This week's product of the week is a little bit different, it is a review of a fabulous game - The Pony Jumping Game - as created by our blogger Team Joyce, however it is also the tale of how the game came to be - enjoy!

Product of the week - The Pony Jumping Game

by Trish Joyce

This is a showjumping board game invented by Team Joyce a long time ago. Sarah was in Grade 2 and was set a project of making up any sort of game. When she came home from school she had already decided it had to be horsey! As a family we always played board games and so after a long discussion Sarah said, "how about jumping? I love jumping". From there on we all sat down and basically designed an easy flowing showjumping game. Using A4 sheets of paper and a stencil of a saddle that Sarah had cut, we all helped sarah make the cards, the judge’s cards, the certificates and the game play and she took it to school. Her teacher rang us afterwards and said "wow what a game!" and asked if we had thought about going further with it. Initially we thought the idea was ridiculous but after thinking about it more we believed we could do it.

Wes and I started looking for a game manufacturer but couldn’t find one in Australia that would sign a confidentiality deed. We didn’t want to take our game in and expose our ideas without it. We had already been stung in the past with an idea of putting Molasses into plastic buckets instead of the tins it used to come in. Many years ago Wes came up with the bright idea of placing the Molasses in many different sizes of plastic buckets, which sold very well at our local feed store. We brought it in the 44 gallon drums and poured it into the buckets ourselves. Because it was so well received we then approached a company in Melbourne, that were very impressed at the time and said they would be happy to involve us in a deal for our idea, well we never heard from them again. They even worked a deal out with the plastic bucket company we had been using for 18 months prior! Needles to say we were cut out of the takings and well today nearly all Molasses comes in plastic buckets! So with the board game idea I decided to email five different manufacturing companies around the world and received responses from one New Delhi in India and one in America. We decided to use a company called Funthinkers in New Delhi.

The next step was to hunt down a local graphic designer that could put all our ideas down and burn onto a CD so we could post it to Funthinkers to produce the game. It took 6 weeks for our order of 2500 games to arrive from India and we were counting the days! Wes and I went down to the docks in Melbourne to collect and load into the horse truck (the Dodge back then as you saw in the Beginning of Team Joyce in Chapter 3). It was so exciting. I even had the phone book with me on the way home and rang every toy shop from Korumburra to Omeo. The very next day after milking the cows and sending Sarah and Tiffany off to school we loaded up the car to the roof and off we went to all of the shops. We could confidently tell the shop owners we were going to advertise on television (in a commercial we made ourselves) in the coming weeks and they brought them in packs of six. We sold 500 games the next day with all the country shops giving us a go, bar one.

Here it is:

Wes made the jump wings and we borrowed the brick wall and asked the school of we could shoot it there. Some horsey children we knew also took part in playing it for the camera. Thanks must go to Matt Manks and Casey White for helping us make the commercial work well. Flash Sarah’s black pony who will be mentioned in Chapter 5 The beginning of Team Joyce coming soon, was a feature as well as Billy, Tiffany’s white pony. The sash was won at the very first Werribee Park Inter-school and even the picture on the front of the box was taken at that event!! The moving pieces are Tiffany and Billy. It was to be all about our beautiful girls as well, they would remember it forever. Wes and I even went to the studio to help put it all together I can honestly say the whole journey was amazing. We ran the ad for three years on country television, which helped us enormously. We had children writing to us and thanking us for the game and saying how wonderful the game was and how wonderful we were.

After a while running the small business and milking cows became difficult for us to manage and a company called Tree-Toys a large toy company approached us at the Melbourne Toy Fair and asked if they could produce and market the game, we accepted with glee. Only two years after that we developed the Saddle Club Cross- country board game. So here we are today 16 years later and the last few games are available at Mornington, Geelong and Lilydale Horseland stores. So if you wish to buy a fabulous fun and exciting board game go and buy The Pony Jumping Game. RRP $10.00

Team Joyce are proudly sponsored by Barastoc , Horseland & The Joint Formula

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