How Tall Tales Almost Ended Up in Starbucks

Michael Morrison — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

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.

Like most indie games, Tall Tales was a side project, and I had been working on it for about four years at that point. The constraint of those little patio Starbucks tables, room for about two coffees and a pastry in the middle (cheese danish!), is the reason Tall Tales is shaped the way it is. I didn’t know that when I started bringing it. I figured it out around the third or fourth evening, when I noticed I’d been quietly redesigning the game to fit that particular surface.

Cranium and the third place

The most-played new game in America at that point was Cranium. It had launched in 1998, the work of two ex-Microsoft colleagues, and become a phenomenon largely on the back of an unusual distribution deal: it was sold in Starbucks stores. Howard Schultz’s “third place” thesis, Starbucks as the place between home and work, was at its rhetorical peak. The third place was supposed to have games in it, and Cranium had won the slot. And Schultz was right, Starbucks was precisely that third place for me, my brother, and his friends.

I was a fan of Cranium, but got frustrated every time we tried to play it at a Starbucks. The board didn’t fit on the tables. Its design drew from traditional board games — it was built for a dining room table. We’d push two café tables together and the board would still hang off the edge, and someone would inevitably bump it knocking pieces around. The mechanic and the venue weren’t aligned. Turns out Cranium was better designed for your first place, not your third place.

The thing I noticed at the third or fourth evening with Steve’s crew was that the prototype I’d brought, by then a deck of cards, a die, a stack of creature-puzzle cards, and no board…fit. It fit on the table with two coffees and a slice of marble loaf (runner-up to cheese danish) still in play. We could actually play it there. And the game’s social mechanics — bluffing, voting, telling whoppers about the worst date you’d ever been on — turned out to be exactly the kind of thing that worked in a coffee shop. A board game asks you to focus on the board. A storytelling game asks you to focus on each other. The Starbucks table, where you were already focused on each other, was the right venue. I wasn’t adapting the game to the venue. The venue was telling me what the game already wanted to be. It took a while but I eventually listened.

I went home and rewrote the design pitch. It wasn’t “a card-based trivia game” anymore. It was “a lounge game,” and the entire spec started organizing itself around that idea. No board. No dice. No writing. Two minutes from picking up the box to playing the first card. A footprint that fit the smallest table you could realistically be sitting at. What’s funny in retrospect is that I called this version of the game the Pocket Edition, with full plans to produce a full-size version later. It turned out the Pocket Edition became the game, because it was the size for which the content and game mechanics were naturally tuned.

Three letters to Seattle

I started writing pitch letters to Starbucks in September 2002.

There were three of them, to three different people inside the company — one to Orin Smith, who was then the CEO, one to Darren Huston, a senior VP, and a generic one to “Coffee Folks” at the corporate PO box, in case the more targeted ones bounced. They have aged about the way you’d expect a thirty-something’s pitch letters to age: a little earnest, a little knowing, a little too proud of phrases like “die-hard Starbucks customers and Starbucks shareholders.” I did own a little Starbucks stock at the time, so that was fully above-board, if not a bit cheeky. I cited the Cranium comp directly. Starbucks had figured out games could thrive in their setting; I had simply built the game that fit.

The letter to Darren Huston went further than the others. I told the actual story of why I’d designed the game the way I had — the evenings, the small tables, the support meetings, my brother. The pitch was that the design hadn’t come from a market analysis of the third-place trend; it had come from being in the third place, week after week, watching what actually fit and what didn’t. We’d already proved the use case before we knew it was a use case.

I made prototype cards in Starbucks-themed artwork. [Insert: detail crop from Prototype/StarbucksCards.ai.] The Illustrator file is still in the project folder. They were never delivered — by the time the first real response came back from Seattle, it was clear the answer was going to be no.

Starbucks evaluated the game and passed. They didn’t say it wasn’t good. They said it wasn’t a fit. I assume the real answer was something more like “we already have Cranium and aren’t looking to add a second game right now,” which is a fair answer. Cranium had been a hit for them. Shelves are finite. Tall Tales went on to ship at the American International Toy Fair the following February without Starbucks distribution, found a small but enthusiastic following at independent toy and game stores, and never broke through the way we’d hoped. The lounge-game thesis turned out to be right. The retailer who would have validated it didn’t bite.

Why I’m telling this now

I’m telling this story in 2026, as part of putting the last of the Tall Tales inventory up for sale on the Stalefish Labs site — which is a slightly strange context for it. But I’ve been carrying the inventory around for decades, and decided maybe it’s time to tell the tale of how it came to be, and then let it go. One quiet thing before the link.

Steve died a few years ago, in an alcohol-related accident, years after any of this. He was sober during those evenings in 2001 and 2002. He was sober for long stretches in the years after. AA recidivism is all too real, recovery is not a clean arc, and his story is not the redemptive one I might have written if the game had succeeded and he had outlived us all. None of that makes Tall Tales a memorial. But the design philosophy that became the spine of the game came directly from sitting at a small table with my brother during one of his sober stretches, and pretending otherwise to sell a card game in 2026 would be dishonest. He’s the reason the table-fit constraint exists. He’s the reason “lounge game” is a phrase I made up. The work happened because he was at the table. He was an incredibly funny and articulate person, and I miss him.

The remaining copies of Tall Tales Pocket Edition are here.

If anyone in your life is in recovery and you think a card game might find a place at the table the way it did for us, reach out via the Stalefish contact page. I have a small stack set aside for that.

Of course I kept a few for myself for the personal memories.