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Photo by Drew Fleming StampMania is a new board game invented and marketed by an Ashland couple, Divina Tilles and Jack Braun, for people who enjoy stamps or who enjoy board games. Game results from stamp mania By BILL VARBLE Divina Tilles remembers the day Jack Braun's stamp mania started. She'd been watching an "Oprah" show on women entrepreneurs when Braun came home from hanging out with some local stamp collectors and said he had an idea for a board game based on stamps. Sure, Tilles thought. "I thought it would stop," she says. "It didn't stop," Braun says. Over the past two and a half years stamp mania morphed into StampMania, and 2,000 copies of a new board game of that name are now ready for shipping. Braun and Tilles are marketing the game at $19.95 in magazines and on the Internet. Contact them at Suite 141, 60 N. Main St., Ashland, or www.StampManianet.com Braun, who admits to being over 50 but doesn't give his age, says he's been collecting stamps since he was a preschooler. When his family moved from Ohio to California when he was 9, his mother threw out his stamp collection. He started over. He moved to Southern Oregon in 1973, has a background as a millworker and hopes to make it as an entrepreneur. He says his goal is to sell lots of games and spark interest in stamp collecting among kids. The object of StampMania is to collect an entire series of stamps from a single country. Players take turns throwing dice and moving markers dubbed "philatels" after philately, the collecting and study of stamps. Chances to buy stamps come up according to the spots players land on. Players draw cards that may be either good or bad. A game takes about an hour. Braun says his interest in a business venture was spurred by a business class he took from Southern Oregon Women's Access to Credit. For her part, Tilles, a job coach at Living Opportunities, was no philatelist. "I don't think I'd ever paid attention to one of Jack's stamps before," she says. At first she was secretly glad when roadblocks came up, thinking Braun would abandon the idea. But one day he announced the project was something he had to see through to the end, and she got on board. They learned as they went along, discovering for example that it's legal to use images of real stamps as long as they're canceled. Jack stamped 8,000 philatels by hand. "Neither one of us had the foggiest idea what we were doing," Tilles says. The two figure the game's market is stamp collectors, kids and serious board game players. If inventing a game was a learning journey, the lesson, Braun says, was perseverance. He says he worries about the future of the hobby in an era when (starting next month) you can buy postage over the Internet and print your own barcode stamps using your computer's printer. Tilles says some people have a hard time grasping the idea of a board game that's about a hobby. Her mother, for one, didn't seem to get it. "How do you spell that?" she asked. "It's a stamp," Tilles told her. Braun says he hopes the game is commercially successful, but even if it never makes a lot of money he feels he's accomplished something. "For me," he says. "it was important to do this." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA