St. Louis ? Sales of traditional games are definitely up, says Christina Charasse, senior account manager for NPD Fun World, the toy and video game-tracking division of The NPD Group, an analyst for the toy and game industries.

Traditional games such as Monopoly, Twister and Trivial Pursuit saw sales of $877 million last year. Sales the first six months of this year were ahead of the same period last year by 18 percent.

“This is a mature industry,” Charasse said. “In a good year, you’ll see one-digit increases. For a category to grow 18 percent is pretty healthy.”

And that’s not including the incredibly hot market for children’s trading cards.

In a field crowded with great ideas for board games, marketing is the key, said several people in the industry.

“A game has to be able to sell itself off the shelf,” said Lorena Theilacker, senior buyer for Event Network Inc. in San Diego, which operates gift shops in museums and other venues across the country.

“It’s all in packaging. It’s got to tell the story with the right colors, the right graphics.”

Board game publishing represents about 85 percent of the business of Delano Service Inc. of Allegan, Mich., says the company’s owner, Roger Ganger. At present, the plant has about 25 specialty board games in some stage of production. Most production runs are for 5,000 to 25,000 games.

“I’ve been in the industry long enough to have an idea of what is going to look good on the shelf,” Ganger said.

“When you walk down the (store) aisle with a whole maze of games on the shelf, you want something that will pop off the side of the box, because that’s what the customer sees.

“It’s all in the packaging, unless there’s a lot of advertising on TV or in magazines.”

Of course, while packaging is a must, a game must be easy to understand and fun to play, he said.

Nearly all Ganger’s contracts are for specialty games that appeal to a fairly small market. The last big hit his company made, Rules of the Game, was bought by a large toy maker, which then took production in-house.

So the game developer’s success was, for Ganger, a lost account.

“I’m rooting for my customers to become very big — in the specialty market,” he said.