By Khalida Sarwari
It has been said that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Frank Thibault found that to be true many years ago when he was faced with the dilemma of giving his children presents at Christmastime on a high school teacher’s salary.
It was that necessity that contributed to the creation of a hobby that still keeps him going today, just days shy of his 92nd birthday: that of board game inventor.
“Every year my kids had brand-new games for Christmas,” said the longtime Saratogan. “They may not have been the best, but they were the newest.”
In those days, he said he’d design up to three games a year, usually during summers when he was on break from school. But the ideas were always coming to him.
“Most of my prototype-making was in the summer or whenever I could squeeze one in,” he said. “But you can’t shut out the ideas when they come; you have to work on them.”
Those prototypes would take him anywhere from six months to a year and a half. Some cost him a few hundred bucks to put together, while others set him back a few thousand dollars.
His first game was Ploy, a multi-player strategy game released by the 3M Company in 1970. That also happens to be one of his personal favorites, he said, “for pure game quality,” along with another word game he released in 1989 called “Cue Me.” That game did well in Denmark, he said, but not so much here.
Thibault’s most popular game is “Topple,” and 33 years later it’s still sold in stores and online. It was recently reissued by the Pressman Toy company as “Topple Chrome.” It’s also his best-selling game; every once in a while he receives a nice royalty check in the mail; the last one was for about $6,000.
“That’s been my bread and butter, mostly,” he said.
His friend and former tennis partner, Gloria Batra, remembers her kids playing the strategy balancing game years ago when they lived in Texas. “My children loved that game,” she said.
Earlier this year, at the age of 91, Thibault released “In Kahoots.” On Amazon, where it is selling exclusively, it is described as an interactive “word game [that] has players attempting to give and guess clues to help them discover two-word phrases.”
His aim with this one, said Thibault, was to make a game where the participants would be fully engaged for the entire duration of the game.
“I wanted it to be for three to six players,” he said. “I said, ‘What could I have them doing while they’re sitting around there; what would occupy them mentally?’ So they’re not just drumming their fingers waiting for their turn. They’re all involved all the time.”
The game has sold about 500 copies since its launch in January, but Thibault expects sales to spike once the holiday season rolls around.
For now, it appears “In Kahoots” will be the conclusion of Thibault’s 47-year career as a board game designer and inventor. “I’ve done enough of those,” he said. “It’s time to quit and do something else.”
That “something else” just might be a book he’s writing on creative problem solving, which he hopes to complete by the end of the year.
“Ideas are what keep me going; they energize me,” he said. “I’m always looking for a new idea to keep me interested in things.”
A former English teacher who taught in the Fremont Union High School District, Thibault has lived in Saratoga since 1956 after moving to California from Minnesota. He has four adult children. His son, Mike, is head coach of the WNBA team the Washington Mystics; Larry is a high school teacher in Santa Cruz; Barbara is a nurse in Idaho; and Jane lives in Huntington Beach and runs an office for Second Harvest Food Bank. He also has 10 grandchildren.
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