Woodland Happy Families Classic Card Game for Kids | Retro Design & Illustrations | Bright, colourful & fun travel card game | Gibsons Games

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And then I understood. My favourite vintage Woodland Happy Families card game all shiny and new but with original Racey Helps illustrations beautifully intact. Like I said –“whoop, whoop!”.

These card games must have made many a child very happy when they opened their birthday or Christmas presents. These were Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan both of them with reduced numbers of cards from the originals. They renamed Sylabex as Word Maker and added two new games to the range in 1984 based on the famous Beatrix Potter children’s books. The firm’s showrooms and headquarters are situated at 8 Bridewell Place, London, E. C. 4 but during the period of the British Industries Fair they will be exhibiting the complete collection of their productions at The Waldorf Hotel, Aldwych.International Football Whist was another unusual game which had a paper football pitch and a little metal football as well as the cards. In 1975 there was only one game published, Noddy Snap (above), again based on a children’s TV series and intended for the very young. It is a good job that Gibsons rescued the old Pepys games or perhaps they would have disappeared for ever. As it is our grandchildren can still enjoy a Pepys game like we did years ago. It takes you on a tour of England and Scotland and the cards show many of their most lovely beauty spots. A 1944 advertisement read: “Pepys Card Games are a good substitute for the holiday entertainment voluntarily given up this year in the cause of the country.

A second edition of Round the World was issued in the late 1960s when Concorde first flew and this aircraft was substituted for the Comet. The last Double Feature game, Channel X was issued in 1966 and showed Pepys awareness of modern TV advertising on the new commercial channel. Castell Bros Ltd were located at 55 Clerkenwell Road London, E.C. in 1908 when they submitted a Provisional Application for a new type of Whist Token Artists were despatched to sit through endless showings of “Snow White” making drawings for the cards and Kenneth Collins, Castell Bros managing director, sat down to write the rules for the game. Also offered was Foreign Legion, a game with the novel idea of a map in four sections on four cards.Also appearing was Gulliver’s Travels, which was anonymous but registered to Castell Bros in March 1940.

When the Snow White card game was used to promote Pears Soap, as far as I know there was no special wrapping, only the usual glassine wrap for the cards inside the box with a gold seal printed in red.Finally the word game Spell came along in its first edition and a further three editions at least followed later.

The company was sold again in 1977 not doing very well. The buyer was T J & J Smith Ltd who produced Dataday diaries and were a competitor with Pepys in that market. Woodland Happy Families is a charming variation of the classic children's card game and is a classic 'set collecting' card game. The cards in this set feature beautiful colour illustrations of lots of favourite woodland creatures. The aim of the game is to collect complete sets (families) by requesting cards from the other players. A player either receives or gives a card on each turn. The winner is the person who collects the most sets. About Us Also Alison Uttley’s famous Little Grey Rabbit books provided a new subject for Little Grey Rabbit which was another example of the kind of quality game that Pepys was capable of producing. SOME ECONOMY GAMESThe trains were brought up to date with the new liveries of the four new British Railways regions. SOMETHING FOR THE GIRLS The first edition of Happy Families of the World was another of the economy 36 card games and probably sold very well because there seem to be a lot around even now. There are secret messages on some of the cards which can only be read using the monocle which is a cardboard cut-out with a red viewing window; another good idea for a game. Of course, less fortunate children may have had to make do with cheaper games which were readily available from manufacturers like Tower Press and Clifford.