Patriarch Louie Stotz is celebrating the national release of The Thanksgiving Game, a “board game without the board” he invented in 1977 while waiting for family members to arrive for dinner at his Lexington home.
Stotz and son-in-law Tim Lester formed The Thanksgiving Game, Inc. in late 2006 and began working on a prototype.
The game works like this: Each player writes on a card those things for which he or she is thankful. Players then guess who wrote down what. Points are awarded for each correct guess.
“It’s always the highlight of the Thanksgiving gathering,” Lester said.
Today, the game is available nationwide at Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores and at select Kroger stores in Kentucky, Central Tennessee, Southern Indiana and Southern Illinois.
The game is available on the Web at Amazon.com and through STL Distribution, which also distributes the game to Christian retailers.
Included in the game—which sells for $19.99—is a set of entry cards to write down what each player is thankful for, guessing sheets and guessing sheet covers—all to get families “ThanksGiving, ThanksGuessing and ThanksSharing.”
According to a written history of the game, bad weather played a part in the game’s creation. Stotz’s wife’s parents were late arriving for Thanksgiving dinner and “I could sense the restlessness,” said the longtime member of Calvary Baptist Church in Lexington.
The family was “hungry and ready to eat—but you just don’t start Thanksgiving until your mother-in-law arrives,” he said. “So I passed out small pieces of paper and pencils and declared, ‘We’re going to play a game.’
“That was the beginning of The Thanksgiving Game.”
Fifteen years later, Stotz and his family set out to produce the game for distribution. Several variations were developed, but the project never got off the ground.
In 2006, Lester, a member of Versailles Baptist Church where his wife, Maria, serves as music minister, encouraged his father-in-law to give the idea one more shot. Stotz agreed and hired Lester as director of marketing.
After months of work on the game’s design, artwork, copyrights and patents, the first several models of The Thanksgiving Game were delivered. Stotz and Lester have been on the road ever since promoting their product.
Stotz said he is “completely convinced that this is not our game, but God’s.” Confirmation of that came during a mission trip last spring, he recalled.
Agreeing to travel to Texas with a college missions team from Calvary Baptist, Stotz instead found his mind focused on all of the work he needed to do for his new business venture. The team was serving at Mission Arlington, a large ministry center in the heart of Arlington, Texas, that Stotz had visited before.
During orientation, a ministry worker told the story of how God had provided extra turkeys to feed 17,000 people at Thanksgiving. Stotz said he then realized why he was there.
He met with Mission Arlington founder Tillie Burgin the next day and told her God wanted him to donate a portion of The Thanksgiving Game proceeds to the ministry.
Stotz has since returned to Arlington, making the company’s first donation.
Lester pointed out that the purpose of The Thanksgiving Game is not for the company to make money, but to bring families together.
“Most families, I don’t care how normal ... you have some times where you may only see those folks once or twice a year,” he explained. “But to really get into learning things about their lives, … this provides a format to do that in a fun way that may not happen if you didn’t play this game.”
And the Stotz family has realized the game’s many blessings over the last 30 years. Stotz said his wife, Jo-Ellen, has saved every card that has ever been written on.
“We laugh and cry and remember how God has blessed us through the years,” Stotz noted.
He hopes other families will experience the same blessings.
“All of these games, once used, will add up to over 5 million expressions of gratitude,” he said. “That’s a lot of thanksgiving.
“The signs are abundant that God has a purpose for (The Thanksgiving Game), and that He will use it for His glory.”
Western Recorder issue date: November 11, 2008
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