No chutes, all ladders: One woman’s climb to the top of the board game industry

Before she finishes her sentence, an electronic bell chimes over a speaker system. The chime sounds similar to the peppy songs playing during Saturday morning cartoons.

She blushes slightly in response. “Just got an e-mail,” she says as her cheeks redden. “It’s actually the sound of the doorbell chime from “The Jetsons.” It gets a chuckle when people hear it.”

[youtube width=”500″ height=”300″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgiO-myHseE[/youtube]She continues talking about her creative process of “playing,” her eyes looking toward the ceiling as she reminisces about some of her childhood art projects. Her mother, Irene Brown, still remembers some of those projects.

“Peggy has always been creative,” she says. “I remember this drawing that I saved of hers from when she was two years old. You know most kids when they try to draw people — they usually do these stick figures and then just put two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth. But Peggy did this wonderful drawing with full facial features and everything,” Irene says, her inflection warm and motherly.

Brown says she owes her mother, a retired elementary school teacher, a great deal of credit for facilitating her own creativity as a child.

“Creativity and innovation are something that everyone has, but the ability of someone to continue to be creative goes back to childhood. Parents these days can either encourage creativity or stifle it, oftentimes unknowingly just because their child’s creations are different,” Brown says. “Just because the kid colors something a different color than what it should be doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” she says.

A Mr. Potato Head sits in Peggy's basement window. Toys are scattered densely over her entire house, occupying many nooks and crannies. Photo by Lukas Keapproth

“We always had crayons and markers and paper lying around,” Irene says. “Never coloring books though, we wanted our kids to create, not just color in the lines,” she says.

Not surprisingly, Brown is also the author of a handful of adolescent books, stressing ways to inject creativity into everyday life. An example she gave from one of the books is about using creativity when cooking, such as adding powdered cheese from macaroni and cheese boxes to freshly popped popcorn. The books also encourage kids to play traditional games but make up new rules — just like she did, and still does.

“When I’d play Monopoly with my siblings when I was little, we’d always change up the rules a bit. Either we’d put a little more money when you’d pass go or we’d make the land cheaper or more expensive. When you help people to think creatively, you see their eyes light up and they go ‘Wow! I would have never thought about that!’” she says, her arms flaring out in a sweeping motion.

“Peggy is just off-the-charts creative,” says Tim Walsh, a noted documentarian of toy and board games as well as one of Brown’s colleagues. “But not only that, she’s prolific. While others may conceive 10 products a year…Peggy can conceive 100.”

Even though Brown spends extensive amounts of time on creative teams and in corporate production rooms, she says the greatest toys over the years were conceived at kitchen tables or mocked up in basements and garages.

“Billion-dollar corporations still rely on the innovative spirits of independents who turn wit, whimsy and silliness into tangible products for kids of all ages,” Brown says.