Meet Game Inventor, Tom Sturdevant, and Learn to Play Q-Less
Crossword Solitaire Game was featured on NPRs Pop Culture Happy Hour
Lifelong creative, songwriter, musician and inventor, Tom Sturdevant, is in his 80s and does not believe in retirement. The Nashville native has created a new, popular and addictive little dice and word game that was featured on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, selling 5,000 units in the first 24 hours!
Q-Less is fun for all ages but is being recognized as a way for older adults to keep their minds sharp and challenged, and a great way to divert young minds from constant technology! And for the corporate set? A great brain break! It’s also a great pocket game for travel.
Q-Less, the Crossword Solitaire Game, is a fast-growing pop culture phenomenon, with tens of thousands of sales this year alone, but it’s not Sturdevant’s first foray into game creation.
Tom invented his first game in 1995. LETRAS was a card game… kind of a cross between rummy and Scrabble. At 52 years old, he knew nothing about the game business. It took about a year to get LETRAS on the market. Tom worked with graphic designers and manufacturers of cards and boxes, and thoroughly enjoyed the process. LETRAS made its debut in seven Nashville stores just in time for Christmas 1996 and sold 2,500 games in three weeks.
Its success got the attention of some game business pros, and within a few months, Tom had sales reps in virtually every part of the country. Then LETRAS won a Parents Gold Choice Award, as well as a Top Ten Award from Doctor Toy. The next year, he invented EQUALS, another card game that one involved numbers rather than letters.
He had also developed a board game called BIJOU, played with movies… any movie. Tom realized that Blockbuster Video would be the ideal place to sell the game. It took him several months but he finally got a meeting with Blockbuster in Dallas in June of 2000. They loved the game and did a licensing deal with Sturdevant. The name was changed to The Blockbuster Movie Game and it was sold in all Blockbuster locations.
What is it? Twelve Dice. Serious Fun.
When NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast featured Q-Less, a flood of orders took the popular game to a new level. NPR producer Andrew Limbong is an enthusiastic fan of the game. So popular has the game become, in fact, that a bevvy of knock-offs have appeared on the world stage, but none as high quality as the original.
Inventor of the addictive crossword solitaire game, Tom Sturdevant has been a foreign service officer, a Peace Corps trainer, a farmer, a filmmaker, an award-winning game inventor, and most recently, a songwriter. When he retired from the game business, Q-Less was nothing more than a few handmade prototypes played by family and friends. Still, they all got hooked on the dice and word game, including Tom, who often played 20 or more times daily. So, in 2018 at age 75, Tom decided to “roll the dice” and return to the game business, sharing his “labor of love” with the world.
In addition to the physical game in its handy and portable tin, the Q-Less Crossword Solitaire App is now available for both Apple and Android devices.
Q-Less is only sold at q-lessgame.com or through the official TikTok Shop.