Cannabis isn’t all fun and games. But sometimes, it is! SOHiGH by Affektiv Games is a cannabis game show where contestants are asked to take part in various competitions, from building a bong with random objects or answering cannabis-themed questions, all while under the influence of copious quantities of cannabis. Consumption is voluntary but it wouldn’t really be SOHiGH without a little smoke beforehand.
SOHiGH originated on YouTube and is now available on CBDTV, a streaming channel dedicated to cannabis content. Founder Chris Abney came up with the idea one night while searching for a cannabis card game. When he couldn’t find what he was seeking, he made up his own.
After several iterations while testing the concept around the community, Abney had the foundations for SOHiGH, the cannabis game show that blends education, games, and cannabis. Cannabis & Tech Today sat down with co-producer Kayla Heard to discuss the show and what’s on the horizon.
Cannabis & Tech Today: What’s unique about what SOHiGH is doing?
Kayla Heard: As far as we know, we’re the first independently produced cannabis game show to be on television. Everything else has been produced by a network that’s cannabis themed. So we’re taking it to the next level, keeping it grassroots while staying true, but also taking it up a notch and putting the entertainment out there for everybody to see.
C&T Today: What’s the premise of the show?
KH: The purpose is, let’s get so high, and that’s in every facet. Let’s get so high in our education, let’s elevate ourselves in every way. There are multiple different games that competitors play against each other to accumulate points, and each round’s worth a certain amount of points. Whoever wins at the end wins some money or some cannabis, you know, whatever we have. So that’s always a good incentive to get onto a game show, right?
One of the games is “Build-a-Bong.” We give the contestants random items, some of them are essential and some are useless. The challenge is to try to figure out how to build a bong out of them. The first one to take a puff and blow it out wins that round.
And we get the contestants nice and high first. Then we go on to “Canna-Qz,” which is our cannabis quiz part of the game show. It’s a lot of fun because it’s a spectacle of an edification on cannabis; we’re learning while we’re having a blast. Whether we retain that information might be another story, but it is a fun way to interact and learn and then take it to the next level with cannabis.
C&T Today: Do contestants ever get paranoid or start overthinking and freeze up?
KH: They never really freeze up, and if they do our host will be sure to make fun of them for it, which breaks the tension. So far, so good. We’re two seasons in and we get a lot of people going, “Oh, I knew that!”, where maybe they just weren’t fast enough on that buzzer. For the most part, our contestants have been really great
C&T Today: Where did the idea originate? I’m willing to bet there was some cannabis involved when you came up with the idea.
KH: Abney, our co-founder, came up with this. He was trying to find a competitive cannabis game. He’s a very competitive person like most of us are; It’s human nature. He was really trying to find something that fed that competitive side and was a little bit educational and fun.
You can smoke weed or not when you play our games. If you want to smoke CBD or not smoke at all, we have in-home entertainment options for that, too. So it started with in-home entertainment games, it started with a game called Smoke-O-Hempics, which was a super competitive cannabis game in a tube. He was taking this around to communities and playing it at community events and getting people hyped up playing these games that you see on the game show now, but in a community setting.
One of his best friends said, “Man, you should make a game show out of this.” And he was like, “Absolutely, that’s a really good idea.” So that was the birth of the game show, it was through cannabis, entertainment, competition, and education that the baby was born.
The whole purpose is to continue to bring cannabis into the mainstream, where it doesn’t have this stigma behind it anymore. My Christian mother in the south of Texas played our games and loved it. She was like, “I learned a lot.” Especially just being able to give this to anybody and they can play it and even if they don’t know the answers, they can still have fun because they learned something. It’s hilarious. It’s a fun, funny game.
KH: So we have anybody from cannabis companies who want their weed to be the weed that gets smoked on our game show, to companies who want us to implement their product into
the game somehow. We have a CBD beverage company which we’re developing a game for right now called “Chug Mug.” We welcome anybody who wants to deal with the general cannabis consumer or somebody in the cannabis business space.
Our biggest viewership on YouTube is people who own cannabis businesses because they’re looking for cannabis entertainment.
Bong companies find ways to get in there with cool product placement. We can develop questions in our card games around certain industries. So we could put a history question in about what year your company was founded and bring more exposure to companies who have a hard time with marketing.
The problem with cannabis marketing is it is so limited in what you’re allowed to do. We can get around that with different tactics, so people get that much needed exposure.
One of the coolest things about the show is we’re completely autonomous and free-thinking. As an independently produced game show, we don’t have to answer to a network. So if somebody has an idea, and it’s not something that anybody’s done before, all they’ve gotta do is email me and we will have a conversation and we’ll find a way to make it happen together.
This article first appeared in Volume 5 Issue 1 of Cannabis & Tech Today. Read the full issue here.
