Family Shows Magic Touch With Game : Leisure: Members chip in ideas and expertise for Touche, which gets a hand from magazine.

Passed from one coffee table to another year after year, the game that Ray Storey’s daughter had raved about looked unimpressive: Two decks’ worth of cards were stuck to a plywood board in a rectangular grid and in random order.

She had played it for hours with friends in Malibu and saw promise for turning it into a financial success.

“We heard that some 80-year-old man somewhere in California came up with this idea,” said Storey’s daughter, Suzanne Bobette Strange.

Storey, a fighter pilot in World War II and now a Long Beach resident, saw room for improvement and began tinkering. He never imagined that Games magazine would name his version, called Touche, the best new family game for 1996.

Two combined decks are dealt out completely among the participants and each player draws a hand of five cards from his stack. Players take a card from their hand and place a colored poker chip on a corresponding card on the board, discarding their card and picking up another one from their stack. The object is to be the first to place three series of five chips in a row horizontally or diagonally.

Eventually, the 76-year-old Storey changed the makeup of the board by arranging the cards stuck to it numerically rather than randomly.

Perhaps Storey’s greatest contribution to the game’s evolution came after he became bored with using simple vertical and horizontal rows of five to win. So the rules now allow cross- and box-shaped patterns.

“That makes the game play much more interesting, especially when you’re playing partners,” said Burt Hochberg, a senior editor at Games.

Over the years Hochberg and fellow testers have seen similar games, one of them an apparent ancestor of Touche from the Midwest. But none match Touche’s charm, Hochberg said. And the game as improved by Storey is “much better than the original idea,” Hochberg said.

Consumers seem to like it too. Stores from Hawaii to New York have ordered and reordered Touche sets by the dozen since the game’s release this year. Plans are in the works to start production in Finland and Germany.

Michael Akkibrityan, owner of a Quebec game shop, just sent for another 24 sets after the first shipment of a dozen sold out in less than two weeks.

“After we opened the first [set] it seemed like every employee wanted to take one home,” Akkibrityan said.

In Long Beach, the game just hit the shelves of a popular Belmont Shore shop called Teacher Supplies. The store’s owner, Dorothy Cohen, said Touche will be a big holiday seller for its simplicity alone.

“A lot of people like not to have to worry about words and vocabulary and lessons,” Cohen said. “This is more logic.”

Despite its blossoming success, Touche remains a family affair. Strange and her husband handle the promotions from San Diego, and Storey’s nephew arranged for the game to be manufactured in China. Storey’s other two daughters collaborated on the game’s highly acclaimed art, complete with humorous renderings of kings’, queens’, jacks’ and jokers’ pompous expressions on the face cards.

Credit for basic innovations, however, have been given to Dad.

“He really designed the game board,” said Strange, who shares Touche’s copyright with her husband. “We together--but with my Dad being the most creative mind in the game--created the game.”

Even with testing long complete, Storey and his wife, Kay, cannot leave the game alone. They play at its hardest level and maintain opposite strategies.

“I play using my cards for my own patterns,” Ray said. “She uses her cards to try and disrupt mine. She’s the ornery one, I’m the nice guy, see?”

Meanwhile Storey hopes to develop other games.

Besides working on a collapsible dollhouse, he has begun play-testing a secret new game he calls Box Ball. He may already have his first customer: He showed the game to a child who liked it so much he asked for his own set.

“He wanted one then, but I said they weren’t available,” Storey said. “We haven’t gotten them copyrighted yet or patented.”

It’s a lesson that the anonymous 80-year-old whom legend credits with starting the game might do well to remember.