Roll dice, move 4 spaces to "Hunger Strike"

A Fort Wayne jury awarded a California board game inventor $275,000.00 in an unusual case heard in the U.S. Federal Court. Most of the award was for attorney fees.  Scott Peterson is the inventor of Pirateer, a board game that was voted by MENSA as the top board game of 1996.

Mr. Peterson sued the West Lafayette based Warren Industries for breach of contract and misappropriation of property.

Mitch Clogg reported yesterday in The Ukiah (CA) Daily Journal that, last fall, Mr. Peterson went on a hunger stike in Fort Wayne when he felt the trial process was moving too slowly.

That is not a common practice in civil lawsuits. 

Mr. Clogg let Mr. Peterson have his say:

Peterson now claims that malicious statements by former colleagues about his character, mental health and business dealings have alienated him from family and friends and overshadowed and consumed his last five years, while what he considers business betrayals caused the ruin of MGC, "the dream of my life" and turned its bright prospects into a "hellish nightmare of a smear job" and a succession of legal contests. They are proceeding in Mendocino courts and elsewhere.

But while personal resentments and attacks appear prominently in the records of correspondence generated by the afflictions of the Mendocino Game Company, Peterson insists that personal antagonism was not the drive-spring of his company's failure.

Speaking of the former board members he is suing, he says, "A lot of the personal stuff was invented to accomplish their objective. Some of it was real, of course, and some of it I fed, but their main goal was to push me aside and take control of the company for their own profit. They're still using accusations about my character and mental stability as distractions from that fact. They were frustrated because I was the majority stockholder. I held the controlling interest in the company."