Snake Oil: a Card Game Entirely About Sales

In early America, there were multiple cases of salesmen peddling a mystery liquid, called snake oil. They convinced innocent customers that the wonder liquid, snake oil, could cure a multitude of illnesses. The phrase snake oil, and these salesmen, are the inspiration for the party game, “Snake Oil”.

Snake Oil is a card game. The rules are simple, but winning is much harder. The premise is simple, each player has a hand of six cards, each of which has a random word on it. Next, the judge is given a customer card, which is basically a description of the judge’s imaginary occupation. The players all combine two of their cards into a single product and try and sell it to the judge.

This is a really fun game, but it demonstrates some real sales concepts in interesting ways. Firstly, since you are just combining two cards, you can basically give the product any features that you want it to have. You can make it magical or do impossible things. Describing the features is not at all what sells your fake product to the customer. Instead, the most important part is framing a problem that the customer could have, and solving this problem. This concept is super important in real-life sales.

Another concept that is helpful in the game snake oil is to make sure that you are keeping the customers entertained and at ease. The people who make quiet, boring pitches never win no matter how good their product is. Making the customers laugh and including them in the conversation works much better. This is also similar to real-life sales where the customer should be talking more than the salesman.