Back in 2022, an eBay listing was sold and eventually ended up with a Pirates CSG collector. From that listing, it became known that Lucky Yeh International (also known as the Lucky Group and Lucky Worldwide) was one of the primary suppliers Wizkids used during the original production runs of Pirates CSG.
In this case, Michael would probably be either Mike Selinker or Mike Mulvihill
I have reached out to Lucky Yeh multiple times through many different channels, to no avail.
-March 2022: Sent messages through their website, another site, and 4 of their email addresses (some couldn’t be delivered to). Tried calling them but my phone couldn’t dial the Hong Kong/etc number.
-August 2023: Mailed physical letter to their Hong Kong location with questions about the dies (letter is at the bottom of this post). It just so happens that the first person I taught how to play Pirates is from Malaysia and knows Cantonese, so he verified the Chinese translation of the letter as well (it was also sent in English).
-November 2024: Sent inquiry through tradeeasy
-December 2024/January 2025: Messaged Lucky employees on LinkedIn (no responses so far)
-November 2024 – January 2025: In contact with them through Alibaba, to no avail. Representative was not able to connect me with anyone in the Hong Kong office, and couldn’t confirm any information about the dies and pictures shown in this post.
I have a feeling that either nobody there can ever say anything about the dies (even just their cost to produce and what happened to them), and/or there may be no employees still working there that worked on the project as late as 2008.
Credit to Matt for all of the pictures.
Here are the previous discussions about this in the Pirates community: Initial Discord posts, Full posts with reveal
Here is the letter I sent them in the mail back in 2023:
Greetings,
I am interested in the work that Lucky Yeh International did for Wizkids on the Pirates Constructible Strategy Game (CSG) around 2004 and likely afterwards until possibly around 2008 when the game went out of print. I have included an example of a card from the game. It was also known as Pirates of the Spanish Main and Pirates of the Cursed Seas.
I would appreciate any answers to a few questions:
1. Does your company still have any of the equipment used to make the game? (such as dies used to press/punch the styrene cards)
2. If you still have any of the equipment, are you able to sell it? If so, how much would each item cost?
3. Do you have financial information about the production costs that you are able to share?
4. How exactly were the cards for the game made? (including the artwork, coloring, number of cards per sheet, and how the artwork was applied to the styrene cards.)
5. Was your company the primary and/or sole producer of the game during its entire production run from 2004-2008? If not, do you know what other companies were involved in the production process?
Thank you!
Ben