Here Come the Ponies!

He has already introduced America to a boy-oriented trading card game (Magic: The Gathering) and one with unisex appeal (Pokémon). Now, Peter D. Adkison is hoping to find new success with a line of collectible cards aimed at girls. This time the product may be a tougher sell because girls in the desired age group — 6 to 12 — have never driven a trading card craze. The cards, called Bella Sara, are clearly more girl-friendly than the latest set of hockey cards or Dragon Ball Z cards. They have pastel colors, fanciful pictures of unicorns and virtual horses to groom, along with girl-power sayings like “Have the courage to trust yourself” and “Use your love to bring peace to the world.” But history is against Mr. Adkison. “Is it possible a trading card product could catch on primarily with girls?” said Alan Narz, a columnist for Card Trade magazine. “Yes. Has it ever been done? No.”

There are challenges other than history. 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. Also, 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. (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.)

These matters do not daunt Mr. Adkison, whose business instincts have proved sound. 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.

After selling the company to Hasbro for nearly $500 million in 1999, he bought Gen Con, which runs a game convention, from Hasbro. Then he started Hidden City Games, which owns the worldwide rights to Bella Sara outside Scandinavia, where it originated. When he left Hasbro in 2001, “I said I’d never do another card game,” Mr. Adkison said in a recent phone interview from Seattle, the headquarters of Hidden City Games. But he was at the Game Manufacturers Association trade show in Las Vegas in 2006 when he stopped at the exhibit of a Scandinavian distributor. He asked about the cards and was told, “It’s a girls’ game, you won’t be interested,” Mr. Adkison recalled, but “I looked at it and was pretty much on the next plane to Copenhagen.”

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.
Ms. Braendgaard designed Bella Sara to be prettier and gentler, and without a competitive component. 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." www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/business/12bella.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin