My reintroduction to board games as an adult came about when I was a freshman in college. Soon after finding some friends in the dorms, a group of us, looking to do something fun together besides Cards Against Humanity, found our way to what was then a Lone Star Comics (now Wild West Comics and Games). It was just a couple of blocks off campus and so we decided it would be a fun excursion to walk.

I had never explored local game stores beyond playing a few Magic: the Gathering drafts when I was a pre-teen so this was a rude awakening for me. Browsing the wares, we came across the first Avalon Hill game I would ever play, Betrayal at the House on the Hill. Upon poring over its cover, reading its back, listening to the friendly clerk’s recommendation of the game, we resolved as a group to purchase the game, thinking it to sound quite spooky. The idea that the rules would not only change as the game progressed but change in secret between the betrayer and the rest of the players was mind-boggling to me and endlessly exciting.

We played the game that Saturday.

It was a blast! (I'm the dazed looking one in the right corner)

We had so much fun reading out the silly flavor text on the omen and event cards, turning off the lights so only the desk lamps spilled light into the room. So much so that we started making a routine of it, playing the game every Saturday on our newfound Game Night. I still have the frayed and faded copy of Betrayal that we played.

It did not take long, however, for Betrayal to no longer quench my thirst for gaming. Many of the haunts weren’t balanced very well and many more, mechanically, weren’t all that different from each other. There just wasn’t much meat to the game once the novelty of the genre had run its course and we had seen most of the tiles. Seeking gratification elsewhere, it wasn’t long before I found Catan and a host of other games that made up my early education in board gaming.

Around this time, I also got back into Magic: the Gathering and started to venture into its competitive scene, a scene I’m still apart of to this day. It was through the lens of Magic that I met my close friend and now business partner, Richard Wyatt.

I had just moved to Austin, Texas, having transferred to the University of Texas at Austin as a sophomore. A new competitive Magic player, I was determined to compete in Grand Prix Houston happening that Spring. Once in Houston, I bunked with another player I'd just met and over the course of the I met Richard. He was playing what he always plays, his own strange creation -- an interesting creature combo deck I had never seen before.

We did not get a chance to play many games, but I was lucky to learn that Richard was another player from Austin like myself. Upon returning home, we became fast friends, bonding over the first twenty or so games of Magic we played in a row at his little apartment on San Gabriel. Since that day, we likely have shared somewhere in the ballpark of a thousand hours of gaming experience together.

Video games, card games, board games, role-playing games; there’s very little we don’t enjoy and we take inspiration from all those expressions of shared interactive experience.

There’s an institution in Austin, Texas, an institution that has stood for 40 years, a student’s promised land: Kerbey Lane Café. There was time, on weekend nights, when Richard and I used to grab late (and I mean really late) dinners together – usually after playing a tournament at Pat’s Games. Only problem was, by the time we would get out, there were only so many places still open. Richard, obsessed with breakfast as he is, was always happy to suggest Kerbey and I usually agreed.

After all, who doesn’t love pancakes? I recommend getting a cinnamon swirl in yours if you ever go.

Digging into these sugar topped clouds, we talked about our tournament results, our takeaways, and more often than not we just talked about life in general. Around this time, I took a Game Aesthetics class at UT that focused on board game design – one of the best decisions I’ve made. The final project for that class was to design a board game that captured the aesthetic of a video game. Richard gladly joined he playtests for the dorky reincarnation of Monkey Island my group worked on. We talked the rules, the numbers I had come to, where the fun of the game was. We often discussed the lessons I’d been taught in class and how those lessons compared to design decisions made in the games we cherished and went back to time after time.

One day, after one such conversation at Kerbey Lane, we couldn’t help but start to explore the idea of making a game ourselves. We set up a time and the following week we met up at Dragon's Lair.

We brainstormed some concepts, some game elements, some ideas for aeshtetics. We had three initial ideas we were attached to. We met once more the next week to further flesh out some of the ideas,s but eventually our work fell through.

Richard (slightly older than me) graduated and left for a job in Houston.

Time passed. Periodically we’d send each other updates. We met at Grand Prix Houston again that following spring which was a great time, but we never really delved back into our game concepts. We always wanted to, it just... didn’t work out for quite some time.

There was a bittersweet moment for us both when someone else made a game of one of our brainstormed ideas (looking at you, Boss Monster), which was validating but also felt like a bad missed opportunity.

It was only when Richard quit his job in Houston and moved back to Austin that things for us really started kicking off. We talked about our games and what we wanted from them, which was always just to make games we enjoyed playing. It never really occurred to us that there might be a business there. We met up met up again and brainstormed, making a schedule for ourselves, meeting every Wednesday evening for months – we were never phased by the man hours needed for it.

We went through dozens of editions of our first game and it was always a labor of love for us. When I finally started a day job, our meetings often became the highlights of my week.

As we started pumping out initial black and white printouts of our first game, we knew that there was something there. Friends who blindtested the game would ask to play again, ask whether they could have copies to play with other friends, when our game was going to kickstarter. In retrospect, I realize that this positive feedback was really important for us. It made our efforts feel larger than ourselves and there was a visceral joy in knowing that there were people waiting, craving to take something we had made to their own friends.

The idea of forming the company really caught fire for us as we started to explore more games on Kickstarter and came to the realization as to just how feasible it was to be an independent publisher with the right work ethic. Those first months of work,we always spent with the assumption that someday we would pitch the game to some publisher and be ecstatic if it just got made.

But we worked more on our game.

And eventually, that just wasn't good enough for us. Working on it was some of the most fun we'd ever had and we realized soon after that working on our projects was some of the most fulfilling work we'd ever done.

We saved up some money, hired a brilliant artist for our first major project, got a lawyer, and finally took the plunge to file for the creation of Dingus Games LLC in the state of Texas and now here we were.

Dingus Games was born and we are here to stay.

Enjoy what you read? Tune into my business partner's part two of this series! You can catch that right here.