How The Op Games built its operational backbone with Airtable & AI
The Op Games built its company-wide operating system in Airtable, scaling submission reviews, feedback loops, and creative workflows with AI to enable faster launches and seamless team alignment.
10X
faster execution from idea to execution
1
single source of truth
6
tools consolidated
"We’re excited about everything we’re evolving and stepping into, and as Airtable continues to advance, so do we at The Op Games. We’re committed to staying at the forefront of Airtable’s evolution, because it orchestrates our business engine and serves as the blueprint for all of our internal operations"
See it in action: AI-powered proposal reviews
The Op Games (formerly USAopoly) is a family entertainment company and leading publisher and manufacturer of board games and puzzles for nearly 30 years!. Based in Southern California, the company publishes original award winning hits like Tapple, Flip 7, Telestrations, Blank Slate, and Hues and Cues, along with licensed games tied to pop culture IPs such as Disney, The Grinch, and Hello Kitty.
Led by CEO Dane Chapin, The Op Games is a product creation-led organization, with more than half the company focused on launching new titles—from inventor submissions and development to creative, production, and marketing.
We’re in the business of creating joy, laughter, memories and connection for our customers. Airtable is transforming how we utilize and leverage AI giving us the flexibility to turn that intelligence into action, and action into delight. Airtable helps The Op Games move faster, make smarter decisions, and deliver even better experiences.
The challenge: Unifying fragmented workflows across teams
Before Airtable, teams at The Op Games relied on a patchwork of documents, shared drives, email threads, and project management tools.
As the company scaled, these disjointed systems led to slower launches, siloed feedback, and excessive manual coordination. Moving to Airtable changed everything: Updating data in one place now syncs and ripples across every workflow and dataset, creating a single source of truth that finally brought the entire process together.
Key challenges included:
1. A bottlenecked submission review process
Thousands of independent game inventors submit ideas every year, often with long rulebooks, PDFs, and pitch decks that took weeks to summarize manually.
2. Unstructured player feedback
Testers submitted notes, screenshots, and gameplay observations in inconsistent formats. The team struggled to make this data actionable for developers.
3. Creative bottlenecks
Producing visuals, packaging, and campaigns for hundreds of titles required major coordination across teams.
The solution: Centralized operations on Airtable
The Op Games began using Airtable in 2022, gradually building it into their operational backbone. By 2023, the platform had become the connective tissue for the entire product lifecycle—from submission to shelf.
At the core is the Product Hub, a single source of truth that links every department across the company. From product development and playtesting to marketing and sales, the hub consolidates data that was once scattered across 5-6 tools and teams.
"We love Airtable and the ability to see all the relevant information in easy-to-view and customizable interfaces. This has allowed our marketing team to become more efficient in our day-to-day operations."
Surrounding the hub are purpose-built apps and portals, each designed to solve a specific pain point:
Inventor submission app to manage and evaluate thousands of new game submissions
Play insights app to turn raw playtester input into structured insights for quick decision making pillars, currently in beta to be launched in 2026.
Product management app drives project workflow process, from idea intake and inventor contracts to development, creative, and production, tracking every stage in one system. Marketing and sales plan launches from the same source of truth, with AI agents and automated updates reducing emails, aligning feedback, and saving 10× the time by keeping everyone instantly synced across all departments.
Vendor management portal to coordinate quotes, production, and communication with overseas partners. This one is massive and has saved 5-10+ hours a week in what was back and forth misaligned and lost communication with our vendors.
"Our team was one of the first in the company to get a major project/base within Airtable for The Op. It immediately leveled up our organization, project visibility, and communication internally with colleagues and externally with partners. The more we use Airtable, the more we love Airtable."
AI in action: How The Op Games uses Omni and AI Agents
In 2024, The Op Games began layering Airtable AI into its most complex workflows. Using Omni and AI Agents, the team transformed how they organized submissions, playtesting feedback, and creative development.
Processing new game proposals at scale
Each new game submission includes attachments like rule books, videos, and detailed pitch decks. The Op Games uses an AI agent that automatically reads all documents and generates a quick product summary with core details like game category, mechanics, and innovation potential.
This summary turns a once-daunting folder of documents into a concise brief, allowing reviewers to easily prioritize the most promising ideas.
Turning playtester feedback into actionable insights
Airtable now extracts product insights from each tester submission into discrete insights, groups them into themes, and rolls them up into high-level “value-pillars” like “Ease of understanding”. Each pillar includes a sub-summary, giving developers both a high-level view and the ability to drill into specific feedback.
The impact: Speed, clarity, and creative lift
With Airtable and AI, The Op Games has fundamentally changed how it brings games to market:
Time saved previously spent going through pages of game submission documents.
Faster iteration between playtesting rounds, with more efficient documentation.
Setting the table to speed up our internal teams’ hands-on review of game submissions and provide faster pass/play feedback to inventors.
Future state exploration through visual aesthetic boards, providing quick concepts in our creative hands to spark and shape new ideas.
Eliminated back-and-forth Request for Quote vendor emails with Airtable Portals, centralizing feedback for faster product costing and P&L guidance.
Built a data-driven creative and production culture where AI empowers, not replaces
"Airtable has streamlined our production workflow, saved time, and kept everyone aligned from planning to execution."
Future plans: Continuing to scale with AI and automation
The Op Games continues to push what’s possible with Airtable.
The team is experimenting with AI-generated concept visuals to inspire new marketing ideas. AI-generated imagery acts as a springboard for further exploration and refinement.
Campaign Concept Generation app to generate visuals: The team is exploring AI to speed up delivery of creative and marketing assets. The app helps by giving creative teams quick AI-generated visual references, early concept material that can function like lightweight mood boards. The Op Games is testing how AI-driven creative consistency will evolve alongside actual product branding. The team is testing how this approach can accelerate early ideation and provide faster starting points for final creative work.
Next up on the roadmap for The Op Games:
Expanding AI use for competitive market analysis and product forecast trend prediction
Launching a creator-facing portal where inventors can track submissions and upload updates
Piloting new AI Plays for Localization, Event Management, and Marketing Campaign Concepts.
Deploying AI Agents that score game submissions against documented investment criteria