LI sports game maker debuts kids' game

Just in time for the Major League Baseball playoffs later this week, Strat-O-Matic Llc, one of the nation's largest producer of sports board and computer-fantasy games, operating out of a tiny, comfortably rumpled building in Glen Head, has come out with a new board game, the first in its 50-year history specifically for kids, the first also to be broadly sold on retail shelves, and its only new product this year.

Strat-O-Matic founder and owner Hal Richman said the company once had a large following among youngsters, but many "stopped playing our products" when electronic games became the rage more than a quarter-century ago. Strat-O-Matic's newest game, Baseball Express, is aimed at recapturing some of that market, said Richman, 75, who began developing sports board games in 1961, when he was an 11-year-old growing up in Great Neck.

Baseball Express, simpler than many of Strat-O-Matic's advanced sports games, is geared to 8- and 9-year-olds, Richman said. It is being sold for $10.99 by Toys R Us, the first time one of the company's games has been so broadly sold by a major retailer. About 98 percent of the company's sales are made over the Internet or by mail order.

"Many years ago, we had a very strong kid following," Richman said. "When the electronic games came out, the kids were overwhelmed" by them. "They stopped playing our products. In an effort to combat that and get back into that market, we came out with this."

Most of Strat-O-Matic's baseball games involve all 30 MLB teams and 900 players who make up the teams. They make use of a spate of statistics that guide play. A typical game for adults sells for about $50, said a Strat-O-Matic spokesman. Baseball Express uses only 42 players, all of them All-Stars, and does away with some of the heavy-duty statistics.

Richman said he sees the latest game as educational. "It's a math tool," he said.