32 ❖ Tiddlywinks • Advertising, Premium, and Promotional Games

A premium is an item given away or distributed at nominal cost by a company in conjunction with one of its products or brands. Premiums can be included in a box (such as inside a box of detergent) or be obtained via a tie-in advertisement included in a product or in collaborative advertising. Sometimes, premiums are sent by a company to a recipient who has submitted proofs of purchase of products from the company.

Here is a sampling of tiddlywinks premium games.

E. Levering's Table Quoits · early 1890s

All consumers of LEVERING’S RELIABLE ‘E. L. C.’ Roasted Coffee can easily obtain one of these games [Levering’s Table Quoits, early 1890s], without any expense to themselves by sending us Twenty (20) of the Monograms E. L. C. (as below) cut from the face of one (1) pound packages of our ‘E. L. C.’ Roasted Coffee.

E. Levering & Co., Importers, Jobbers & Roasters of Coffee, Baltimore MD (Est. 1842). This promotional game comes with a very nice felt playing surface (also advertising Levering’s Coffee) which has a thin wooden stick coming up through the middle of the mat. The winks that are played are not discs but instead are rings (also called quoits).

Several varieties of the Levering’s Table Quoits were produced.

Dunham's Shred Cocoanuts · 1893

The Dunham company produced cocoanut layer cakes, among other products. To obtain a free tiddledy winks game, number 216 in their catalog, a consumer needed to cut out one whole proof-of-purchase certificate from the front of a shred cocoanut layer cake package and send it to Dunham’s via its secretary, James P. Wood, at P. O. Box 3611 in New York City. Dunham’s also asked for the name of the grocer and the city in which the product was purchased. The certificates came in three sizes: whole, half, and quarter, depending on the weight of the product purchased.

Poll Parrot Golf Course · made by Fort Wayne Paper Box Co.

Poll Parrot was a brand of shoes made in the United States in the 1920s and later. Their golf course tiddlywinks premium was produced by Fort Wayne Paper Box Co. in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Coca-Cola · Winko Baseball · 1945

After Milton Bradley came out with its large, yellow boxes of Winko Baseball in 1945, Coca-Cola arranged with Bradley to produce a custom Winko Baseball game, marked “Compliments of The Coca-Cola Company”. This game consisted of a folding game board along with an implements box, which contained the following:

Two white winks (representing baseballs)
Nine winks each of red and blue (representing baseball players in the field)
Two wooden shooters in the shape of baseball bats, each of red and blue (used as squidgers to the shoot the baseball onto the field)
A pad of “Winko Baseball Score Card”s

The game board is marked with Milton Bradley’s catalog number: 4670-XCC.

No enclosing box was provided for this game, only the board and an implements box.

Trix Cereal · 1962

Trix, the General Mills, Inc. cereal with the marketing motto, “Trix is for Kids”, included a set of tiddlywinks inside Trix cereal boxes in 1962. As it turns out, a Trix cereal tiddlywinks set became one of the catalysts for NATwA winker Severin Drix when he formed the Cornell Tiddlywinks Team in 1965.

Wheaties Cereal · Shoot Hoops with Michael Jordan · 1991

This premium came in Wheaties cereal boxes produced by General Mills, Inc. in 1991. An extra sheet of thin cardboard was attached to the back panel of the box; this sheet was pulled down from the top, revealing a small basketball hoop that sticks out on the vertical back of the box, plus a flat horizontal sheet resembling the court near a basketball hoop. A player shoots a wink from the free-throw line using a flipper that bends. Each of the winks have basketball designs on them.

Kellogg's Corn Flakes (France) · Jeu de Puces · 1998

The back of the box states, in French, that the back of the box should be cut out. Then, each player uses a 20 centime coin as a squidger to shoot three 10 centime coins (as winks) into the open box.

North American Tiddlywinks Association