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Thursday 4 April 1968

95th day - 271 days to come

Jerry Darcy called from the airport. Invited him over.
He showed me a model of his new set of puzzles called HANG UP, "played with mental blocks". It is a set of 6-3x3x3 cubes which are each colored differently and broken into pieces (like SOMA). During evening I put all but one together. I also suggested that they could al be mixed together and a number of players could grab for pieces of any color with ob- ject to be first to complete a cube. (Trouble with this is that a player could memorize a winning set of pcs. and always take them. It could also be played something like CARRE but I won't suggest that.) Parker is quite interested in it.
COUPE D'ETAT gave him $27,000 in royalties last year. But the first quarter this year was only $1,000. They are rewriting the rules and he hopes that will improve sales. (Alice mentioned that it was not moving off the shelves.)
Jerry sold two of his games to E.S.R.:- PROGRAMMIT, BLUF.
Lakeside has changed KUFU to INK A DINK A DOO. Jerry and I think it pretty terrible.
Jerry has sold a game called SCHTICK to Saalfield. It is a successor to BLOCKHEAD which was also put out by Saafield. The pieces consist of segments cut on different bevels [or levels?] from a dowel stick, abt. 1"[symbol]. They are piled in one pile until they collapse. I told Jerry about SCATTER BRAIN. He said he knew the one putting it out and implied that he stole it.
Transogram is looking at TABOO (This was previously called VOLCANO, see 11/16/67). There is a volcano which explodes and scatters the cards around the room.
Frank Thibault:- 3M has dropped SQUIGGLE because of NILE.
REGATTA will come out national in May. 3M has also signed a contract for TOTAL OUT (see 11/16/67).
Parker is looking at his game PLOY. Jerry didn't remember all the details but it is played on an 8x8 (probably) quadrille. The pieces are discs with from one to 3 arrows on each. The pcs. move in the direction or the arrows and as many spaces as the number of arrows (Jerry thinks. It would have better balance to have the length of move in inverse proportion to the number of arrows.) Replacement capture. Object is to capture opponent's "King". (Neither of us think Parker will be interested.)
SPLURGE (see 11/16/67) was sold by its inventor to createk. The "Lego" division of Samsonite is looking for games. They have a Football GAME which Jerry thinks is quite ordinary. They say they are looking for games which involve decision making. They are in Denver and the man to contact is Mr. R. Reed.
Jerry says that Parker is dropping Hans Goldsmith's DON'T MISS THE BOAT.
I showed Jerry BAZAAR and also KNOTS TO YOU. He said the latter was a good idea but not saleable until I do more with it. I told Jerry about [crossout] TRIPLE CROSS.
I told Jerry about GAMES -> -> -> NEW -> -> -> BUT DIFFERENT and
(cont. on 4/3)