A postmaster’s code game and a Leicester moulder.

Mastermind — written Master Mind by the English company that launched it — is a code-breaking game for two players. One player, the codemaker, hides a row of coloured pegs behind a shield at one end of a board; the other, the codebreaker, places rows of guesses and receives smaller key pegs as feedback, coloured for a peg in the right colour and position and white for a right colour in the wrong place, until the hidden row is found or the board fills up. English Wikipedia credits the game to Mordecai Meirowitz (also spelled Mordechai Meirovitz), whom it describes as an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert, and dates it to 1970.

A history of the game published online by the enthusiast Toby Nelson in March 2000 sets out the next steps. Meirowitz’s idea was turned down by several toy companies before he took it to the Nuremberg International Toy Fair in February 1971, where he showed it to Invicta Plastics, a company based in Leicester, England. Invicta bought the rights to the game outright and, under its founder Edward Jones-Fenleigh, refined it and released it in 1971–72. English Wikipedia’s article on Meirowitz adds that Invicta restyled and renamed the game.

Invicta was not a games publisher by origin. Its own website, in a version archived in 2007, says Jones-Fenleigh founded Invicta Plastics in 1946, and English Wikipedia describes the company’s early work as injection moulding, thermoplastic sheet moulding and vacuum forming, from a headquarters in Oadby, Leicestershire. The 2007 site dated the game’s introduction to 1971 and listed versions the company had designed and produced, among them Super Mastermind, Mini Mastermind and Grand Mastermind.

The game resembles an older pencil-and-paper game known as Bulls and Cows. English Wikipedia says computer versions of that game were written in the 1960s and early 1970s, including one called MOO on the Titan computer at Cambridge University and one for Unix by Ken Thompson. In Israel the board game is sold under a Hebrew name, Bul Pgi’a.

Invicta’s licensees, Pressman and Goliath.

From the start Invicta treated Mastermind as a property to license as well as a product to make. English Wikipedia says the company originally manufactured the game itself and later licensed its manufacture to Hasbro worldwide, with the exception of the United States and Israel. Invicta’s own site, archived in 2007, listed three licensees for the Mastermind range: Orda Industries in Israel, Pressman Toy Corporation in the USA and Hasbro International for all other countries. Wikipedia adds that Chieftain Products acquired the rights to make the game in Canada in 1972.

Pressman is the name many American players met on the box. English Wikipedia says Jack Pressman founded the company in Brooklyn in 1922, that it is now based in Richardson, Texas, and that it has marketed a series of family games, Mastermind among them, since James Pressman became president in 1977. The same article, citing the trade paper ToyNews, says Pressman was bought in July 2014 by Goliath Games, a Dutch game manufacturer.

Invicta itself changed shape. English Wikipedia records that the company left its Oadby site in 2009 for premises in Leicester, and that in 2013, after its insolvency, several of its divisions passed through a management buyout to a new company, Make a Material Difference. The Oadby site, Wikipedia says, was demolished and replaced by a supermarket.

In 2025 the game moved again. Popverse reported on 30 May 2025 that Mastermind, which it called Hasbro’s classic game, would now be manufactured and distributed by Goliath Games, and the Spielwarenmesse trade-news service reported that Goliath had secured worldwide manufacturing and distribution rights through a multi-year agreement with Hasbro. In that report Goliath’s chief executive, Jochanan Golad, said the company was excited to introduce new ideas “to the next generation of codebreakers and codemakers”, and Goliath said it planned a marketing campaign built around social media and aimed at younger players. Goliath, which the report describes as Netherlands-based, already counted Sequence and Triominos among its family games.

Design and documentation.

A board game reaches its players as a box before it is ever a set of rules, and the box lid usually does more of the identity work than any single piece inside. The lid carries the name, the logo and often a photograph or illustration chosen to show who the game is for, and that image can be redrawn many times over the years while the name stays the same.

Inside the box, the identity continues in physical form. Moulded plastic pegs, discs, frames and trays, printed boards, cards and rule sheets each carry colours and shapes that players come to recognise, and a change of supplier, licence holder or market can quietly change all of them at once.

Each guide in this group looks at a game brand through those layers: who devised the game and when, which companies have made and sold it, how its name and box art have been handled, and what its components look like. It separates what independent, dated sources record from what a publisher says about its own history, and treats the palette shown here as our own interpretation rather than an official specification.

Two models, a shield and a row of coloured pegs.

The Mastermind box is remembered less for a logo than for a photograph. English Wikipedia says that starting in 1973 the box showed a man in a suit jacket seated in the foreground with a young woman standing behind him. A June 2003 Invicta press release, published on the University of Leicester’s e-Bulletin, named the two as Bill Woodward, then the owner of a chain of hairdressing salons, and Cecilia Fung, a Hong Kong-born computer science student at the university. The release, which dates the shoot to 1972, says the photographs were taken at a studio in Leicester, that Woodward sat in after the male model originally booked failed to arrive, and that Fung was approached by people from an agency while walking in the city with friends. Some frames were taken with a cat on Woodward’s lap; Invicta said that idea was dropped. The two models were brought back together in 2003 to recreate the original photograph.

The name has two spellings. Invicta always wrote it as two words, Master Mind, according to English Wikipedia, while the 2025 trade reports on Goliath’s agreement write it as one word, Mastermind. The components carry the rest of the identity: a decoding board with a shield covering the hidden code at one end, round-headed code pegs in six colours, and smaller flat-headed key pegs in red or black and white. The variants listed by Wikipedia and by Invicta changed the number of colours and holes while keeping that peg-and-board format.

For a design guide, Mastermind shows how a game whose rules fit on a single sheet can be held together by a box photograph, a hidden row of pegs and a name that has passed from a Leicester moulding company to a run of licensees. Compare it with Othello, another two-player game of black, white and coloured pieces from the early 1970s, and Scrabble, a word game whose tiles and board carry its identity. For this guide we use board black, peg red, code blue and peg yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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