About Us A long, long time ago, in a college very far away.... <Queue the music Mr Williams!> Oh, you're still here! Well, it is basically true; it was a long time ago at Penn State University that the two Adepts first met. I (Lance) was working for student affairs with Thelma Greco, and she introduced him to Hugh to help design a quest for incoming freshmen. You see, Hugh was very good at coming up with these adventure things and I was very good at making them all look good.

Hugh and Lance at the 1st World Championship held at Land of Make Believe in Hudson, OH

At the time, Hugh was already playing an early version of Stupiduel he had come up with in high school. Players wrote down a list of items, as simple or strange as desired, and then used them to attack the other players. One of the fun features of this early version of Stupiduel was that everyone drew themselves on a sheet of paper, and then sketched their attacks out on the paper too! We played this form between classes a lot.

I forgot to mention that we used to put on gaming conventions back then too! Anyone around that remembers the old Neb Cons or the Nebulous Association??? Many, many....many moons went by, with Hugh and me out of college and in the real world, but still friends. Hugh's wife, Rachel, started to bug him to get off his duff and do something with all the game ideas he has. He had a lot, trust me! I was working for a print shop at the time, and told Hugh to pick one idea and we would fully develop it and get it produced. Thus was born Lost Adept Distractions! Well, not really, but it's a much shorter, less convoluted, fewer false-start-filled story than the real version.

Us back in the Penn State Days,in fact the night of graduation. I did say a long LONG time ago, didn't I?

Hugh was piled high and deep - no, not a PhD, the game concepts! He and I looked at board games and role playing games and finally came back to good old simple Stupiduel. He'd already converted it to a card game by then and the sometimes controversial title had been used for close to 20 years; the first deck had 378 cards in it and was already popular with the few people lucky enough to get into a game. But we questioned how it could be turned into a game to market.

At first we tried putting pictures of the items on the cards, but we found it had an unexpected side effect: players would only use the card as what was pictured, which severely limited game play. To this day, people comment about there being no art work on the cards, but if there's a picture, players will only use what's in the picture. Part of the fun of the game is coming up with new uses every game, so we abandoned pictures and focused more on picking the most versatile words.

Our first logo, the Lost Adept!

The item card "Junk", for instance, could be something like: “You're running down the alley and trip on junk”, or “Your gun misfired because its a piece of junk”, or “I was saved by a passing Chinese fishing junk”. You'd need 2 separate pictures for the first and last, and couldn't even have a picture for the middle one. Meanwhile, with a simple word, you could spend a casual hour (with Stupiduel experience) coming up with uses for “Junk”.

So, we limited the number of cards in the deck to 120, and figured we could use other rejected cards in future expansions (we have 2 so far). Then polished it up and put the game into production!

The official launch for Stupiduel was held at CosCon in Butler, PA on March 12-14, 2004. Things started off with a bang and went great for the next few years. We started working with a fulfillment house out of Cleveland and were available through every major game distributor. But when the fulfillment house went belly up, we were left in the lurch. About this same time I got busy with the increased ops tempo with the Air Force Reserves, and things fell quickly apart for Lost Adept and Stupiduel.

But we're still here, re-launching our flagship game, Stupiduel, and preparing for the domination of the solar system! Bawhahahah!

Oh, you're still here.... (Smile and wave, Hugh, just smile and wave....)