Pitching a Card Game to 70 Dead Retailers

There’s a folder sitting on my computer in the Tall Tales project named, with no imagination whatsoever, “Cover Letters.” Inside are 113 of them, written across 2002 and 2003, most addressed by hand to a specific buyer at a specific retail chain I hoped would carry the game — about seventy retailers in all, since the bigger chains got more than one letter. I looked the addresses up one at a time and tailored every letter. Most of those companies are now dead.

Not struggling. Not pivoting. Gone.

Tower Records. KB Toys. Blockbuster. Hollywood Video. Borders. Zany Brainy. Musicland. The Discovery Channel Stores. I pitched all of them. FAO Schwarz, which has changed hands so many times since that the name now means more than the company does. Spencer Gifts, which mostly lives online and in the few malls that somehow outlasted the rest. Reading the list back is less a review of a sales campaign than a walk through a cemetery where I happen to know every name on the stones.

There’s a shorter list that stings a little more: the retailers that are still standing and still said no. Walgreens. REI. Cabela’s. Bass Pro. Hallmark. Barnes & Noble. Target. Caribou Coffee. Peet’s. There’s no era-ended excuse to soften those. No casket I can look at and delusionally think, “my game might’ve saved them.” No, they’re still out there selling things today. The thing they declined to sell was mine.

Partway through the campaign I decided the way to cut through was to write to people instead of companies, and those letters are the best thing in the folder. The idea was an end-around on the corporate buyers: drum up interest directly with people tied to the game — some named on its cards, some just kindred spirits — and with a few in the press who might talk it up.

I wrote to G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate infamy — the game had a card about him — and couldn’t help adding a note: “Dancing Queen wasn’t released until 1976, so you would’ve really been ahead of your time to have hummed it during the Watergate incident.” I wrote to Penn & Teller, pitching Tall Tales as “a game in the same spirit as your show Bullshit!” I wrote to Terry Gross at Fresh Air with a line I still mostly believe: “we like to think we’re resurrecting the lost art of storytelling.”

None of the people answered. A few stores did.

That’s the quietly brutal part. Out of 113 letters, the return was a thin scatter of form rejections and, mostly, silence. Two addresses turned into something real. Starbucks wrote back, evaluated the game, and passed — a near-miss with its own story. Cracker Barrel went further than any of them: I met the founder/CEO and designed a custom edition of the game before they ultimately decided to pass. That one earned its own story, too.

Here’s what I couldn’t see then and can’t unsee now. In 2002, mailing 113 letters to toy buyers, music chains, outdoor outfitters, Watergate burglars, and magicians was a real distribution strategy. There were that many doors, and a small company with a clever product and a roll of stamps could plausibly reach a national shelf. Run the same campaign in 2026 and it falls apart on contact. Half the companies don’t exist. The survivors buy through distributors and category managers stacked ten deep, and a cold letter from a one-person game company would reach a recycling bin, assuming it arrived at all. The road I was walking got paved over. That doesn’t even touch the weirdness of mailing a physical letter to a celebrity now.

So the folder has become something other than a sales archive. It’s a core sample of a specific American retail moment — the one just before big-box consolidation and the internet finished rearranging the shelves. 113 envelopes to seventy-odd retailers, a whole landscape of places you could once walk into and find a strange little card game. Most of those places are gone now.

The letters outlived the companies they were written to. I kept them anyway, the way I kept the games.