“They ordered 5,000 sets and wanted exclusivity,” a dazed-sounding Blackburn said.
The game has also attracted some big-name endorsements: actor Stephen Fry, Countdown’s Susie Dent and the British linguistics expert David Crystal are all fans.
Players are assigned character cards — mostly noteworthy lexicographers and philologists from history — and acquire “artefact” cards by answering questions correctly.
The winner is the player who has gathered the most artefacts, many of which are inspired by the Mayan, Egyptian and ancient Hebrew civilisations.
Creating League of the Lexicon was something of an odyssey for Blackburn. Seeking advice on the game, he rang around a number of language and literature experts, including writers Michael Rosen, Ben Schott, Lynne Truss, Pip Williams and Hana Videen, as well as academic Simon Horobin. He also wrote to hundreds of people worldwide, asking them to devise one question for his new game.
“And most people were incredibly positive, particularly when it wasn’t a big ask.”
Certain that every aspect of the game should be “really as expert as I could make it”, Blackburn sought wisdom from people at the top of their professional trees. Most, he says, were intrigued and flattered to be asked.
The result is a core of 2,000 fascinating, complex and occasionally tricky questions, many multiple choice, and each offering detailed explanations for the correct answer.
Blackburn, who grew up in “a house full of books in Hampstead”, originally devised League of the Lexicon as a way of keeping his two sons, Sonny and Judah, interested and engaged during the long weeks of pandemic lockdown.
"At the time the boys were aged nine and seven and Blackburn and his wife discovered that they were “really bad at home schooling — but really good at games”.
His immediate observation of the homework that his sons were being sent during lockdown was that “it just sucked the love out of language.
Stephen Fry - a fan of the game
"That’s what really depressed me. I was interested in finding ways to get them to think about words differently.”
To avoid too much familiarity with the questions, Blackburn and his team, trading as Two Brothers Games, are now producing different editions of the game.
There will be a global edition, written by Gaston Dorren, a lexicographer who has written two books on language; and a slang edition, written by Jonathon Green, the world’s foremost slang lexicographer, which includes numerous questions relating to Hebrew and Yiddish.
Blackburn himself is also working on a junior edition — “that will be going back to its origins, for ages eight and up.
“And this is what’s exciting about language, that we can keep working on these special editions for as long as people have an appetite for it.” The team is also working on a specific American edition with US-related questions.
With mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardi heritage, Blackburn’s own background gives him a deep linguistic well to draw on. His family were members of Lauderdale Road synagogue and now he belongs to Westminster Synagogue, where his elder son is beginning his bar mitzvah preparations.
Jews, reckons Blackburn, have “a natural affinity with words and language and pulling the words apart” — so perhaps instead of traditional shul quiz nights we might see a Synagogue League of the Lexicon.
