How The Game Began

As a youngster growing up in a small community in Southern Ontario , golf became a good part of my life.  I started as a caddy in my early teens & I soon became an avid golfer.

As most people know golf in the Niagara Region starts in the spring, (April at best), & it usually ends in the middle of October.  If you are lucky you can head south in the winter and play as much golf as you can afford.  Unfortunately the majority of Canadians are not in a financial position to do this. After my retirement in 1990 I began to develop a golf board game to provide entertainment for the people that couldn’t go south for one reason or another.  In 1992 I attended a seminar for board game inventors in Toronto .  There, I learned a lot about board games.  I also learned that golf board games were not very popular as far as sales went.  Being a recent retiree from our family business, I decided to continue to research golf board games in my idle time.  The games that were available at that time showed me why there was not a market for golf games.  That’s when I decided to develop my game

Most of the games were designed showing all 18 holes on one “fold up page”. I thought, no wonder, the holes are too small, at that time I thought how can I make each hole a lot larger.  Then I thought, a separate large page for each hole made into a book form.  The dice approach that was used in most of the games, I felt did not create any excitement. I thought having spinners representing each of five separate clubs with different distances and hazards would well represent the actual swing of a golf club.

I started to make up my own prototype.  I drew 18 different golf holes on 20” x 10” cardboard. I added a heavy poster board for the front and back covers, I used string to coil them all together. This created a book form golf course.  I spent countless hours and days figuring the math that would allow all the distances for each club to coincide with one another.  At the end, the scores would come out quite similar to a real golf score.  I played it for months on my own & kept improving it.  Unfortunately, that’s where it ended.  I became more involved in other businesses.

In 2004 my daughter happened to mention the old board game to a very talented graphic designer that we used in our family business by the name of Gerardo Lopez.  Gerardo got so excited at that time that he asked my daughter if I would consider reviving the old board game, and he would provide all the graphics necessary to complete the game.

My old prototype was nowhere to be found and I thought, do I want to go through that all again?  A few days later I met Gerardo and he and I formed a bond and we began working together in the dining room of my home.  After two years of working together we had what we believed would allow Spin Swing Golf to overcome all of the negatives that have faced golf board games in the past.  The feel real game, the timing is now when golf is peaking to the hottest it’s ever been in many countries, in many languages, in so many age groups both female and male alike.

Look out golf board game barrier; Spin Swing Golf is coming through.

Jack E Huard

Inventor