But the ones they enjoyed most didn't come out of a box. They came out of the imagination of their German-born father, Gunter Elkan, who created them using graph paper and improvised board pieces.

At least that's how they remember it. Now, they've asked a federal judge in Portland, Ore., to endorse those memories and award them millions of dollars in back royalties and penalties in a copyright-infringement lawsuit they've filed against Hasbro, the parent of Milton Bradley.

For the past 44 years, Milton Bradley has distributed a game called "Stratego" that Elkan's kids allege is a pirated version of "Strategy," a game their dad copyrighted and pitched - unsuccessfully - to the game maker in the late-1940s and then played with his kids until his death in 1973.

"Once he died, we forgot about it," says Laning, who still lives in Huntington Beach.

"Oh, there was talk especially Heidi. She'd say, 'Don't you remember people talking about how Dad invented a board game?' And we'd just say, 'Yeah, yeah, whatever.'"

No one's saying "whatever" anymore. Not Laning or any of Elkan's other four surviving kids. And certainly not Hasbro, which calls the lawsuit "totally without merit."

But as Laning and her siblings have pressed their claim, scouring through their dad's long-forgotten files and talking with the cousins they barely knew, they've discovered a startling story behind the story. Elkan, who was loath to talk about his youth, was Jewish, the son of a prominent inventor who narrowly escaped the Holocaust.

"He must have gone through a lot because he never talked about it," says daughter Heidi Cox, who, like Laning, grew up in Huntington Beach, but who now lives in Oregon, where she's active in a nondenominational church.

"My mom didn't even know he was Jewish. It brings a tear to my eye just to imagine what he felt - not knowing if he was going to live or die."

That their father had been persecuted was something the kids only learned in recent years. That he was a game maker was no surprise at all.

After escaping Nazi Germany through Britain, Elkan settled down for a while in Canada, then moved to Orange County in 1960 as a widower with kids. In California, he met and married a widow with kids of her own. Together, they had even more.

"It was a 'yours, mine and ours' family," Laning says.

Games - games that seemed to spring from his own imagination - were one way Elkan molded the divided brood into a cohesive family. Cox and her siblings say they noticed the games were like board games their friends played.

One of the friends' games especially caught Cox's eye: a capture-the-flag game of military strategy from Milton Bradley called "Stratego." When Cox saw friends playing it in Orange, Upland and finally Huntington Beach, she'd wriggle with proprietary glee and let her little secretfly.

"I'd tell them, 'My dad invented that,'" says Cox.

And so she continued to insist for many years. "She never gave up," says Laning, who is 10 years older than Cox and baby-sat her as a kid. "She's always been like a punching bag. You knock her down, and she pops back up."

Evidence that Cox considers iron-clad proof of her belief - and that Hasbro rejects - emerged in recent years after Cox met her Canadian cousins, the sons and daughters of Elkan's brother. The Canadian cousins were Jewish, just like their father. Just like their father's father. Just like Elkan.

Just like Elkan? "I didn't know he was Jewish," says Laning. "He wasn't a practicing Jew when I knew him."

And the Canadian cousins were the custodians of another secret. The family's departure from Germany in the late-1930s was no coincidence.

Elkan had been rounded up by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. His father, Fritz, managed to buy his son's freedom and then fled Germany with his immediate family. The rest perished in the Holocaust.

Keen to see if her dad's old files contained any more information about his hitherto hidden Judaism, Cox pressed her sister Karen - who inherited Elkan's files and then moved to Canada in the early 1970s - to take a peek.

There wasn't much in the files about Elkan's German past. But there were four documents that reignited Cox's certainty that her dad invented "Stratego."

The first was a U.S. copyright registration request Elkan filed in 1948 for a capture-the-flag game he called "Strategy." The second was a letter from Milton Bradley dated shortly thereafter, acknowledging receipt of his game idea. The third was a letter from Milton Bradley rejecting Strategy.

Thirteen years later, the company began distributing "Stratego."

"I think they figured if they waited long enough, no one would notice," Cox says. "We feel angry and betrayed. How could a company that big do something like that? If they wanted the game, all they had to do was buy the rights. What would it have cost them back then? A thousand dollars?"

Wayne Charness, a senior vice president at Hasbro, insists his company "committed no wrong against Ms. Cox or her father" and that the game it sells as "Stratego" was "made and sold well before her father allegedly came up with an idea for a game named Strategy."

Fans of the board game say Hasbro may be right. According to Ed Collins, a Placentia resident who runs a leading Web site dedicated to the game, Milton Bradley's game is a modern version of one played in the 19th century - decades before Elkan was born. Indeed, when Milton Bradley first debuted the game in 1961, it admitted as much, calling "Stratego" "The Popular Old World Game Of Skill And Strategy."

"The game's roots go back," says Collins.

According to Collins' site, the game was first manufactured under the "Stratego" name in Holland shortly after World War II by Smeets & Schippers, which purchased the rights from a Dutchman named Jacques Johan Mogendorff. But some "Stratego" fans believe Mogendorff's game was simply a copy of a much older game called L'Attaque, which was made in Britain before World War II, right about when Elkan and his family were passing through on the way to Canada.

These doubts about the game's origins don't discourage Laning, Cox and their siblings, who say they're confident they'll prevail and that Hasbro will pay dearly.

"The lawyer says it will be millions," says Cox. "He doesn't know how much because it's been going for 45 years."

No matter how the suit is resolved, Elkan's offspring say the Hasbro case is just the start. Next on their to-do list is a lawsuit against Germany. Their charge: that the Nazis stole fuel-enhancing technology their grandfather patented to drive their war effort.

"We're taking things one at a time right now," Cox says.