"This game's not tame!"

As a kid, Donaco loved playing Monopoly, Parcheesi, Go Fish, Poker and Blackjack. "We could play poker but we had to use buttons instead of money. One night it was graham crackers. Not a great idea.”

The main point being, he loved playing board games and card games. And he also loved animals. He tried playing card games WITH animals but that, too, didn’t work out so well.

In the first version of this game, Donaco used animals which intrigued him like octopuses and preying mantises. Surprisingly, when he played the game with friends, nobody got excited by insects and octopodes. He shelved that set of cards and sketched a new deck with mostly furry creatures. People enjoyed them much better and these are the animals in play today. Now, Donaco just needed to find the right artist who could actually draw instead of simply scratching out a vague elephant shape with legs that don’t really bend that way.

In 2017, he re-connected with Randall, whom he'd met several years earlier. Donaco knew he would be the perfect artist to bring this game to life. He could draw animals that were realistic or cartoony and his characters had whimsy and power. Donaco wanted a kind of "simplified realism" and Randall knew just what to do. And he did it brilliantly!

Big thanks to Kim Killingback who was instrumental in helping this game come to life and supporting this vision.

Randall had always been interested in cards, however up until the age of 6, he primarily used them for building card houses he would demolition with his metallic green Hot Wheels hot rod. His favorite was a deck of Old Maid cards. Not so much for the game but because each card had a wonderfully illustrated goofy character. 

One of his fondest memories was playing cards with his brother during a power outage at night. “We sat in the living room because it had tall windows. We’d wait for lightning strikes to illuminate the room, so we could see the cards.” 

Randall also recalls how much he enjoyed going to the Milwaukee Zoo with his family. “I always had to see Samson, a 650 lb gorilla. When I was a child he looked to me like a real-life King Kong.” Many years later, Randall pursued a career in graphic design and illustration. He designed the cards, game board and box for Pic-The-Flic, a Trivial Pursuit like game but based on movie quotes. 

“I’m so fortunate to be involved in the creation of Animal Watch, a card game with animals! Donaco is so open to ideas and is easy to work with. I’ve really enjoyed illustrating all the various animal cards.”