The Game of Goose as a template for games of advertising and promotion

The printed board game is well suited to advertising, provided that the production process is capable of achieving bright, attractive colours and that it is cheap, so that the game can be offered free, or for a nominal price. In the final decades of the 19th century, the techniques of chromolithography had developed sufficiently for these provisos to be met, so that the 1880s saw the introduction in France and the Netherlands of games designed specifically to promote commercial products. Among these games, the Game of the Goose had a particularly significant influence on design. This simple race game was well known and well trusted in the family environment through its association with educational games. Moreover, its protean structure was easily adaptable to product-specific variations that largely retained the excellent playing qualities of the original.

Early advertising games in the Netherlands

Van Houten's Tramway Game

The simplest way of creating a game to advertise a product is to take an existing game and just to print the name of the product or a corresponding slogan on the game sheet. This seems to have been the process in the case of the Tramway game published by Vlieger of Amsterdam about 1885. The game itself is a standard version of the two-track Tramway game described in Chapter 4, Section 9. The only way in which the Vlieger game distinguishes itself from other, non-promotional, editions is that the tramcar bears an advertising slogan (above the normal direction indicator): ‘Van Houten's Cacao – beste goedkoopste in gebruik’ [Van Houten's drinking chocolate – best and cheapest in use].

The Van Houten's Cacao Spel

In 1889, the firm of van Houten brought out the game shown in Figure 17.1, closely based on the classic Game of Goose; a version in French was also produced. Like its original, it was a simple 63-space race game played with two dice, in which the favourable spaces on numbers 5, 14, 23 etc and 9, 18, 27 etc denoted by a goose in the original game were instead denoted by characteristic images of the Van Houten Cacao tin.