My brother was recently on East Falkland, and so this seemed an auspicious reason to begin our blog with a game that was actually invented there more than 120 years ago.
In 1902, William Hardy, of the General Store, Port Stanley, invented a card game. Using the same number of cards as a conventional pack, he put letters on each card to make up sentences.
The letters on one suit made up the phrase "Pluck the goose", hence the name of the game.
The rules are simplicity itself*: each person gets a set of thirteen cards, which are placed in front of them face down, and has to rearrange them to form the given phrase.
Sadly the other phrases aren't listed, so we had to come up with three more. We chose three that might have been uttered in the Kelper Store in 1902:
Shear the sheep
Catch the sprat
Stable the mare
We also included a picture to do with the phrase to make the cards more lively.
To make the pack of cards usable beyond the Game of Goose, we encased the letter and image in the middle of a regular pack of cards, and you can of course use them for any standard international card game. We assigned the original phrase to Spades (as the highest suit) and the others we called by lot. Here are the phrases assembled:
To play the game for yourself, you can buy a copy here, printed on demand, at Make Playing Cards.
So who was Mr William Richard Hardy?
He filed his patent through a London agent in 1902, giving his address as the General Store, Stanley, so it seems likely that he was the W R Hardy who ran the Kelper Store there, and advertised in the Falkland Islands Magazine in 1897-1905. **
In the Magazine of 1896, we read: "Montague House has been purchased by Mr. W. R. Hardy. He has his store there, the accommodation apparently being none too large for the goods on show".
His style is flamboyant - one advertisement from 1903 began "An Ounce of Fact is worth a Shipload of Argument and it is acknowledged that W. R. HARDY'S KELPER STORE leads the way".
He seems to have been a notable figure, and in the Christmas pantomime of 1902 we hear as part of the plot that "The Baron informs his daughters of Prince Caramel's arrival in search of a wife, exhorts them to use their opportunities and to buy all they can for 1/6 at Hardy's Kelper Store in order to captivate him."
He advertised that he offered showers with fresh towels for people in need of a wash who were passing by, and provided shaves and haircuts. He regularly brought out a jeweller from England to service the watches of the locals:
"Once more from London D. J. JACOBS, Practical Watchmaker & Jeweller, has arrived in this Colony and wishes to thank the public of Stanley and the surrounding Camps for their favour, kind support, and begs to state he has come for a limited time, and hopes to further solicit all kinds of Repairs, Clocks, Watches, Jewellery, Phonographs, Chronometers, and Musical Instruments and all kinds of Automatical Machines..."
Shortly after his patent was granted, he died from heart disease in the Quarantine station in 1905, aged 39. From the advertisements in the Magazine, we know that his widow Caroline continued running the store at least for the rest of the decade.
This is one of many patents we have realised from the original documents. For some there are diagrams, for others (like this) we have to use our imagination. It's a form of design archaeology, bringing back ingenious game designs that never saw manufacture.
*from the 1903 final patent: "In playing the game thirteen cards of the same set are dealt to each player and the player shuffles his neighbour's cards which are then placed on the table face downwards. At a given sign each player takes up his cards and arranges them one behind the other so as to read the sentence with the letters in proper order. The first player who is ready calls out and the others keep on until finished, the last one paying a forfeit to the other."
Read the patent here at Espacenet Patent Search.
**A "kelper" was the name for a Falklands Islander at the time.
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