Object: Become the player to acquire the most wealth and personal satisfaction by holding parties to sell a home-enrichment product to friends, relatives and people you've never met before -- all without leaving your house.

SimplyFun is not a board game, but playing games is a big part of the bottom line for the direct-sales party plan company based in Bellevue, Wash., and founded by two Brigham Young University graduates and a married mother of two.

"Our whole mission is to promote the importance of play," said Matt Molen, a SimplyFun co-founder and the company's director of marketing.

Lots of products are sold using the party plan, where sales representatives, commonly called consultants, promote the product by inviting people they know, have met, or found in a phonebook to come to their home, or a friend's, for a sales party. Think Tupperware, or Pampered Chef, or Shade T-shirts.

It takes a special kind of madness, on the other hand, to suggest that your consultants invite their friends to in-home parties where playing games, instead of setting a relaxing mood, is an actual demonstration of the merchandise. That's so crazy it just might work.

"That's how games are sold, by word of mouth," said Molen. "You play a game, end up buying it for gifts and it gets passed along."

SimplyFun co-founder and product development director Jeremy Young used the popular board game The Settlers of Catan as an example. "You wouldn't just go and see Catan sitting in some hobby store and say, 'Hey, that looks really fun.' It just doesn't happen. You hear about it or play it and then go looking for it."

A SimplyFun party merely compresses the timeline. You can hear about the game, try it out and buy it -- no need to go comb through the mall -- all in the same evening.

Molen, 32, and Young, 34, met at BYU and used their business smarts to begin selling games before they'd ever even thought about parties, consultants and reaching customers without relying on retailers. Their experience with their first game company, Uberplay, convinced the pair that there had to be a better means than mere advertising of generating the all-important, sales-driving word of mouth.

Uberplay (which is still in operation) also connected Molen and Young to Gail DeGiulio, a sales executive at a much larger game company, Wizards of the Coast. The three of them eventually realized that, in addition to their shared business interests, they had a shared desire to market a different kind of game.

For starters, something that would be easy to learn and could be played quickly. DeGiulio, 47, said that she had gotten tired of sitting down with a new board or card game only to find out that "I needed a PhD to learn the rules and two days to play the game."

The ideal game would, on the other hand, also be something that offered a certain level of challenge to players both young and old. Something where, as Young put it, "you don't just roll the dice and move your marker."

Simple to learn, fun to play -- a name and a mission statement all in one.

The trio spent 18 months developing their sales concept prior to launch. In addition to cutting through some of the knotty word-of-mouth problem, the party plan was also a means of forcing an opening in a shrinking market.

"A lot of the mom-and-pop toy stores that used to carry the innovative stuff have dried up and gone away," Molen said. "You're left with Wal-Mart and Target."

And also with the problem of shelf space. The safe thing for retailers, after all, is to stick with perennial favorites like Risk, Monopoly or Scrabble.

All three founders are aware that the direct sales approach causes some consumers to hesitate, or even flee. DeGiulio herself had a negative view as a result of spending her growing up years watching her mother struggle to sell cleaning supplies out of the home.

But the ability to have a consultant demonstrate 10 different games to a captive, even friendly audience in just 90 minutes was too good to pass up. And there's another key difference between games and cosmetics or scrapbooking supplies. SimplyFun, said DeGiulio, "is not just women selling to women."

Men come to the parties and men buy the products. Some men even sell them.

"My husband really likes Texas Roll 'Em," said Orem resident Jennifer Lewis, referring to a SimplyFun game that combines dice and the current cultural fascination with poker.

Lewis has been a consultant for a little more than two months after hearing about SimplyFun through the media grapevine.

"We were attracted to the company because we're a huge board games family," said Lewis, who has four children.

Getting people she knows or has met to agree to host a SimplyFun party isn't always easy, Lewis said, but the product is a strong seller: "I haven't had anybody come to a party who hasn't bought at least one game."

And it would seem that the business of selling the games can be as much fun as actually playing them at game parties. Lori Nickerson, who lives in West Jordan, has been a SimplyFun consultant for nearly a year. "When I turned 40," she said, "I decided I wanted to try new things."

New things like first-month sales of more than $1,000 (the SimplyFun startup kit is $149, which includes free use of the company's Web site, www.simplyfun.com). New things like managing almost 40 people out of her home. Not bad for something that Nickerson said she jumped into "pretty much on a whim."

It's almost like being there at the table in the dining room when she describes her recent business activities. "If I get one more sales order over the Internet," Nickerson said. "I'll hit my highest sales month ever."