“Girls like something beautiful, something nice to look at,” Ms. The resulting product looks something like a combination of the My Little Pony characters, with its dainty toy horses, and Webkinz, the line of stuffed animals linked to online worlds. Braendgaard designed Bella Sara to be prettier and gentler, and without a competitive component. The story of Bella Sara starts in Denmark, where Gitte Odder Braendgaard, a social worker who had worked with emotionally disturbed children, noticed that while her son collected Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering cards, her two daughters were not fans. Adkison recalled, but “I looked at it and was pretty much on the next plane to Copenhagen.” He asked about the cards and was told, “It’s a girls’ game, you won’t be interested,” Mr. Adkison said in a recent phone interview from Seattle, the headquarters of Hidden City Games.īut he was at the Game Manufacturers Association trade show in Las Vegas in 2006 when he stopped at the exhibit of a Scandinavian distributor. When he left Hasbro in 2001, “I said I’d never do another card game,” Mr. Then he started Hidden City Games, which owns the worldwide rights to Bella Sara outside Scandinavia, where it originated. He founded Wizards of the Coast, a game-publishing company that not only made Pokémon a household name but also enabled him to acquire Dungeons & Dragons.Īfter selling the company to Hasbro for nearly $500 million in 1999, he bought Gen Con, which runs a game convention, from Hasbro. Adkison, whose business instincts have proved sound. (Girls can use a computer mouse to clean the horse’s living quarters and feed it hay, but they can’t trade horses with their friends.) Bella Sara cards are not used as part of a competitive game, where having a rare card can mean the difference between triumph and defeat.Īlso, each card comes with a code that can be entered on a Web site, unlocking a horse’s stable, but each code can be activated only once - meaning the cards are meant more for collecting and less for trading.

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