Foto opportunity: Walton inventor's card game could be ‘the new Uno'

Until this year, South Walton’s Debby Pozza didn’t know how competitive marketing a new game could be.

“It’s very intimidating,” Pozza, the creator of the card game Foto Feud, told The Log about attending an industry convention in Los Angeles. “There are over a thousand games invented every year ... It’s very difficult to break through into that market. But I feel like this game is going to be the new Uno.”

Players in Foto Feud compete to assemble Florida photographs — an alligator, the Gulf at sunset — broken up into four cards. In addition to drawing cards with the right images, Pozza said, there’s a strategic element: Players can use other cards to steal a competitor’s partially completed picture.

“The thrill of the game is actually from taking another player’s (cards),” Pozza said. “You’re building to get that puzzle piece, but a lot of times you have to abandon the puzzle you’ve got.”

Pozza, a marketing coordinator for the South Walton Tourist Development Council, said she came up with the concept for Foto Feud while thinking of what to do with all the Pozza family pictures: “We’re all a big game-playing family, I thought if I could make a game ... God put it into my head, all of a sudden the little details just fell into place.”

Pozza decided that marketing a game based on family pictures wouldn’t be practical, so she turned to tourism photographs as the basis for her puzzles. She said that opened her eyes to Foto Feud’s potential as a marketing tool, something that could be tailored for Disney World, painter Thomas Kincaid or Washington D.C.

Since receiving the first batch of Foto Feuds in December 2007, Posse said Destin Elementary School bought 500 of the games to sell for fundraising, or to use in class as a rainy-day activity. She’s sold others through Perpetual Imagination in Grayton Beach, on her Web site and around town.

“It’s a difficult road to travel, but it’s fun,” Pozza said. “It’s something that I’ve done for myself — I don’t get too bogged down by it, other than the fact I don’t have the time I’d like to spend on it. I have so much faith in it.”

WANT TO FOTO FEUD?
If you want to learn more about Foto Feud, visit fotofeudgame.com.