Redesigning Goldfish into a Board Game 🧀

Turning American Classics Asian — Season 2, Episode 2!

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Turning American Classic’s Asian: Goldfish 🧀

I cannot relate to Gen-Z on many things, but I can reach across the aisle, the grocery aisle if you will, to agree that Goldfish are a top tier snack in the pantheon of consumable goods. Goldfish are apparently Gen Z’s number one snack, and as their geriatric millennial forefather, I would like to claim that Goldfish was our personality first. Okay actually, Gen-Z can take the regular Goldfish, Cheez-It’s are categorically better anyways. The flavor-blasted Goldfish though! Like damn those might take the cheese cracker crown,

I love playing with my food, literally my dream party is to play Dodgeball with tiered wedding cakes that are launched into my face at full speed. A video for another time hah. But Goldfish felt like the perfect opportunity to explore an idea that has always been bouncing around my head: what if you could turn iconic American snacks into playable games?

Turning it Asian ✌️

How cool would it be if a snack brand like Goldfish could use their crackers as a way to learn board games from different cultures? My brain went pretty quickly to the Chinese game of “Go”, a strategy board game to see who can claim the most territory, played with black and white stones.

Defeat your evil twin by controlling more territory

Making the packaging 📦

There were two things I wanted to solve for: How to turn the packaging into the game board itself, and how to make appetizing Goldfish resembling Go’s black and white game pieces.

A real time sketch of my brain figuring out the redesign

I ended up landing on two flavors, a white cheddar goldfish tossed in ginger scallion powder that would be Player 1’s white pieces, and a sharp cheddar goldfish dyed black and tossed in black sesame powder for Player 2’s black pieces.

Making the brand 💅

With the Go pieces becoming fish, I knew I wanted to go all in on fishing as a theme. I started out by sketching boxes with cute fish caught in nets, leaning into the fishermen of it all.

Once I began translating those sketches into design, I realized I wanted to lean more into the people who do the fishing versus the fishies themselves. Truthfully, it was just another excuse to highlight a category of Asian bucket hat dads and Asian sun visor aunties that I will happily become one day.

Packaging design from first idea to final!

Final design becomes a dieline to print and cut 📦

Introducing, Go Fish! 🎣

The final design! A snack that uses its crackers to teach board games from all different cultures. Go Fish, an homage to Goldfish, introduces people to the Chinese game of Go. The brand is a nod to vintage Asian magazine ads from the 70’s and 80’s. while highlighting the Asian bucket hat fishing dad (my final form) and the Asian auntie divers of Korea known as haenyeo.

Each flavor of Go Fish is one player’s set of pieces. Get both flavors, and you can combine both boxes together to create the game board to play Go.

Each box comes with a bag of either white cheddar scallion ginger crackers or black sesame cheddar crackers (and of course, a courtesy Lactaid for my brothers and sisters in Camp dairy-will-make-me-poo-my-pants).

I’m not a business major or anything, but..I feel like snacks as games is kind of business savvy?! It encourages multiple purchases of different flavors to collect all the boxes and game pieces to be able to play, it’s scaleable across games from around the world, and because they're so tasty, if you eat too many of your game pieces, you can’t play anymore and then oopsies, you have to buy even more! Am I becoming a corporate overlord now? Bahah.

🎲 What other games should become snacks?! Let me know and I might just make it!

✌️ Frankie