DAVID PARLETT
David Parlett (b. 1939) is a British creator and historian of card and board games. Known best for his Hare & Tortoise, he has also produced numerous other board games, including Chicken Out!, Pot Black: Snooker Dice, The Puzzle of Oz and Zoo Party. He has invented more than 70 card games that can be played with a standard deck of playing cards. Parlett is the author of The Penguin Book of Card Games and The Oxford History of Board Games and has been a writer and editor for Games & Puzzles magazine. In 1979 he won the German Spiel des Jahre (Game of the Year) and in 1981 the Dutch Speelgoed van Het Jaar (Toy of the Year), both awards for Hare & Tortoise. He has been President of the British Skat Association and is a visiting professor of Game Design at the University of Suffolk.
Parlett discovered Friends through personal friends and by reading Geofrey Hubbard’s Quaker by Convincement. In 1980 he began attending Croydon Meeting in south London, where he is now a member and has served as Clerk. He said that he realized that he had been a Quaker all his life and that he felt he was among people who were more interested in who you were than what you believed. Parlett has written for The Friend and made audio recordings of Quaker books and publications for blind people through Talking Friends. He is part of the Nontheist Friends Network as well as the Quaker Artists Network. His children attended Saffron Walden, the Quaker school.
David Parlett is a creative force, a maker of wildly entertaining games. The games are also visually beautiful. I had not been familiar with Hare & Tortoise, but I was charmed with the gorgeous edition I found online.
A quote:
“An inventor of games is like a poet or a composer. I regard a game as a work of art”.
Gary Sandman
July 2026