Posted By:
Butch & Co.Hi again Gil, pardon our absence from the thread -- although we're not sure Leon isn't giving us the skunk-eye for taking up bandwidth with a discussion that's running far afield from the pre-war card topic with which it began. Better, probably, we continue this aspect of it over at our own forum, although, before we retreat, we'll again solicit any and all further input from anyone here on the Billy Owen mystery.
Anyhoo, your guess on the homemade board-game is very probably right -- it would hardly be the first time we'd encountered a homebrew version of a commercially-produced game, and the Barber game even in 1950 was (and still is) fairly scarce (a limited production run, although not nearly even close to "the rarest of all baseball board games" as some hyperbolic auction pitch from several years ago convinced a few people it was).
We haven't played all or even most of the grid-based games we named at our site, but your instinct is correct on at least one or two of them, in our game-playing opinion anyway -- they are indeed exasperatingly tedious to play. Well-intended, no question, but the designers were oblivious to the eternal design conflict between detailed realism and ease of play.