Christmas, 1973. Jon Klassen gets Avalon Hill’s classic Blitzkrieg board game from his grandmother. He invites acquaintance Randy Brandt to play. Instantly bonding over the large hex board and countless units, the young teens become friends for life, and remain undefeated as a war game team throughout high school. They serve as best men in each other’s weddings, and both end up in the computer world.
Their first joint business endeavor in high school is planting a field of potatoes, ignoring the field despite their parents’ dire warnings about required weeding and hungry moles, yet still managing to harvest a profitable crop in fall. They sell 600 pounds of potatoes at 10 cents a pound, shocking the skeptics who point out that the grocery store has them for eight cents a pound. They joke about launching a vast potato empire, but preferring clean hands and keyboards to callouses and field work, that dream quickly fades. Now, the legend of the potato empire lives on in the gaming world as they once again seek to confound skeptics who doubt their grandiose plans!
Potato Empire Games is a division of JEM Productions, LLC.
