St. Thomas board game designer hopes players will 'Finesse' their bridge skills with new game

A St. Thomas woman with a passion for the card game bridge is seeing years of work come to life with a newly designed version of her favourite game.

Carole Coplea says she's spent years perfecting FINESSE, which she describes as a visual board game that's easier to learn than the classic trick-taking card game. While the concept is similar to bridge, Coplea believes she's got something unique.

"After I had spent a few years developing this thing and once people started playing the game itself, I realized it's not a bridge game," Coplea explained. "It's a serious game on its own."

According to her rule-booklet, the game revolves around four players each putting down a card, with the highest one winning. The objective of the game is to predict how many times your team will win.

The board features five ramps which help to visualize the gameplay, as well as game tokens placed on coloured squares. She's even created a new deck of cards.

"The only thing we have to translate are the rules, because there's nothing to translate with the game itself. Anybody can play it," Copela said.

With approximately 300 game sets in production, Copela said her plan is to set up a stall at the Horton Farmers' Market in St. Thomas.

Creating the game was not an easy task, Coplea said. After working out the rules of the game, the next step was to sketch out the board and take it to a local print shop.

She then tested the game on family members before recruiting a larger group of testers through social media.

She said she implemented a lot of the feedback she received, including additional symbols to make it accessible to people with colour-blindness, which she said she now considers a very important aspect of the game.

"The tests helped me with some of the refinements," she said. "That is what the game is now."

Kayla Gibbens is the owner of Uber Cool Stuff in downtown London, which specializes in board games. She said many card games have been successfully transformed into board games, like FINESSE.

"A lot of games are kind of based off of other ones," she explained, using the game Cribbage as an example. "There's Crib Wars, where there's more of a battling element to it. One game feeds off another one in a gameplay aspect— it's really interesting to see those growths."

Creating a new board game and trying to get it distributed has gotten a little easier with social media, Gibbens said, but she pointed out that having a strong community of game enthusiasts is important. She note that it blew up during the pandemic when people were looking for activities during the lockdowns.

"It always helps to have those communities around so you can get the feedback about how a game plays. You can get the word out and get a feel for the audience as well."

"I think there's still a growing market," Gibbens said.

Coplea enjoys the strategy and tactics of any board game, but says bridge is her favourite due to its challenging gameplay.

She hopes FINESSE will offer players that same type of challenge, and potentially lead them to want to learn to play the original card game.

"It's a lot easier to learn when you're young," she said. "I'm hoping that my game will help people learn the fundamentals of bridge before they actually need to learn how to play bridge.