An eBay Find For Town Historian—

Troque: Scrabble’s Unsuccessful Successor Returns To Newtown

Scrabble may have been the most successful board game developed by the late James Brunot of Newtown, but it wasn’t the only one. He produced a strategy game by the name of Troque (rhymes with broke), but it never achieved the success of its popular predecessor.

Forty-eight years after it was produced, a Troque game has returned to Newtown through the combined efforts of Newtown Bee Managing Editor Curtiss Clark and Town Historian Dan Cruson.

“Curtiss saw the game was on e-Bay as a product of Newtown and sent me an e-mail,” Mr Cruson said this week. The minimum bid was $9.99 so Mr Cruson put in a bid for $12, but as the only bidder he ultimately purchased the game for $10 from an antique collectibles dealer.

“It was important to us because of being produced in Newtown but an unimportant board game to others,” Mr Cruson said about the lack of other bids.

In 1955, following his success with Scrabble, Mr Brunot’s Production and Marketing Company attempted to refine and develop Troque, which was the creation of Arpad Rosti of Brewster, N.Y.

Mr Brunot had successfully produced and distributed Scrabble for more than 25 years from Newtown after securing the rights to the game from its inventor, Arthur Butts. Woodworking and assembly took place in the Flat Swamp schoolhouse and later in a building at the corner of Plumtrees and Hawleyville roads.

Troque, a strategy game similar to chess or checkers, consists of pieces composed of three concentric rings. The combined pieces were castles and the parts of each piece were the wall, tower and moat. The object of the game, which could be played by four players, was to get all the castles across the board to the opposing side or goal.

Mr Cruson said getting to the opposite side did not necessarily mean that person won the game. It was the person with the most chips who won. However, he noted, it would most likely be the person who gained the opposite side first because he or she would have captured more of the rival castles.

The castle pieces and chips were manufactured in four colors, red, blue, white, and yellow.

At the time Mr Brunot took on the project, he received a board and the pieces but no defined rules. After a year spent playing the game hundreds of times, Mr Brunot developed a copyrighted game with a set of rules supplemented by diagrams of possible plays.

The game was in production by July 1956 and available in department stores in New York and several local stores. On the box cover it states “Another exciting Scrabble product.”

But it was not to be. How long the game was produced is unknown, Mr Cruson said. “Obviously he had great hopes for it.” However, unlike Scrabble, the game never became popular and disappeared after a few years.

“I’m not sure when it went out,” Mr Cruson said.

Mr Cruson noted that while the game boards were most likely contracted out for printing, someone, perhaps someone locally, had to make the wooden game pieces.

“I’d love to know more about its production,” he said.

Eventually the game will be donated to the Newtown Historical Society for its collection, Mr Cruson said. Meanwhile, however, he intends to enjoy playing the game. “It allows me the pleasure of possession,” he said.

Rather than the game sitting on a shelf somewhere, Mr Cruson said, “My real desire would be to have it where people could actually play.”

However, the game he purchased is a “crippled” set, he said, in that it is missing a red moat and a blue tower, he explained. So that four people could play the game, Mr Cruson hopes that someone in town might have remnants of the game in their attic and would be willing to supply the two missing pieces.