Wir sammeln Pilze board game
Just like the recently featured Begriffe-Lotto, Wir sammeln Pilze (“We gather mushrooms”) is a game issued around 1981 by VEB Plasticart Annaberg-Buchholz, produced in their Werk 4 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, the Saxon city nowadays known again as Chemnitz.
And just like Begriffe-Lotto with its mix of Cut-In and Thannhaeuser-Schrift, this board game illustrates the gamut of typographic options in East Germany at the time: body copy was to a large extent still set manually, with metal type dating back several decades, to be printed in letterpress.
Designers in the GDR strived for a greater palette. For display purposes, they found interesting contemporary faces in the offerings of the NSW, the “non-socialist economic area”, read: the capitalist West. In this case, it’s Marianna by Samoan New Zealand designer Joseph Churchward. The chubby face with forms evocative of curving mushroom heads (see also Bravado) was available from West German company Berthold Fototype and also from French press type manufacturer Mecanorma.
The insert with the rules of the game features a headline in Aktuell, created by Walther Schnippering and released by Schriftguss before the war, in 1935. The text face is the slightly younger Primus-Antiqua. Made in-house at VEB Typoart, apparently as a socialist clone of Excelsior (Linotype, 1931), it was first cast in 1950.
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In some games, the insert with the rules and information about the various mushrooms wasn’t printed in Aktuell and Primus, but in two other typefaces that were common in the GDR. Kurier is a bold brush script designed by Herbert Thannhaeuser and first cast by Schelter & Giesecke before the war. Super-Grotesk likewise originated in the 1930s. The Futura follower was made by Arno Drescher for Schriftguss. Both typefaces were later continued by Typoart.