A real-estate founder, a research report and a garage door opener.

Taboo is a word-guessing party game built on a single restriction. English Wikipedia describes it as a word, guessing and party game published by Parker Brothers in 1989 and later owned by Hasbro, and credits its design to Brian Hersch. A player has to get teammates to say the word at the top of a card without saying that word or any of the related words printed beneath it — the “taboo” words that give the game its name. The clue-giver may only speak: Wikipedia’s summary of the rules excludes gestures, sounds and drawings, and a member of the opposing team acts as a “censor” who signals the moment a forbidden word slips out.

Hersch came to games from outside the toy business. In an interview published by the Chicago Toy & Game Group on 24 January 2017, he said he had been a founder of a real-estate development company and a keen Trivial Pursuit player when that game came out, and that after a friend suggested he was creative enough to design one, he did what a business person does: he commissioned a market research report on party games and Trivial Pursuit. In his profile for the textbook Game Design Workshop, Hersch says the research pointed to a moment when a recession was squeezing entertainment budgets and a baby-boom generation with bills to pay had shown a willingness to entertain at home and a liking for board games.

The same profile contains a design story about the game. Hersch says he is a strong believer in prototypes, and that the special quality of a game is often found in a single component. His example is the buzzer in Taboo: the original prototype buzzer, he says, was made from his garage door opener. Even in that rough form players could push a button and react to its sound, and he credits that one component with supporting the play, adding fun and giving the game a physical, tactile edge. The buzzer has stayed central to the brand ever since, in one form or another.

Hersch’s company also designed other party games. The Game Design Workshop profile lists titles including Outburst, Oodles, SongBurst and Malarkey alongside Taboo, and names him as general partner of Hersch and Company. The 2017 interview describes him as co-owner of Hersch Games and lists Midnight Outburst among his games.

From Parker Brothers to Hasbro, with the trademark in Los Angeles.

Taboo arrived in the last years of the American games industry’s separate brand houses. English Wikipedia records that Hasbro bought the Milton Bradley Company in 1984 and acquired Tonka, which owned Parker Brothers, in 1991, citing reports in The New York Times. In 1998 Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers were merged to form Hasbro Games, and the two old names were kept as brands until 2009, when they were dropped in favour of the parent company’s own name, now Hasbro Gaming. Wikipedia credits Parker Brothers with Taboo’s 1989 release but also files the game among Milton Bradley titles, so its earliest boxes sit inside that shared Hasbro history.

Ownership of the name itself is spelled out on Hasbro’s current packaging copy. The product page for Classic Taboo, dated 2023, states that Taboo is a trademark of Hersch and Company, Los Angeles, and carries a copyright line for Hersch and Company, while Hasbro’s own marks are listed separately.

The brand moved beyond the table early in the 2000s. A press release issued through PR Newswire on 4 September 2002 announced that The New TNN had picked up a half-hour Taboo game show, set to premiere in the first quarter of 2003 and produced by Radio…With Pictures. The release described the show as based on the Hasbro board game created by Brian Hersch, named the comedian and actor Chris Wylde as host, and said Hersch would serve as an executive producer. The release called it a game show for a young-adult audience, with comedic penalties in a “danger round”.

Licensed editions followed for particular audiences. On 2 August 2011, the New York Jewish Week, published by JTA, reported on Taboo Jewish Edition, developed by two friends, Seth Burstein and Ian Framson, who had found themselves mixing Hebrew and Yiddish into their clues while playing. The paper said the edition was produced with Abe Blumberger’s Jewish Educational Toys, described it as “blessed” by Hasbro, and noted that the same company had produced a Jewish version of Apples to Apples. Wikipedia also records a Taboo Junior edition for younger players and packs of additional words sold in 1990.

Design and documentation.

Card and tile games carry their identity on a small set of objects that players handle again and again. The tuck box or lidded box is the first of them: it sits on a shop shelf, then on a home shelf, and its name panel, colours and illustration have to be recognisable from the spine as well as the front. A game’s name is often drawn as custom lettering rather than set in a stock typeface, and the same lettering may be redrawn when a publisher refreshes the range.

The card face is the second. Numbers, symbols and colours have to read quickly across a table, in low light and upside down, so a card’s layout tends to change slowly even when the box around it is redesigned. Card backs, by contrast, are where a brand’s pattern or mark can repeat across every card in the deck.

The third is the component that sits in front of each player — a tile rack, a tray or a board — whose shape and material can become as familiar as the name. Each guide looks at how these pieces have changed under successive owners, and at what the sources say about who designed them.

Two-colour cards, a buzzer that keeps changing colour.

Taboo’s identity lives in its components as much as in its name. The card is the core object: a single guess word at the top and the forbidden words stacked beneath it, so the layout itself states the rule before anyone reads the instructions. English Wikipedia says early editions printed the cards with pink lettering on one side and blue on the other, and that later editions used a wider range of colours, including green, purple, yellow, orange and red. A one-minute sand timer, a score pad and a tray complete the basic set.

The buzzer has changed colour from edition to edition. Wikipedia’s edition-by-edition notes give the 1989 game a turquoise electronic buzzer, the 1990, 1993 and 1994 editions a pink squeaker, the 1999 and 2000 editions a purple squeaker or buzzer, the 2003 edition a red squeaker, the 2011 edition a yellow and white electronic buzzer, later editions purple, and the 2023 edition a yellow squeaker. Some editions added a game board with two tokens, and the 2011 and 2013 editions a “game-changing” die. Through all of that, the device that interrupts a careless clue-giver remained the game’s physical signature.

The words around the game have been steadier than its hardware. The line “the game of unspeakable fun” appears as the subtitle in Wikipedia’s entry and still opens Hasbro’s 2023 product copy, which describes the cards as drawing on pop culture and trends and offers an optional web-based timer, buzzer and score pad so the game can be played with just the card box. Even the online version keeps the buzzer.

For a design guide, Taboo shows how a party game can be branded by a rule — a word you must not say — and by one tactile object that enforces it, with colour left free to change from edition to edition. Compare it with Monopoly, another Parker Brothers name that passed to Hasbro in 1991, and Scattergories, another party game built around words. For this guide we use card magenta, card blue and buzzer turquoise with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Taboo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.