And the lawsuit over it: https://generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-milli...
> November 26, 2012 - Innovention Toys LLC, a company headed by a Colorado professor named Michael Larson, won its patent infringement lawsuit against MGA, Wal-Mart Stores and Toys "R" Us. A federal jury in New Orleans found that the defendants had infringed Innovention's patent on a strategy board game using lasers and mirrors.
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Back in the days of http://www.gamecabinet.com being one of the primary sources for board games on the web you'll note a search on it: http://www.gamecabinet.com/info/PatentSearch.html
One of the things this let people do is find games that were patented, but never published.
Sid Sackson wrote in A Gamut of Games:
> The files of patents that have been granted are a fruitful hunting ground for forgotten games, although going through these files, as anyone who has ever been involved in a patent search well knows, is a time consuming job. Often the patented games are downright silly, such as a set of dominos made of rubber so that they can double as ink erasers (No. 729,489) or a sliding block puzzle with edible pieces so that a player who despairs of a solution can find collation in gratifying his stomach (No. 1,274,294). Often the patents are repetitious: There are over a thousand different baseball games.
The publishing of a patent maintains the ideas - even if they never got anywhere. If you know how to look, its an archive of decades of board games rules... written in patentease.