Two Classic Games, One Disney Box
2 Divertidos Juegos: Damas Chinas y Damas Españolas — “Two Fun Games: Chinese Checkers and Spanish Checkers” — is a 1972 Mexican set issued by Fotorama de México under a Walt Disney Productions license. As the title promises, it is a two-in-one package: one board for Chinese checkers (damas chinas) and one for Spanish checkers (damas españolas), wrapped in cover art starring Mickey, Minnie, Daisy and the nephews. The artwork leans hard into a stylized Chinese theme, with the characters in traditional dress beside a dragon, a pagoda and mountains rendered in the thick outlines and saturated colors of early-1970s Disney comic-book style.
The pairing makes sense once you look at the games themselves. Both are venerable abstract strategy games that long predate Disney, and both were natural candidates to be “skinned” with popular characters for a children’s edition.
The Games Behind the Disney Skin
Despite its name, Chinese checkers is not Chinese. It descends from Halma, a star-and-square jump game that appeared in the United States in the early 1880s. A German variant played on a six-pointed star board was patented in 1892 as Stern-Halma (“star Halma”). The familiar name “Chinese checkers” was an American marketing invention: the Pressman brothers introduced their version in 1928, originally as “Hop Ching checkers.” Spanish checkers, meanwhile, is one of the regional branches of the ancient game of draughts — an 8×8 board with twelve pieces per side, played on the light squares, a tradition long established in Spain, Portugal and parts of Latin America. Putting both under one Disney lid gave Mexican families two well-known pastimes in a single colorful box.
Foreign-Licensed Disney Games of Latin America
This set belongs to a broad, lightly documented world of foreign-licensed Disney merchandise. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, Disney granted regional manufacturers the right to put Mickey and friends on locally produced toys and games, and Latin American makers produced their own editions for Spanish-speaking households rather than importing English-language American boxes. Fotorama de México sits alongside the Argentine “Disneylandia: Juego de las Cuatro Estaciones” and the Spanish-made “Circo Donald” as examples of the same impulse: a familiar game format, localized language, and Disney characters supplied under license. The dynamic parallels Disney’s later European park-exclusive merchandise — the kind of regional editions surveyed in this look at Disneyland Paris and its decades of European exclusives.
The box also carries a small dating clue in its credit line. Material from this period is marked “Walt Disney Productions,” the corporate name the studio used until 1986, when it was renamed The Walt Disney Company on the reasoning that the older name referred chiefly to the film business. A 1972 imprint reading “Walt Disney Productions” is fully consistent with that pre-rename era.
Fotorama de México
Fotorama is a Mexican toy and board-game maker whose name still appears on familiar Spanish-language editions of classic games. The company is best known to Disney collectors for its long-running Mexican Turista Disneylandia property — a Disney-themed travel game it has issued across multiple generations, including a much later contemporary Turista Disneyland edition. Detailed corporate history for Fotorama in this period is thin in the public record, and we have tried to avoid stating specifics that cannot be verified. What is clear from the object itself is the role it played: a Mexican publisher taking two of the world’s most durable abstract games and presenting them, under a Walt Disney Productions license, to Spanish-speaking children of the early 1970s.
