on the streets of Chicago. Players are no longer just rolling a die and passing cards. In our CLUE they pound the pavement, discover long lost artifacts, puzzle out their secrets, and pull all the information together. Players interact with a butler at the beginning, middle, and end, but the rest of the journey is entirely in their hands. Rather than watching someone else solve the case, players get to step into the role of detective and crack this age old mystery.

Juliana, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Our official title at the Wild Optimists is Creators of Fun and that really is our north star. We design interactive immersive experiences with a focus on games and puzzles for live events, brand marketing, and at home gaming that increase audience engagement by giving players the chance to be the hero. Our passion is designing new ways to play.

We got our start by designing the first at home escape room game: Escape Room In A Box: The Werewolf Experiment. That game was a major success on Kickstarter and has since become a series with Mattel – we’ve designed four games in the line. Board games have always been a passion for us. We now have nine published board games on the market including the mystery series Crimes & Capers and the card game for the popular video game: Hello Neighbor.

We’ve also had the opportunity to create all sorts of incredible experiences off the table. We’ve designed giant puzzle quests for music festivals like Lost Lands and Electric Forest, consulted on immersive experiences for brands like Hasbro, Universal, and Mall of America, and worked on marketing campaigns for numerous high profile film and tv projects.

We’re always looking to make our players feel like the hero and create those memorable moments that people will talk about for years to come.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Our business began with tabletop gaming. While at home gaming will always be one of our deepest loves and we continue to create such games, we never wanted to be confined to purely on the table gaming. Over the years, our business has pivoted more and more to live experiences at location based entertainment. We love the idea of transporting people out of their homes and into an adventure. We want the real world to feel just as exciting and magical as the worlds that you can find on the screen. So, we have been working hard to create that magic out in the world where people can come and experience it.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Playtesting! Whenever possible, we extensively test everything that we put out into the world to make sure that it is fun and enjoyable for the majority of players. This requires many hours of observing people in the experience, gathering their feedback after, and then tweaking based on what we have seen and heard. This is truly where experiences are made, and what makes the difference between a project that feels intuitive and delightful and one that feels clunky and obscure. Testing experience after experience before putting it out to the market has helped to establish our reputation within the market.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wildoptimists.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/thewildoptimists
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wildoptimists
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moreno-juliana/
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/escaperoominbox