My Board Game Epiphany

So this is my first Blog! I have to admit I’ve never published a story or article online before. I recall that when I was a teenager I wanted to be a writer with a lake house and a typewriter, you know, but soon after I realized I wasn’t good at it, I focused my attention on my second hobby: games, obviously!

I grew up playing games like Donkey Kong and Zelda and I thought I wanted to be a game developer to make amazing games like those. Soon after I finished my school studies and enrolled in a university, I realized that programming was too hard and boring for me.

I enjoyed the creative part of making games rather than the technical one a lot more, so I found myself with nothing in mind for the future.

Without realizing it, during my life, I’ve been thinking about the business side of things for fun, like understanding how much you can earn selling ice cream during winter or what are the costs and benefits behind a virtual online game without having physical stock and such.

I was lucky enough to join a Mexican videogame company when I was 20; I helped with the marketing and the administration of an online game, and after 2 years I was adventuring myself into the online game business with my own company.

During my time in the industry, the videogame market changed very drastically starting from the social games on Facebook to the mobile game apps, so as a little company we focused on what we had, and without adapting completely to the new platforms, we started giving localization and community management services to other companies.

After some years, I realized that the videogame scene had changed a lot.
For the same amount of money, in 1997 you could have bought Dungeon Keeper, and now it’s the cost to buy a single marginal feature in a mobile game, like avoiding the 24h waiting time to build a room. You now have to pay for all the DLC to improve your game experience.

I don’t want to bash the videogame industry, I still think there are plenty of amazing games and companies but I personally didn’t have fun anymore as I did before.

Then, one day, I had what I like to call my board game epiphany. To me until that time, board games were only Monopoly, Risk! or a fun memory of playing hungry hippos as a kid, but the board game industry is humongous!

I was browsing YouTube when I found the Tabletop show with Wil Wheaton on Geek & Sundry’s YouTube channel. They were playing “Small World” and I got so hooked to that game idea, with the extinction of each race and all the strategy involved. 

I was in love, I started looking for other types of games and I found there were plenty of them, from bluffing to storytelling and even push-your-luck games!

I kid you not, my life changed completely. I remember waking up, making coffee and sitting in front of my PC watching and reading many types of games before starting my working day. I started selling my videogame collection and started buying board games of different types and categories.

With every year that passed, my will to join the board game industry was becoming bigger, and this is the reason why I’m now writing this. ThunderGryph is my passionate attempt to join the business of my favourite hobby ever.

This is not an instructional blog on how to make a game, how to publish it, or how to run a good crowdfunding campaign, there are already many amazing places to have a good read on those topics (like the Blog of Jamey Stegmaier, for example).

In this Blog, I will keep you updated about the process behind building my dream, the experiences I learned doing it, the people I’ve the pleasure to work with, and sometimes my thoughts regarding a board game and what impressed me.

However, that is enough about me. What was your board game epiphany?