After roughly 25 years, Jill Ramsey decided the 2020 pandemic was the perfect time to relaunch a card game she and her brother created in the 1990s.
The game, then called A Rhyme in Time, had been shelved as Ramsey got married and had children.
"I just kept looking over my shoulder saying we would resurrect these card games," she said.
After meeting Jane Bennett, who also lives in Sarasota, the duo began working on modernizing the game.
"When you're asked to do that you just never know where it's going to go," Bennett said. "But it's with this wonderful lady who had a great product that just needed shifting into the 21st century. It could’ve been dreadful, but it wasn’t."
The women began working with focus groups that had participants from ages 10 to 75 years old, and decided to make it a "bit edgier" after some millennial participants' suggestions.
This year, the Socially Twisted game was officially ready to launch.
"Jane is the twisted and I'm the social," Ramsey said. "'We took the original game and we rebooted it, but the thing that made us say, 'Time to go,' is when the pandemic hit. There was a resurgence of game playing under lockdown, and we also all just needed a reason to laugh again."
Socially Twisted can now be found on Amazon as a card game and as an app on mobile devices. It markets itself as a card game "for bad people with good humor," and is a type of Mad Libs-meets-improv game. The premise stemmed from Ramsey's brother's time at Second City, a renowned improvisation group in Chicago.
"He was in the improv group, and we grew up watching game shows in the '70s and thought it would be fun as a board game," she said.
The new-and-improved company is now staffed with four people, all who are Florida-based. Both co-founders live in Sarasota, its app developer is in Orlando and its social media director lives in Longboat Key.
The company is entirely bootstrapped and plans to focus its sales efforts on Amazon in the coming months. The game comes with its original "badass pack," and will soon have a family pack, kids pack and a U.K.-focused "britpack," all slated to come out in Q4 of this year.
"I think during the pandemic people had huge epiphanies that they want to enjoy themselves as families and move away from sitting in front of the TV as much," Ramsey said. "It's expanding the horizon for entertainment, and of course everyone needs to laugh."
Socially Twisted is the latest to enter into the Sarasota budding startup scene, but has aspirations well beyond Florida.
"There is this huge creative undercurrent in Sarasota — we have Ringling [College of Arts and Design], we have the Florida Studio Theater, so we’re really lucky," Bennett said. "Because of our goal is global domination, it doesn't make that much of a difference where we are — the benefit is we live in a beautiful place."
