Are there really alligators in the New York sewer system? Did Marilyn Monroe wear a Size 16 dress? What dance style did bandleader Xavier Cugat popularize in the 1930s?

Trivia questions such as these are a popular pastime for most but, for Jean-Paul Teskey, they represent dollar signs. His Mississauga-based company, Rumba Games, creates, markets and distributes some of the most popular board games on the market.

"We've grown to well over 100 products," says Teskey, the company's founder and president. "We try to cover the whole board game-industry gamut, but we also provide more nichey and specialty products as well."

While Rumba does make educational games for kids, its specialty is board games for an older market. For example, Urban Myth asks players to guess whether popular anecdotal stories are true or myth.

Brennan O'Connor, Business Edge
Rumba Games president Jean-Paul Teskey and marketing co-ordinator Kimberly Wilding show you can play Urban Myth anywhere.

Another, a spelling trivia game called Oxford Dilemma, challenges players to correctly spell and define words arranged in four categories.

"The fastest-growing segment are games that are more adult/party-oriented," says Teskey. "It's games that are targeted for people 14 years old and up, and are different than the standbys like Monopoly and Scrabble."

Obviously, success in the competitive specialty-games industry relies heavily on superior concepts. According to Teskey, Canada seems to be a never-ending source of creativity.

"People I meet at toy fairs always ask me why Canadians come up with such good game ideas," he says.

"I attributed it to our longer winters and that we tend to go to the cottage quite a bit here. The whole Trivial Pursuit phenomenon gave people the idea they could make it big in the game industry."

And with good reason. Sales figures for the industry are anything but trivial. According to the Toy Industry Association, board-game sales reached $2.23 billion in 2001, double the sales records from five years earlier.

In fact, board games are the only segment of the overall toy market to grow in the last seven years, while all other segments have slowly declined.

According to The NPD Group - a consumer trends, sales and marketing analysis firm - the board-game market grew another 19 per cent in 2002, but the most stellar growth came in 2003 when the first half of the year saw an 84-per-cent increase in adult board-game sales.

Money, however, wasn't the only factor that attracted Teskey to the business.

"It's creative, fresh and just plain fun to spend time thinking up new products," he says. "That and sales are what I do best."

Teskey's journey to the upper echelons of the industry played out a little like a game of Snakes and Ladders. After college, Rumba's president was working as a buyer for a major Canadian supermarket chain when a relative approached him with an opportunity to create a board-game company.

"I was the sole officer at the time, but I had a different opinion than the majority shareholder," Teskey confides. "We took different paths, but that has been great."

Today, Rumba is a $5-million company with phenomenal growth, but getting there took expert play. Having slid almost back to the starting line, Teskey and his partner, marketing vice-president Gerry Gaskin, started Rumba Games in 1999 based on its first product - an educational children's game called Countdown.

While Countdown won recognition and awards from the industry, getting retailer attention posed a problem for the small startup. To move Rumba to the next level, Teskey approached alternative retail outlets.

"When we first started out, we were going to non-traditional toy retailers like the Chapters/Indigo and Barnes & Nobles of the world," says Teskey. "They were really good fits for our games and that's why we approached them."

Following its acceptance by retailers and the introduction of its most popular game to date, Urban Myth, Rumba's growth exploded. Over a two-year period, the company's revenues grew from $58,650 in 2000 to $1,176,828 in 2002, a growth rate in excess of 1,900 per cent.

Those numbers earned Rumba the No. 5 spot in PROFIT Magazine's 2003 Hot 50 issue, which lists Canada's fastest-growing companies.

While impressive for any young company, Rumba outpaced its own performance the following year by moving up to third place on PROFIT's list with 2,122-per-cent growth. Rumba's success, says Teskey, was largely due to hitting the market at the right time.

"A lot of it was attributable to the whole cocooning phenomenon; people started spending more time at home with friends and families," he says. "There was also a bit of a backlash against violent video games."

Based on the initial success of its board games, Rumba made the jump to mainstream toy and game retailers, but it took a bit of marketing gamesmanship.

Rather than shipping a complete game, Teskey enticed buyers with sample game cards tailored to their region. For New York buyers, for instance, he sent Urban Myth cards that asked if it were true that the city had alligators in its sewers.

"The most important thing was to get that first face-to-face meeting," says Teskey. "It also helped that I had been on that side of the business and knew I had to be persistent to the point of getting buyers' attention but short of annoying them."

In another fortunate turn, Rumba followed Urban Myth by snagging a coveted licensing deal in 2003. At an annual toy fair, CBS television representatives asked Rumba to pitch a board game based on the network's popular CSI series.

"At the same time, they were talking about a Survivor game as well," Teskey explains. "We pitched both. They took a pass on our CSI game, but they loved our Survivor game."

Today, Rumba has distribution contracts with leading U.S. board-game firms and is featured in mainstream retail outlets such as Wal-Mart, Toys 'R' Us, Zellers and Shopper's Drug Mart. The company's sales are projected to reach $5 million this year, but Teskey says that's only the beginning.

"We are growing into more than just games," he says. "I see us growing to about $50 million over the next five years."

To reach that goal, the company recently began distribution of Hot Wings, a line of collectable, die-cast airplanes made by Just Think Toys.

In addition, Rumba is introducing innovative new products, such as its CD-based mobile game series, Trivia for the Road. Players listen to trivia questions on a car stereo system and the first to answer correctly wins the round.

"There is also a huge potential for getting into the European market far more than we are now," says Teskey. "We have a great opportunity for global distribution on our Survivor board game as well as many others."

So while New York's sewers are alligator-free and Marilyn Monroe, by today's standards, wore a Size 12 at her heaviest, Teskey and his team have the same goal Xavier Cugat had in the 1930s - thus making "Rumba" a household word.

(Mike McLeod can be reached at mcleod@businessedge.ca)