Being a few bricks short of a load isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, Lanny Campbell thinks everyone can have some fun if that happens while they’re playing her new board game.
She launched A Few Bricks Short of a Load at Canadian Western Agribition where customers were snapping it up.
“We’re having a lot of fun,” she said at the booth where she and her husband Sandy, from Pense, Sask., were promoting the game just in time for Christmas.
She said it’s one thing when friends and family buy the game.
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“It’s more exciting when a stranger buys it.”
The game was five years in the making and came out of Campbell’s years as an elementary schoolteacher. She created all kinds of games in order to help the students review what they had learned.
Looking one day at the flags of countries involved in the Olympic Games, she wondered if people would be able to match the flags to the countries.
The idea for a game was born.
“Once I got going on it, I was obsessed,” Campbell said.
In this game, players have three minutes to identify 10 objects pictured on a card. They write down their answers on a score pad and earn points for each correct guess. If they can’t guess, there are hints on the bottom of each page that can only be revealed using the magic wand. However, using the hints costs points, and requires the player to declare that he’s a few bricks short of load.
Each time a player earns 50 points, he gets a brick similar to a popular plastic building block. The player with the tallest tower at the end of the game is the winner.
Campbell said the neat thing about the game is that everyone plays at the same time. For example, if four players are involved, each has a card. They pass the cards around so everyone guesses all the objects, and, like school, they correct each other’s work.
Each weighty game set includes 94 categories or 940 images on two-sided cards. The correct answers are on the flip side of each card.
“People want to play about five times before doing the cards over,” she said to explain the number. And they might not remember the correct answers anyway.
The categories range from dinosaurs to antiques to cattle breeds to nursery rhymes to laundry symbols. Each card contains objects that fit into easy, medium and hard-to-guess categories.
The images were obtained from a variety of sources, including drawings by a nephew and photographs from a zoo photographer in Utah who only asked for a game as payment.
Northern Games Co. in Edmonton manufactures the game.
“He thought the name and idea were catchy, and he liked the fact it’s for everyone,” Campbell said of the company representative to whom she pitched her product.
The company fit the game into its already busy production schedule and the first boxes arrived on Nov. 17, just two days before Campbell opened her Agribition booth. She said she learned marketing ideas from other exhibitors and visitors to the trade show.
So far, the game can be purchased at Book and Brier in Regina or on-line at www.afewbricksshort.com.
Meanwhile, Campbell said she can hardly go for a drive without noticing something else she could use in the game.
She already has enough categories for a second edition and is considering a junior edition for those younger than age 12.
Campbell said her family and friends have had a lot of fun playing the various prototypes.
“Making a million dollars was never the goal,” said the inventor.
