This holiday season, as I gather together with friends and family, I’ll be enjoying great food and conversation while trying to explain that my new job involves branding, not advertising. So imagine my delight when I discovered a new board game designed to demonstrate how well branding has infiltrated the collective human consciousness.

My biggest challenge with board games is simply getting people to play with me, but the challenge in “Brand Memory” from BIS Publishers is to find matching pairs of a brand, based solely on their characteristic color/style elements and a short description of the brand. The game shows you can swap a company’s name or slogan with different text and people will still recognize a well-known brand, simply based on the design elements.

I could see this game inciting a good-natured “who’s more important” debate between the writing and design teams here at TheFrameworks. As a writer, I’ll lob a preemptive strike over the desk by mentioning the Comic Sans Project. Its contributors have taken Comic Sans — the font favored by creators of school projects and office posters — and recreated famous brands with it “because Helvetica is sooo 2011.” Do people still recognize McDonald’s when the golden arches are golden mountain peaks? Absolutely. So take that, designers. I fearfully await your retaliation.

Speaking of Helvetica, if you haven’t yet caught the wonderful documentary about the font, seek it out (I streamed it through Netflix). You’ll never look at your Word document the same way again. Because Arial is sooo 2001.

“Oh, no,” you say. “There couldn’t be anything less interesting than watching a documentary about a font.” Au contraire, mon ami. The same folks who bring you the “Brand Memory” game offer the “Typography Memory Game” in which players must find matching pairs of the letter A in one of 25 different fonts.  Your friends and family will experience minutes of enjoyment as they slowly realize they can’t tell the difference between Akzidenz Grotesk and Garamond, nor can they comprehend why you thought playing this game was a good idea.

Better yet, make your holiday celebration a theme night, by combining the two games and a viewing of the film. I guarantee you’ll never be asked to host another family gathering. On the other hand, I’d have a fabulous time.

Excuse me … I’ve got to tell Santa to add these games to my wish list.