Having introduced, in our first dozen years, many products from very small to very large, easy to very difficult, this was our year to engage and marry our design sense with ideas from eminent outside contributors, friends and kindred spirits. Here are their start-ups:

A few years later Chris took up woodworking and with his usual perfectionism turned out magnificent wood boards and obtained wooden horses (they look like chess knights) to go with them. In 2002 this deluxe version of Gallop earned a place on Games Magazine's "Games 100" list, but that's a story for another year.

Kaliko^TM
We became entwined with this beautiful set originally in 1985, simply reselling it through our printed catalog (pre-WorldWideWeb days) and buying sets from our friends, Charles and Terry Titus and their son, Steve, at Future Classics, who were making them in-house at the time. In 1991, having run out of their current production inventory and finding no takers among the big game companies to take over the license, they assigned to Kadon the exclusive rights to produce the future generations of Kaliko.

By then we were using lasers, a faster and cleaner method than the ingenious 14 banks of sawblades Future Classics had used, and Kaliko became a cherished member of the Kadon family. For ten years we reproduced faithfully the red-white-blue paths on clear acrylic to match the classic design. In 2001, having run out of the acrylic sets, we switched to wood to eliminate the frequent confusion of which side of a tile should be up. But that's a future story...
 

Lewis Carroll's Chess Wordgame^TM
When Kate had occasion to visit Martin Gardner in his home in Hendersonville, NC, in the late 1980s, Martin showed her his idea for a game suggested by some notes in Lewis Carroll's diary that Martin had been studying. Letters would move around on a chessboard like queens to form words. Martin suggested a set of rules, and Kate designed the game equipment to fit the theme. The story has it that Lewis Carroll is taking his young friend Alice on a picnic, and the tablecloth would form the gameboard. We added some other original games and a couple of solitaires to make a versatile entertainment package. Our first idea was to supply the cloth and letters in a Chinese food container, like a picnic basket. Soon we decided that was not good enough and switched to a handsome leather-like box that could serve as the "table" for the cloth. Twenty-five years later we still use the same happy design. It has stood the test of time. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) and Martin Gardner (1914-2010) are timeless.
 

Oskar's Disks^TM
When this young Dutch maze designer, Oskar Van Deventer, showed us his ingenious interlinking disks design, we were smitten. Having gotten the hang of laser-cutting, we made the first sets in crystal-clear acrylic that looked absolutely dazzling. After two years we switched to wood, a story for another year. We're proud to have been Oskar's first publisher, and 25 years later still have his elegant puzzle in print. In the interim, Oskar has created dozens of other puzzles and mazes, published by others, and has attained world fame among collectors. We're happy to see him at the International Puzzle Party, in whatever country is hosting it that year.

Throw a Fit^TM
We met Jeff Dender, a very young man, at EveCon 1990, a science fiction and gaming convention held over New Year's Eve in Virginia. He showed us his game idea of using 10 dice with all combinations of 3 colors. It was the neatest thing, and Kate took it on immediately, creating its name, working out the logical positions of the colors, and developing some cool puzzles to go with it. The original version was made with smallish white blank cubes to which we attached die-cut vinyl color squares. In 1995 we switched to large wood cubes for a more rustic look, but they didn't roll very well. Eventually we settled on jumbo white plastic cubes for the best of both rolling and stacking. It was the second of our growing collection of puzzles supplied in little pouches. We were deeply saddened to learn that Jeff passed away of cancer in 2015. He is survived by a son, David. Postscript: We were deeply touched when David wrote us and turned over to Kadon all rights to Jeff's idea. We will keep it alive as a memorial to a creative and benevolent spirit who left this world much too soon.
 

In the year 1991 we opened our doors to inventors whose ideas fit well with our own and who were agreeable to let us develop and embody their inventions in designs wedded to our own artistic vision. The happy fusion of others' functions with our forms became our tenth pillar.
 

1999-2024:   Finding kindred spirits