Game Fame
photography by Chuck Zovko
A word game changed Karen Young’s life. It’s changing again.
Land grabber = acre taker. Large toupee? Big wig! It’s a word game called Think-It Link-It, and Karen Fried Young ’84 brought it to a toy store near you. To toy stores everywhere, actually.
Indeed, it was at no less a toy store than F.A.O. Schwarz that things first took off for Young and her brand new company, TLI Games, with the launch of Think-It Link-It (“The Game of Rhyme and Reason”) in 1992. Today TLI, based in New York City, offers more than two dozen titles, and its founder once again has a brand new venture in mind.
Young was a commercial real estate agent in Manhattan when the idea for taking Think-It Link-It to market took over her life. She and her friends had been spending a lot of time making up clues for and guessing two-word rhyming phrases. They were so hooked on it (“Every time we play, it doesn’t stop until we get kicked out of the restaurant,” Young told the New York Times) that she decided to use proceeds from a real estate deal to develop Think-It Link-It.
She had no retail, games, or manufacturing experience and no fear. She knew that maybe 95 percent of ideas for games never make it to market. She was told her game would never make it unless it was licensed by a big manufacturer. Young ran right through all the stop signs. She had prototypes of the game made and marketed them herself, and soon Think-It Link-It was outselling all the other games at F.A.O. Schwarz combined.
“If you live by the odds, you might not get anywhere,” she says. “If you look at the numbers, there are so many ways you can defeat yourself in life.”
After that, with each new game Young created, F.A.O. Schwarz agreed to a bigger launch. TLI now offers three other major brands in addition to the Think-It Link-It line, and the company’s City GO! Fund supports nonprofit organizations whose missions include inspiring, encouraging, and enabling kids to believe in themselves, think philanthropically, and realize their aspirations.
By 2007, TLI was enjoying so much success that Young knew she’d need to expand the company’s staff and infrastructure significantly to meet demand. She took time to consider her options and decided to phase out of the game world.
“I realized that if I was going to build a larger infrastructure, it would be in many ways like starting a new company, and if I was going to start a new company, I didn’t want it to be a board-game company,” she says. “I’d already reached most of my goals.”
Thus the new venture. She’s opening the Sip and Swirl Café on the Upper East Side. She plans to serve healthy food in a stylish, fun, family environment.
“People have told me that retail is horrible, there is a food crisis, and that I’ve never been in the restaurant business before,” Young says. But, obviously, she doesn’t take no for an answer.
“When people say ‘Definitely not!’ my first question is ‘Why?’” she says. “This feels like a very natural next move.”