Dragging a new board game to the table

In this city known for self-promotion, Celia Weiner can talk business with the best of them.

In the middle of a conversation with a waitress at a local restaurant, Ms. Weiner shifts the small talk to her latest project.

The waitress, whose family has been in the movie business for three generations, folds her arms, as if to steady herself for a conversation she suspects she has had a hundred times before.

Weiner has worked as a music editor in films including "The Right Stuff" and "Karate Kid." But her key interest tonight, and almost every night, is not in the pictures people watch, but in the games they play.

Before ordering, Weiner casually makes her pitch. She says that she is a board-game inventor and that she is selling a new game called Driveway Deals which everybody loves to play.

In Hollywood, such bald marketing does not seem out of place. Among independent board-game creators, it is the absolute norm.

Driveway Deals is the only board game in the US based on garage sales, says Weiner. But walk into any major toy store, Kmart, or Wal-Mart in America, and you will not find it. Despite years of phone calls, presentations, and pestering, Weiner has been unable to persuade a toy company to manufacture her game, or cajole a major toy store to carry it.

Despite the fact that board game sales in the US continue to grow, Weiner's struggle to sell Driveway Deals illustrates the difficulty small-time players face in an industry where a small group of companies decides which products ever see the light of day. It's one slice of what retail analysts call the "Wal-Martization" of America.

Most manufacturers and retailers "are absolutely not interested in pioneering new things," says Andy Daniel, president of Enginuity Games, an independent toy company in San Jose, Calif. "If your product is not a known entity, it's almost impossible to get it on shelves."

The fact that Weiner has had difficulty promoting Driveway Deals is somewhat surprising given her prior success. After watching hundreds of episodes of "I Love Lucy," she created a Lucy-based board game in 1989 that eventually won the approval of Lucille Ball and CBS.

Talicor, a Las Vegas gamemaker, agreed to manufacture 100,000 units. The manufacturer and CBS have received nearly all of the profits from the game's sales. Weiner, who has only made $5,000 on royalties, still considers herself fortunate to have been "published."

"They say you've got a better chance to produce a show on Broadway than to get a board game produced," says Weiner.

Driveway Deals is what industry experts call a "chase game." The goal: to beat the other players to a finish line on the board after purchasing five items at a variety of neighborhood garage sales.

Because more than 60 million Americans shop at garage sales, Weiner believed the game would be an easy sell. But Driveway Deals has faced a series of roadblocks. Weiner first spent three years attempting to sell the license for the game to one of the dozen or so major gamemakers. Several companies, Hasbro and Mattel among them, would not even speak to her over the telephone. Such a refusal is common among game companies who do not want to be sued in the future if they produce a game with a similar theme.

"I wish the buyers had more vision," says Weiner. "They have to see; people go nuts over this game."

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