A QUICK PATCH with long-time growth
as reported in Games Games Games magazine, December 1999
What do TriBond, Blurt, Mad Gab, and Kuba have in common? They were all produced by a new old company called Patch Products. “Old” in that the company was formed as a commercial printer in 1971; founding brothers Fran and Bryce Patch became immersed in the toy business when they began printing games like Trivial Pursuit and Cabbage Patch Doll sticker books. “New” in that they have just put together a good line of games within the decade. In 1989, they teamed up with Tim Walsh, a Colgate university footballer who then played professional baseball in Guanajuato, Mexico. Tim and two college friends invented a game called TriBond, the success of which launched the company’s now-healthy game line. The object of Tribond is to figure out what three items have in common. For example, “A Wave, A Split-Fingered Fastball, A Huddle”. Answer: “They break.” Some of the questions are tricky, and it’s fun as a team game.
Blurt, Walsh’s second game, is the kind of party game where everybody knows the answers. The point is, who can blurt them out fast enough. For instance, how quickly can you should out the word for, “The amount of medicine taken at one time”? (“Dose”.) Mad Gab is another party game, promoted as, “It’s Not What You Say, It’s What You Hear”. Teammates have to figure out what you’re saying if you yell something like, “Ask Rude Arrive Her.” Say it quickly and it becomes clear as “A screwdriver.” Most of it translates into British English too, I think.
Attempting to describe in print the amusement of a party game is like trying to share the excitement of a parachute jump with the grounded. You really have to try it. Dictionary Dabble, another Patch product, you can try, even if you don’t own the game. It’s based on a game called Fictionary or Dictionary (there have been at least six versions of it over the past decade), in which players make up fictional definitions to a real word no-one knows, and then you vote on the definition–with the real one included–that you think is correct. This is one of my favorite games, and Patch makes it easy by eliminating the need to page through a dictionary. A great variation of Fictionary is Patch’s Malarky. Here players try to bluff the answers to questions based on author David Feldman’s “Imponderables.”
But, when push comes to shove, my favorite Patch game is Kuba. This two-player, all-strategy game consists of a plastic formed board with 29 balls in three different colors, the object being to push all your opponent’s balls or seven of the 13 neutral balls off the board. The instructions are simple, the games quick, and yet the strategy is complex. Kuba is on my “Best Games” list (I have no idea how many other games are on that list).
Patch is one of the small, independent companies that’s getting large enough to play with the big boys. But they maintain an entrepreneurial spirit that shows up in their playful products.
