The Board Game Secret Show

Molly Johnson and Shawn Stankewich are two of the three founders of FLATOUT GAMES, the studio behind 🎲 CASCADIA and 🐱 CALICO. They tell the story of an AEG exec brushing off POINT SALAD, why a small publisher stays on Kickstarter, and what a store owner said about their next game. Check out Perennial: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flatoutgames/perennial-0 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ IN TH...

Kylie Prymus took a dusty 1,000-square-foot shop doing $350,000 a year and turned it into a million-dollar store that sells no Magic, no Pokemon and no miniatures — on purpose. 🏪 GAMES UNLIMITED has been in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill since 1979, and the owner who bought it used to teach philosophy for a living. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE: 🧪 The ALCHEMY talk behind the whole stor...

Zero Strategy Games put a perfectly normal sheep on the cover of a horror game — and people did a double take all the way to a hit campaign. Jeremy Stark co-designed 🐑 THE SHEEP, 🗝️ SHUFFLE DUNGEONS and 🐉 UNHEIST. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE: 🌪️ Surviving the Gen Con tornado in a 10×10 booth 🍻 A board game company founded over "one drink after another" 🏥 From project-managing P...

Tend began as a Stardew-flavored side project Toby Sarnelle built just for his friends — then IV Studio co-founder Zac Dixon helped turn it into one of the most-requested flip-and-writes out there. 🌱 TEND's designers open up the legacy version that almost shipped, and the two expansions coming next — 🐝 HIVE and 🍷 CELLAR. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE: 🧪 The legacy "mega sheet" —...

Jeff Kornberg has taught hundreds of thousands of people how to play board games, and not one of those rules has ever been true. 📺 THE DRAGON'S TOMB is eight years of completely straight-faced tutorials with entirely invented rules — and the man making them spent his day job building 🎬 CONDÉ NAST's biggest YouTube series, with over 800 million views on videos he personally produced. ━━━━━━━━━━━━...

Support my work and join my community: https://crdbrd.app/ Koltin Thompson took a sick day from teaching fourth grade to launch his Kickstarter. It did $300,000 in the first 24 hours. He went back to work the next morning anyway — state testing was coming — and his co-workers wanted to know what on earth he was doing there. That game was 🚀 GALACTIC CRUISE, and it just won Dice Tower Game of the Y...

Does Cola Wars match your taste? : https://crdbrd.app/hub/game/682109fe-a66d-402c-a141-f4f9cf13c2d6 Matthew Meeple took his first game to Gen Con, put six people on it at once, and found out mid-demo that it literally could not be won. He raised $476,000 on it anyway. He's the founder of One More Turn Games — publisher of ⚔️ ASCENDANCY and the upcoming 🥤 COLA WARS — and he quit his job to do all...

Chad DeShon ran a million-dollar Kickstarter, added another half million in add-ons, and made basically nothing — then turned that wreckage into one of the busiest publishers in board games. He's the founder of 🎲 ALLPLAY, formerly 🪑 BOARDGAMETABLES.COM, and he runs the whole thing out of a limestone mine. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE: 🕳️ The Allplay warehouse is inside a decommiss...

Manny Trembly had never designed a board game when he made 🎲 DICE THRONE — he was a comic artist who'd just been laid off. Ten years, 40+ heroes and a Marvel licence later, he still draws it, designs it, and now runs his own studio inside Chip Theory building ⚔️ WROTH. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE: 💼 Laid off ten years ago this week — a prototype in Nate's kitchen two days later ✏...

Helaina Cappel turned down more games than she published — and that's why KTBG and Burnt Island look the way they do. Teacher, publisher, and the one who rescued ⚓ ENDEAVOR off Z-Man's shelf and steered it into 🌊 DEEP SEA. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE: 🎓 Teacher to publisher — FOODFIGHTERS at the kitchen table ⚓ A year convincing Jarratt & Carl to hand her ENDEAVOR 🌊 Leavin...

He won a Magic: The Gathering national championship at 17 — the youngest ever — and got the cards he won with banned. Then he built Ascension in 18 months, bet his life savings on 10,000 copies, and sold out at Gen Con. Justin Gary of Stone Blade Entertainment opens up 15 years of design secrets: why balance is a misnomer, how the One Ring broke his game (and the story moment that fixed it), and w...

He invented card crafting — and he may have just reinvented deck building. John D. Clair designed 🚀 SPACE BASE, 🏴‍☠️ DEAD RECKONING, 🎲 CUBITOS, 🐎 READY SET BET, and 🔮 MYSTIC VALE — and his new "momentum" system in ⚔️ UNSTOPPABLE is the engine behind the smash-hit 👑 DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL board game. In this one, I review Unstoppable to the designer's face for the very first time. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━...

One of the most storied résumés in the entire board game industry. Zev founded Z-Man Games, published 🦠 PANDEMIC and the first English 🌾 AGRICOLA (and basically invented the "animeeple" by deluxing it), signed the original ENDEAVOR, spent seven years exploding the WizKids catalog with ~100 games, and now runs his own publisher — ✨ PLAY TO Z. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE, WE GO DE...

Board game designer Peter Hayward (Rolling Deep, Things & Rings, That Time You Killed Me) sits down for a wide-ranging, 3-hour conversation about what actually makes a game fun, why he's stepping back from designing to chase screenwriting, and how he reverse-engineered the feeling of Balatro into a tabletop roguelike. We get into the apex of game design, the difference between fun, satisfactio...

I need your help to keep this going. The #1 way you can support me is join my community here: https://crdbrd.app/ Zeshawn from Board and Shield has played over 500 board games — and he's just as deep in the book world as the board game one. In this episode of the Board Game Secret Show we go all the way down the rabbit hole: how a Game of Thrones version of Risk pulled him into the hobby, why he m...

BigPasti makes $1,000 a month on YouTube, refuses every free game publishers send him, and is building his own game designed to make you miserable. So we sat him down and ran through 20 of the spiciest board game takes on the internet — Earth, Secret Hitler, Zombicide, FOMO, sleeving, AI art, and whether the designer even matters. Agree? Disagree? Drop your own hot take in the comments. 👇 🎲 Back...

Daniel from@thinkgaming fled his country in 2022 with no job, no money, and no plan. Three years later he's running one of YouTube's most dedicated nerdy strategy channels — 500+ hours into Elder Scrolls, the official How-to-Play creator for Too Many Bones, and somehow he's never missed an upload week. We talked about losing everything in a single day, sleeping on a friend's couch in London, why h...

@iv-studio-games started making commercials for Nike, Amazon, and Bad Robot. Then one Christmas, Zac invited Austin over to "just make a board game" — for fun, for nostalgia, no plan. That became Moonraker. Six years later, IV Studios is one of the most design-forward indie publishers in the hobby — shipping on 9-to-12-month timelines, running 800-person community tours, and somehow maintaining a...

Two Latvian guys, one YouTube channel, zero plans to stop — I sat down with Jānis G and Jānis T from Board Game Hangover to talk about building one of the most creatively ambitious channels in the hobby from Riga, Latvia, going viral with Eternals, refusing publisher money on principle, and what it actually costs to do this full time. We get into the messy reality of running a board game channel y...

Danny Garcia has quietly become one of the most thoughtful designers in board games — and in this episode, we go deep on exactly why. We talk about his unconventional design process (he builds entire games in his head before writing a single note), his obsession with action selection, why theme always comes first, and what it means to share your culture through cardboard. We also get an extended l...

Jay runs @CardboardEast one of the most unique channels in the hobby. He spent nearly 20 years living in Taipei, learned Chinese and Japanese, and became one of the best windows into Asian board game design the English-speaking world has. Now he's back in the US as Marketing Manager at Bézier Games. We talked about what drew him to Taiwan, the Tokyo Game Market experience, what Western publishers...

Mike Kelley of One Stop Co-op Shop sits down to talk the real side of board game content creation — review ethics, publisher horror stories, and much more. Then we break down his framework for what actually makes a great solo or co-op game, using his recent reviews as the lens. Plus: an unannounced mech game reveal you won't want to miss. Subscribe to @OneStopCoopShop Join the Secret Club Here: ht...

The NSFW Episode Beware ;) My @BoardGameBollocks conversation. He is human, hilarious and incredibly thoughtful. Whether you agree with his takes or not I can assure you this conversation shows a side you almost surely have never seen before. If you don't know Bollocks then even more reason to sit down with us and hang out for a while. Join the Secret Club Here: https://www.crdbrd.app/hub/clubs?cl...

Eleven friends from college in central Arkansas turned game night into a YouTube channel — and they're in debt doing it. In this episode I sit down with Matt, Eli, and Robert from The Grove Games to talk Twilight Imperium betrayals, why they refuse to trash a game even when it's bad, and what it actually takes to build something real in the niche of all niches. 🔔 Subscribe to @TheGroveGames : htt...

Tom Vassel has been the face of board game media for over two decades — hundreds of written reviews, 21 years of top ten lists, a YouTube channel (@thedicetower ) a podcast and conventions. In this conversation we go beyond the games. Tom talks about what it actually cost him to go full time, what it costs him to stay honest, and what shaped him long before any of it started. Support the Jack Vase...