RETAIL group Seibu has placed an initial order of 50 sets of Latrel, the new board game that promises to become a money-spinner. The game, Latrel, has been devised by Richard Morgan, managing director of Millennium 2 Games. And Mr Morgan is looking for a partner to help him take the game to China and Asia. 'We had one serious approach. They planned to do all the investment for the factory and so forth, but I think they are too small,' said Mr Morgan. For Mr Morgan, a sleepless night sowed the seeds for the birth of the game. His other company was in trouble in November last year and the broadcasting engineer was suffering some sleepless nights when the idea struck him. Now, a year later, his product is already breaking records in a market that is notoriously difficult to crack. The game, Latrel, that Mr Morgan devised, combines elements of chess and draughts, takes three minutes to learn and looks set to sweep the chess boards of the United States, Europe and with luck, China. 'Only one in 100,000 games breaks through,' said Mr Morgan, 'and only one in 100 of them is successful.' But Latrel had already outpaced first year sales of blockbusting games such as Trivial Pursuit, he said, and with orders placed by a US company for 500,000 games over three years and high acclaim from specialist games magazines in Britain and the US, success now seems assured. The praise heaped on Latrel is not the only good thing to have happened to it. Within two months of having the idea while fiddling with a chess board on that sleepless night, the head buyer at Hamley's, the world famous London toy shop, was placing orders. Mr Morgan, whose other business provides giant television screens for display and broadcast purposes, has even convinced his friend Man Ying-chau to give up his restaurant, the Oakwood Palace in Enfield, London, shift to Hong Kong and lead the game's thrust into China. 'I showed the game at a trade fair in Shenzhen, and look at the response,' said Mr Man, gesturing at the thick pile of business cards potential partners and buyers the game attracted. Mr Morgan has signed distribution deals with one of Germany's two largest toy distributors and another with a US firm. In Britain, entry into Hamley's which sold out its first order of 144 games in under two weeks, helped the product along, as did articles in women's magazines tipping it as the 'next big thing'. The only stumbling block seemed to be an inability to get the product placed in chain stores - the key to big European and American sales. 'There is a catch 22 about getting a chain store to take on a game - if you aren't being distributed by a chain store, chain stores won't distribute your game,' Mr Morgan said. But Mr Morgan managed to convince a British chain of high street stationers and book sellers to test-market the game in the Midlands area and the chain looks set to go national with the game.
