The Game of Cootie
children's dice rolling and collection game
The Game of Cootie is a children's game for two to four players. The object is to be the first to build a three-dimensional bug-like object called a cootie. The game was invented by William H. Schaper in 1948. In 2003, the Toy Industry Association included Cootie on its "Century of Toys List" of the 100 most memorable and most creative toys of the 20th century.
History
The game was invented in 1948 by William H. Schaper, a manufacturer of small commercial popcorn machines in Robbinsdale, Minnesota. It was likely inspired by an earlier pencil-and-paper game where players drew cootie parts according to a dice roll and/or a 1939 game version of that using cardboard parts with a cootie board. Schaper's cootie, which was originally wooden and sold at the Schaper family's Robbinsdale Bakery, was commercialised in 1949 and moved to a plastic construction for wide distribution. Over 1.2 million game units were sold by 1952, and over 25 million by 1971.
In 1986, Hasbro acquired the game from Tyco Toys.
A "Cootie" statue was exhibited in Robbinsdale in 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Game of Cootie” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.