The official catalogue
Marmite, over the years, has produced or licensed three actual board and card games for the home market. None of them is going to make it onto the BoardGameGeek top hundred, but all three exist, and all three are genuinely on-brand in a way most licensed games are not.
In order of seriousness:
Marmite Love It or Hate It
A family-friendly party game where you try to guess which of your fellow players are Lovers and which are Haters, on various everyday questions (not all of them about Marmite). The Marmite branding is more of a framing device than a mechanic. The game itself is a perfectly serviceable round-the-table party game. You could play it at Christmas with relatives you do not see often, which is, structurally, the entire purpose of a party game.
Inoffensive, mildly amusing, not actually about Marmite. The kind of thing that turns up at the back of a cupboard, gets played once, and is then there forever.
Who Put the Marmite in the Fridge?
A faster, more obviously themed card game. You match pairs of cards, but if you end the round holding the Marmite-jar card, you lose the round. The implicit joke is that you have, in the metaphor of the game, ruined the Marmite by putting it in the fridge.
(For the record: yes, you can put Marmite in the fridge, but you absolutely do not need to. The salt content keeps it stable at room temperature for months and the cold makes it harder to spread. The fridge is for jam.)
The game is short, snappy, works with children, and the rules can be explained in a minute. It is a good travel game, although the deck is slightly bigger than ideal for a coat pocket.
The Marmite Truffle Game
The genuinely chaotic one. A Russian-roulette-style game where players take chocolate truffles from a box. Most of the truffles are normal chocolate truffles. A few of them have a small amount of Marmite hidden inside. The unlucky players bite into one and find out.
This is not really a game so much as a way of finding out which of your friends will react with grace to a savoury surprise and which will spit it across the room. As a social-engineering exercise it is unmatched. As a board game it is, structurally, a single round.
It also requires you to actually trust that the Marmite truffles are accurately produced, which depends entirely on which limited-edition packaging run you happen to have bought.
Why none of these are properly serious games
Marmite is one of those brands where the licensed-product output is, by necessity, more about the brand presence than about the product quality. A serious board game from Marmite would be no more authentically Marmite than a serious board game from Coca-Cola or Heinz. The fun thing is that Marmite is on the box at all.
What I would actually like to see is a Marmarati-style escape room, in which you progress through clues to be inducted into a fictional Marmite society. Marmite have not made one. They should. The 2010 Marmarati campaign already did most of the worldbuilding work for them.
In the meantime, all three of the existing games turn up in odd shops, often on eBay, occasionally at car boot sales. None is essential. All are at least mildly funny to own.
The Hate Party, of course, will not own any of them. The Hate Party’s loss.
Source: Marmite Shop archive; eBay listings.
