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Spot It, published by Asmodee, Blue Orange, and Play Factory, and designed by Denis Blanchot, Guillaume Gille-Naves, and Igor Polouchine, is a card game of 55 round cards with pictures where you have to be the first to spot the only matching items on both cards. Every two cards have exactly one matching item. I’m not exactly sure how they do that.
Reinhard Staupe is pretty sure that he knows, however. He designed Catch The Match, published by Amigo, Playroom Entertainment, Gigamic, and others, a card game of 15 square cards with pictures where you have to be the first to spot the only two matching items on both cards. Every two cards have exactly one matching item. Actually, it’s a lot easier to do that with 15 cards than with 55.
Richard is not planning to sue, but he’s plenty upset [PDF]. Catch the Match has been in print since it was released, and he believes that he should at least have been acknowledged.
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Reinhard Staupe, has had over 50 games licensed and is one of the most respected of the European games inventors. Kunterbunt (German)/Catch the Match (USA & UK) was one of his first published games. It uses 15 images on the cards and 15 sturdy cards. This was a decision of his licensees – his system allows for varying numbers of images and varying number of cards, and he has the original prototypes to prove this.
Any variant of numbers of images on the cards/numbers of cards is, in my opinion, blatant plagiarism.
Asmodee, Play Factory, Blue Orange should be having a stern word with their so-called ‘inventors.’
The honourable thing to do would be for these ‘inventors’ to return all monies paid to them in advances and royalties and the companies should pass them on to Reinhard Staupe, the true inventor, who, I’m sure, would offer to share them with AMIGO, Playroom Entertainment, David Westnedge Ltd, plus any other company that has been damaged by sales of thes ‘me to’ game.
And, of course, Asmodee, Play Factory and Blue Orange should do the honourable thing and withdraw their game from the market with immediate effect.
I think that it’s fair to say that the math behind the Spot It deck design is more sophisticated. You can read about it here:
https://plus.google.com/114937925666302803969/posts/Fa9Znut5JmK
The mystery is why didn’t Spot It have a “perfect” deck of 57 cards?
The illustrations here are great – http://images.math.cnrs.fr/Dobble-et-la-geometrie-finie.html
I think this is the case that you can copy someone’s idea, change it a little bit and then claim it as his own. And if get caught he can say it is a parallel development. Even though he copied something that already existed many years ago.
This case is similar to the toy Wedgits. Wedgits owner claimed that he invented the game and he claimed that he patented the game worldwide ( Whic is a lie). The game actually is an exact copy of a wooden game called Diamant. Diamant was designed by Swiss designer Peer Clahsen in 1981 for Naef Toys in Switzerland. If you look at the game and the pieces. They are all the same except that Diamant is made of wood, Wedgits is made of plastics. Diamant is a little bit bigger.
Shamed on you all those thiefs of someone’s idea.