If you've ever played Telestrations, Hues and Cues or Tapple at one of our tables, you've played a game from The Op — a company that started with a single, narrow licence to print city editions of Monopoly and ended up becoming one of the biggest names in party games. It's also one of the more unlikely origin stories on our shelves, involving a parking lot, a car boot, and an Olympic Games.
Sold Out of a Car Boot
The company that would become The Op was founded in 1994 by Dane Chapin and his sisters, on the back of a two-year licence to produce city-specific editions of Monopoly. It was a small, narrow deal — but everything changed in 1996, when the company produced an Atlanta Olympics edition of Monopoly. When the games weren't moving as fast as they'd hoped, Chapin and his small team drove to the Olympics themselves and started selling copies out of the car park, out of his own car boot. That instinct — go where the people are, sell it yourself if you have to — became the company's identity for the next three decades.
The Atlanta success expanded the Monopoly licence far beyond city editions, into pop culture, sports, and beyond. From there, the company — originally known as USAopoly, a name still stamped on plenty of its boxes today — built the licensing relationships that would define it: Hasbro, Disney, Marvel, Nintendo, Warner Bros. and more, turning a single Monopoly deal into one of the widest licensed-game catalogues in the industry.
Building Its Own Games
Licensing got the company through the door, but its longest-lasting hits are the ones it made itself. Telestrations — the drawing-and-guessing party game that goes wrong in the best possible way — has sold millions of copies worldwide and remains the company's signature title. Alongside it sit originals like Blank Slate, Hues and Cues, and Tapple, all built in-house rather than licensed from anyone. These are the games that turned a licensing shop into an actual game studio, and they're still the backbone of the catalogue today.
The licensed side never went away, though — the company also puts out officially licensed versions of Clue, Trivial Pursuit and Munchkin, alongside original designs built around outside IP, most notably Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, a cooperative deck-building game that's become one of the best-loved ways into the genre for Harry Potter fans who've never picked up a deck-builder before.
A New Name, and the Founder's Return
In 2019, USAopoly rebranded as The Op — a shorter, punchier identity for a company whose catalogue had grown well past what "USAopoly" implied, even as the older name stuck around in plenty of marketing and on plenty of boxes. Then, in 2022, Dane Chapin — the same person who'd been selling Monopoly out of his car three decades earlier — returned to the company as CEO after time away pursuing other ventures, specifically to push The Op's own signature games, especially Telestrations, further into new formats.
The Op Today
Based in Carlsbad, California, The Op now describes itself as a family entertainment company rather than just a board game publisher — still producing party games, licensed classics, puzzles, chess sets and accessories, but increasingly pushing its own hits like Telestrations into new mediums beyond the tabletop. What hasn't changed is the throughline from that Atlanta parking lot: make something people want to play, and go sell it wherever they are. As the company's own announcement of Chapin's return tells it, that scrappy, sell-it-yourself spirit is still very much part of the pitch.
Come Try Their Games
Hues and Cues — a board of 480 colours and a one-word clue; watch how differently everyone actually sees colour.
Telestrations — The Op's signature hit: Chinese whispers with drawings, and it goes wrong immediately, every time.
Tapple — name something in the category, tap your letter, pass it on, and hope you're not the one who freezes.
Tap 4 — rapid-fire category chaos for the table that wants its party games fast and loud.
Come have a play in-store; we'll happily walk you through any of the four.
We believe the best moments happen around a table, and it's worth knowing that some of the games making your table laugh the hardest started out being sold from the boot of a car.