'I didn't want to go to the grave with my board game idea under the bed'

Thirty-four years after coming up with the idea for a board game while on honeymoon, Colin Cliffe has finally seen his dream become reality.

The road hasn't been easy for him and the project was neglected over the years because of work and family commitments. as well as the death of his wife Bernadette in 2015.

It suffered another setback when Covid-19 hit and more disappointment followed when the production company he hired to make the game went into administration.

Undeterred, Cliffe found another company a few miles up the road and his strategy boardgame, Tri-Armi, has finally gone on sale. The 68-year-old said: "I knew what a good game it was and I didn't want to go to my grave with it under the bed."

Cliffe, from Audlem, Cheshire, came up with the idea for the two-player strategic board game while on a two-week honeymoon in a remote area of Greece.

He said there was little to do apart from playing a board game in a bar.

"So we sat and we drank and we played Connect 4 all night," he added.

He first thought he could improve the classic game, quickly realised he could not, so came up with his own idea using a flat hexagonal board.

He spent years trying to refine his invention, before putting the project entirely on hold when Bernadette died.

He said: "I get emotional, very emotional because I just wish my wife was here to see it."

It is billed as a tactical battle using triangular tiles and Cliffe believes it could sell worldwide.

His first version of the game ended in a draw 50% of the time, which he was not happy with, so he eventually forgot about it.

He would only rediscover it years later after moving house, but life continued to get in the way.

But, when his daughters were old enough to appreciate board games, they started playing his prototype "night after night" and although the draw rate was better after a tweak to the format, it was still not right.

The eureka moment came in his van on the way to work, when he realised the solution was to have two ways to win.

But within two months of that revelation, Bernadette was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he became her carer, before she died in 2015.

Her death was followed by death of his father, his sister, niece and then his mother, so all thoughts of the game were put on the backburner.

When Cliffe decided it was finally time to get his invention to market, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and "stopped me again in my tracks for two years."

He wanted to have the game made in the UK, and found a firm that could make, print and pack it, but they then went into administration.

He said: "I couldn't believe it, absolutely gutted."

In the end after much searching, he discovered people just miles from his home who could do the production work.

Cliffe is packing and posting his creation himself, and thinks he is onto a winner, describing the game as simple and addictive.

He already has ideas for two more board games and a card game.

"My mind never, ever switches off, it's just continually spinning, I just see something and I get an idea, and that's it, I'm away," he said.

Angela Poole owns table top gaming cafe Potteries Gaming in Stoke-on-Trent. She said board games are hugely popular, with new concepts being produced all the time.

She said: "The simpler a game is - depending on how strategic it is - it's going to be a quicker played game, so that could appeal to a lot more players.

"You think of anything in the world, and there's a board game about it, or very similar, I can't express the wide range."

People like the social side of traditional gaming, added Poole, who attends the UK Games Expo in Birmingham every year.

"They're already in five halls of the NEC, each year it gets bigger, there's more and more companies that want to be there, more and more people releasing board games."

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