Las Vegas for the home - Casino Royale game from The Learning Experience

Nation's Business, Dec, 1995 by Michael Barrier

A.P. "Pete" DuBarry Jr. deals in "secondary fiber"--that's the entrepreneurially correct name for what used to be known as wastepaper. Through his three-person company, DuBarry International, in Encino, Calif, he buys wastepaper in the United States and exports it to Latin America and the Far East. These days, his business is an awfully good one to be in, as you must have noticed from all the shadowy figures scurrying away with the old newspapers you put by the curb for recycling.

DuBarry's real passion lies elsewhere, though--in games. Not in playing them or collecting them, but in making them. He does that through his other company, which he calls The Learning Experience.

None of DuBarry's games has yet muscled Parker Bros. or Milton Bradley off any retail shelves, but he is no dilettante in the field. One national retail chain carries one of his games in about 50 of its stores, he says, and another chain is looking at it. And--the ultimate accolade, in this ease--"we're in all the major casino gift shops."

That game in the stores is called Casino Royale, and the idea is, as an advertising flier "the fun and excitement of Las Vegas into the home." For anyone who has been to Las Vegas recently, that may be a disquietung prospect--who wants an artificial volcano belching all over the living room rug?--but DuBarry actually has something milder in mind.

Casino Royale has some Monopoly in its genes, DuBarry acknowledges, but "only in that you have squares in the perimeter of the board and property that can be acquired by the player. After that, it really changes completely, because the central theme is to be involved in different types of gaming activities."

In other words, when family members sit down to play Casino Royale, they have the chance to--quoting the flier again--"engage in roulette, poker, and craps while winding their way around the board." The properties they can buy are not Park Place or Boardwalk, but casinos such as Harrah's and the MGM Grand.

Those famous hotel and casino logos around the edge of the board--23 of them in all--are a large part of what gives Casino Royale its cachet. DuBarry didn't have any special entree to the people who could let him use those logos. He spends a lot of time in Vegas, but he says he's not much of a gambler; he just likes the place. He was at one of the casinos about 3 1/2 years ago, he says, "relaxing and having a nice glass of wine," when he realized that there had never been a Las Vegas game. So, "I pulled out a napkin and started making drawings of how the board would look."

DuBarry sent faxes to a number of casinos, inviting them to participate, and got replies from about half. "The thing that I thought couldn't happen, did happen," he says. "they loved the idea." He signed up not just casinos but other Las Vegas businesses--restaurants, a rental car agency, the Liberace Museum--for a coupon book that comes with each game.

DuBarry puts the value of the coupons at more than $200, and he says that at first they were too attractive: When stores in Las Vegas began selling Casino Royale-typically priced at $24.95--"and people found out that every copy of the game contained the coupon book, people were opening the boxes and taking out the coupon book, then putting the box back on the shelf." Now, buyers of the game have to request the coupon book by mail.

Casino Royale has been successful enough that "several casinos have ap- proached us" about producing games de- voted just to them, DuBarry says, "and we're looking into that."

For now, though, he is concentrating on another casino-based game, 21 or Bust, which he designed originally to be given away by businesses--it's much smaller than the bulky Casino Royale--but which he is also selling through casino gift shops.

The perfect corporate customers for his new game, he thinks, "are banks and insurance companies that say, 'Come open a new account and we'll give you a copy of 21 or Bust with this fabulous Las Vegas coupon book.' And since one out of 10 Americans are going to Las Vegas anyway, the odds are that you're going to hit somebody who's interested in going to Las Vegas."

DuBarry estimates that he now spends more than half his time in Vegas, checking on coupon redemptions and sales of Casino Royale. At 63, he is enjoying his modest success as a producer of games, but he admits that he finds that success bittersweet, because, at bottom, he would rather be making games of a different kind.

"I worked my way through college" as a student teacher, he recalls, "and I guess I've had a little of that in my blood ever since. When I decided to do some games, I wanted to do something that was educational. That's why the company was called The Learning Experience, and the initial games we produced were educational."

Starting about 10 years ago, he came up with products including Famous Dead Dudes, a set of trading cards with portraits and biographies of such "dudes" as Alexander Hamilton and George Armstrong Custer. He encountered "tremendous marketing resistance," though, so he decided to step away from educational games "and concentrate on something else." That's how Casino Royale came to be.