A patent, a pack of cards and four coloured starts.

Sorry! begins with a patent. The United States patent for an “appliance for playing games”, granted on 11 April 1933, names its applicant as William Henry Storey of Southend-on-Sea, England. The document records that the American application was filed on 4 August 1930 and that an application had been made in Great Britain on 12 September 1929. English Wikipedia, citing the UK Intellectual Property Office, says the name was registered as a trade mark in Britain on 21 May 1929, and, citing the Canadian patent database, that a Canadian patent followed in 1932.

The patent describes the game in plain mechanical terms. It calls for a board, a set of playing pieces that it calls “men”, and a pack of cards, each card showing a design or a number, with the cards rather than dice deciding how the men move along a track marked on the board. The track runs around a square and is divided into small squares. Opening off each side is a start, and the patent suggests colouring the four starts characteristically, giving red, green, yellow and blue as an example, with each start large enough to hold four men. Continuous arrow-like markings, which the patent names “slides”, pass over groups of squares and are coloured to match the start on their side of the track. A short track of five divisions leads off each side to a square home, coloured the same way as the start on that side.

The patent therefore already sets out four colours, four men per player, a card-driven move, the slides and a separate path to each home. English Wikipedia describes the game as based on the older game Ludo, and says the title comes from the many ways one player can undo another’s progress while offering a sarcastic “Sorry!” The exclamation mark is part of the name as Hasbro writes it today.

Waddingtons, Parker Brothers and Hasbro.

The game was taken up on both sides of the Atlantic. English Wikipedia says it was sold in the United Kingdom by Waddingtons, the Leeds games maker, from 1934, and that it was adopted by Parker Brothers in the United States the same year; the publishers it lists for the game are W. H. Storey & Co, Parker Brothers, Waddingtons, Winning Moves Games USA and Hasbro. Leeds City Council’s newsroom, writing in 2018 about the Waddingtons archive held at the Leeds Discovery Centre, said the company had been founded as a theatrical printing business by John Waddington of Leeds and the actor Wilson Barrett, that it began producing card games in 1922, and that it was bought by Hasbro in 1994.

A Parker Brothers rules sheet gives a close look at the early American edition. Winning Moves Games, which has reissued older editions, published a transcription of the rules “as found in the 1939 United States version”. That text describes a pack of numbered cards with no 6 or 9, plus Sorry cards. It names margin squares around the edge of the board and a Safety Zone of coloured squares in front of each home, and it tells the player to turn each card face up on a design printed on the board. A man is started by placing it on the coloured circle in front of its start, and a player needs a 1, a 2 or a Sorry card to do it.

Ownership of the American publisher changed in 1991. Time, writing in November 2014 about the history of Monopoly, described Hasbro as the company “which acquired Parker Brothers in 1991”, and English Wikipedia says Hasbro now publishes Sorry! continuously. With its purchase of Waddingtons in 1994, Hasbro owned both the British and the American publisher of the game.

The board has not stood still under Hasbro. English Wikipedia says older editions had a coloured diamond space one square behind each start, with a rule that stopped a pawn of that colour from passing over it, and that the diamond and its rule were removed from later editions. It records a 2013 edition subtitled “Fire and Ice Power-Ups”, in which each player has three pawns and two tokens change how marked pawns may move. The same article lists a dice-based travel version called Sorry! Express, which Hasbro re-released in 2021 as Sorry! Diced!, a computer game released in 1998 and a handheld electronic version from 1996.

Design and documentation.

A board game brand is carried less by any single object than by a set of printed parts that travel together: a box lid, a board, a handful of tokens or dice, and a folded sheet of rules. The lid does most of the public work, because it sits on a shelf and has to name the game, show what kind of play is inside and carry the maker’s mark, often at a size that reads from across a shop.

Inside, the board turns the game’s logic into a layout of spaces, tracks and colour-coded zones, and the tokens, cards and score pads repeat that colour code in miniature. Rule sheets are the quiet part of the identity, with their own headings, diagrams and house style, and they are often revised when a game is reissued.

Game names also change hands more often than their players notice, so the company printed on a lid may not be the one that first published it. Each guide separates what dated, independent sources record about a game’s origins, owners and editions from what the companies say about themselves.

A word, four colours and a pack of cards.

The Sorry! identity starts from its name, which English Wikipedia ties to the sarcastic apology a player offers when undoing another’s progress, such as sending an opponent’s pawn back to its start. The exclamation mark makes the word an exclamation, and the 1939 rules carry the name into play itself: alongside the numbered cards, the pack includes four Sorry cards.

The colours are equally functional. Storey’s patent suggests red, green, yellow and blue for the four starts and asks for the slides and the paths to home to be coloured to match, so that each start, slide and path to home on a side shares one colour. The 1939 rules repeat the idea with coloured circles in front of each start and a Safety Zone of coloured squares, and they direct each drawn card to be placed face up on a design printed on the board.

Later editions changed the details around that structure — the diamond spaces dropped away, the 2013 edition cut each player to three pawns, and the travel versions replaced the board with dice — but the name, the four colours and the card-driven race have stayed with the game through its publishers in Britain and the United States.

For a design guide, Sorry! shows how a game can carry its whole personality in one spoken word, with colour doing the work of wayfinding across the board. Compare it with Monopoly, another Parker Brothers game that Waddingtons published in Britain, and Clue, the Waddingtons game that Parker Brothers licensed for the United States. For this guide we use pawn red, yellow, green and blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sorry!’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.