Game About Farm Life Has Link to Pagosa Springs,
Home of Parelli Corporate Office
The Rohrbacher family farm, a game invention, a live theater in Pagosa Springs and Parelli Natural Horsemanship. What’s the common thread? A humble game created in the 1970′s – the Farming Game.
According to an article in the Edmonton Journal written by Mairi MacLean in 1999, George Rohrbacher was sitting on his tractor, baling hay one fine July morning in 1979, when he got the idea that changed his life and saved his farm. “We’d just about lost it all…we were going broke,” he recalls, talking about the years of drought that hit his Washington cattle spread in the late 1970s.
Rohrbacher was in the process of writing a historical novel about farm life in the 1970s when the idea for a game about farm life hit him. “It struck me like a ton of bricks. This would be a better game than a book …and 90 percent of what’s in the (game) box, I invented that day,” says Rohrbacher. “Then it took a week to convince my wife I wasn’t ready for the looney bin.”
The Farming Game deals with the very real risks and chances associated with farming. Players start the game with a 20-acre farm, no cash and a job in town. The object of the Farming Game is to build a self-sufficient farm large enough to support a family. One trip around the game board represents a calendar roll. Players roll dice for harvest and draw "farmer’s fate cards" which can bring fate such as drought, a grain embargo, or a market crash.
“It’s like the family farm economy at ground zero,” says Rohrbacher. He describes the game as a great subject for a business game that all ages of family members can understand and have fun with. Because of the element of chance for the farms, each game is different than the previous one.
In addition to the need for something to change economically for the Rohrbacher family when their own farm was in dire straits, the game was also a way to explain to non-farmers what the world’s most essential industry is about, and it was a way for farmers to laugh at the difficult situations farming brings. "If you lose your sense of humor in this business, you’re ready for a straitjacket," shares Rohrbacher.
Rohrbacher played his own game of chance when bringing the Farming Game to market, but it was a risk that paid off. The first production run totaled 10,000, and 7,000 games were sold in the first six weeks. By 1999, game sales totaled 400,000.
Fast forward to 2010. George Rohrbacher’s daughter Laura Moore and her husband Tim Moore relocated to Pagosa Springs, Colorado and brought with them their love of live theater and stage productions. The couple converted an empty building that was formerly a paint and outdoor store into a beautiful art center with a live theater space. A large part of the funding for the project was due to the Rohrbacher family and proceeds from the Farming Game.
When George Rohrbacher was in Pagosa Springs in the fall of 2011, he attended a business conference where he met Mark Weiler, CEO of Parelli Natural Horsemanship. In addition to his work at the Parelli corporate headquarters in Pagosa Springs, Weiler is very involved in the local community and was intrigued with Rohrbacher’s story about the Farming Game that was still going strong after over thirty years in production. Rohrbacher shared stories of families who send letters about playing the Farming Game as kids and now play it with their own children. Other stories involve having worn out three copies of the game, or expressing thanks that the game saved their children from a life of delinquency after it became a staple game that brought the family together and enticed the kids to stick around to play it. One extended family has celebrated Thanksgiving for the past decade with a Farming Game tournament.
Feeling the family game was in alignment with company values, Parelli Natural Horsemanship now carries the Farming Game and another Rohrbacher invention, the Hay Is For Horses card game, in their online webstore.
“It’s been a marvelous, interesting adventure,” says Rohrbacher. The game helped put three of his children through college and continues to support live theater in the small town of Pagosa Springs.
