NELLIE

Alex Randolph is known as game designer and author worldwide. “Snail’s Pace Race”, “Twixt”, “Enchanted forest” e. g. are only three out of over 160 of his games. That he also wrote many poems and some books may not be so well known.

He conceived “Nellie” - a so far unreleased mouse story from 1954 – for his then 8-year-old niece Deena Katz from New York, neatly wrote it with drawing ink and drew all the illustrations himself. The story – written in simple but poetic English - is about a quite complicated mouse love between strong principles and a certain nonconformism.

What will prevail in the end?

Age: 8 years and up

*Suitable for reading in elementary school

Text and drawings: Alexander Randolph

Size / pages / binding / printing ink interior 21,7 x 15,2 x cm / 104 pages / hardcover / monochrome

ISBN 978-3-941345-00-3

As you can see here properly Alex has included a “Carom” game board as a “MOUSE-MAP” in the Nellie mouse story – already in 1954, 6 years before his first game release.


Games were his passion. In the year 1962 Alex Randolphs first game “PAN-KAI” was released at Phillips/USA. It was a 2-person laying-game with Pentomino elements. He worked in an advertising agency and developed campaigns there. Later he made the breakthrough with “Twixt”.
The royalties allowed him to go freelance and to concentrate on designing boardgames besides writing poems and books. From 1968 to 1970 Alex Randolph lived and worked in Japan.

In this picture you can see him with a three-dimensional sculpture puzzle that he invented there “as there are such fantastic and enormously talented, absolutely perfect carpenters in this country”.