VILLAGERS rallied round to help finance Elaine Sturgess's venture into the world of board games.

About 250 people in Hook Norton put £20 each into her project to launch a new game called Headlines, which is based on rearranging the words of headlines of zany news stories.

Elaine, who runs Headline Games from her home in Netting Street, said: "I needed to raise finance to develop the idea and decided to see if people would be prepared to support it.

"So I went around the village, to the pub and the village store and got people to buy shares. For £20 they got five shares in the company and a copy of the game."

Elaine, who runs the business with fellow villager Maria Hirst, used to work in sales and marketing for Book Club Associates, Weightwatchers and a cable TV company. She said: "I came up with the idea four years ago after seeing a clever headline in a newspaper. I developed a fairly basic model and then set out to find out about the games market."

The game already sells in 120 stores nationwide.

She added: "We launched it at the Toy and Game Fair at Olympia and the first production run of 7,500 is now ready to go. There is interest from UK stores and we are talking about the possibility of international distribution in countries such as the USA, India and continental Europe."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.