Stalefish Labs

The Vault Opens: Three Tall Tales Decks Never Made It to Print, Until Now

This series has spent its first few weeks on the almosts. Tall Tales almost ended up in Starbucks. It almost got a custom edition at Cracker Barrel. I pitched it to 70 retailers, most of them now out of business. What I haven’t talked about is what I made for those almosts — the cards I wrote for editions that never went to print. They’ve been sitting in spreadsheets for twenty-three years. Today they go online.

The Cracker Barrel Edition That Almost Was

I’m a native Nashvillian, which is increasingly rare these days. I grew up with Cracker Barrel as a road trip staple, complete with the vintage candy in the gift shop, the triangle peg game, and endless biscuits. The company is based in Lebanon, Tennessee, half an hour east, and after getting an initial soft reply via a cold letter writing campaign about them carrying our card game Tall Tales, I learned I had a surprisingly direct connection to the top. I ended up getting a real sit-down, inside the building, with the founder and CEO himself, to show him the game. A truly rare opportunity for someone with zero marketing experience trying to launch a new game.

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.

How Tall Tales Got Designed (in Letters)

In January 2002 I dropped an envelope in the mail addressed to my brother Steve. Even in 2002, mailing a letter to a sibling was unusual — but these weren’t usual circumstances, and the address wasn’t his usual one. He was, in the letter’s own phrasing, in a “new temporary environment” — incarcerated, briefly, in one of the not-good stretches that bracketed the good ones.

The Cell Phone of Games: Notes from Toy Fair 2003

In February 2003, a blizzard later known as the President’s Day Storm shut down most of Manhattan and made it nearly impossible to get to the Jacob Javits Center, where the American International Toy Fair was set up that week. I was supposed to be at booth #6250 in the Specialty Source section on the 1st floor, debuting Tall Tales Pocket Edition. I made it. So did most of the other indie game makers — on foot, dragging suitcases of inventory through snow that was deeper than the wheels on the suitcases. It was my first Toy Fair, my first time designing a custom trade show booth, my first experience learning the ins and outs of NYC union labor…check with an electrician before you plug or unplug ANYTHING!

How Tall Tales Almost Ended Up in Starbucks

In the fall of 2001, I was deep into creating a trivia/storytelling game called Tall Tales. I started meeting my brother Steve at a Starbucks near where we lived in Nashville, after his AA meetings let out. It was one of the “good periods” with my brother, when he was focused on recovery and we could have a reasonably normal relationship. We had ups and downs over the years, and this stretch would prove to be the most meaningful one we shared. Often a few of his sober friends came along for our nightly coffee sessions, and it being summer and nighttime, we’d typically sit outside. The tables were small, maybe twenty-four inches across, and we’d push two together to get four or five chairs around. The conversation ranged wildly and there was a variety of interesting characters from night to night, and periodically I’d pull a half-finished prototype of my game out of the car to playtest.