Meet Thomas and Garrett | Founders of Rough Draft Games

We had the good fortune of connecting with Thomas and Garrett and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Thomas and Garrett, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
Everyone loves Risk. At least they do until somebody’s decided to camp out in South America and prolong the game for about 30 more turns than it needs to be. The classic area control war game might not be the most innovative board game on either of our game shelves, but it did teach us a thing or two about rolling the dice and taking a chance on what could be a tremendous victory or crushing defeat. We started Rough Draft Games in the same mental space. We wanted to make games that we liked with people that we could tolerate (each other). Whether or not people would be willing to buy those games was a chance we were just going to have to take. Luckily, we weaseled our way into a wonderful community that seems to laugh politely at our jokes and somewhat respects our efforts.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
We only started Rough Draft Games because we wanted to hang out more. Unfortunately, as a result, we had to form an LLC, figure out how to pay incorporation fees, learn what a tax nexus was and establish multiple production and fulfillment partners.

Everything we’ve done as a company, we did because we thought it would be fun. Our business is an extension of our friendship. It makes tough decisions and disagreements more difficult, but we couldn’t and wouldn’t want to do this any other way.

We hope that the sense of humor and the comradery we share as two weird dudes bleeds through everything that we create for the board game community. We want you to feel like you know the guys who made the thing you just played, and by playing it, we just hung out… and we raided your pantry. We took the last Yoo-hoo, btw. We’re not sorry.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Boardgamers are known to typically avoid natural light, and to congregate around tables. That being said, if you do feel like breaking away from the tabletop experience, we’d recommend checking out The Great Wolf Lodge and going down a couple of those waterslides. It’s indoors, so that means no sunburn! Another place we’d recommend seeing is the Ross Perot Museum of Space and Science. It’s just a cool place. Check it out.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
There’s actually loads of people we could right about here, so we’re going to shoot from the hip and name a couple that spring to mind immediately:

We’ve never actually met this guy, but board games are funny because they allow you an intimate window into the creativity and vision of their creators. Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games has not only given us many wonderful game nights that served as inspiration for the type of communal experiences we wanted to create but he’s also served as a guide on our journey in starting our own board game company. With everything he’s published and shared online, he’s pulled back the curtain on the daunting process of working with publishers, retailers, and the entire experience of crowdfunding. His book, The Crowdfunder Strategy Guide, served as our blueprint to create our first game.

We also want to give a shout-out to Kerry Rundle at Panda Games. She’s a champ and so are the other folks over there at Panda. They really spent a lot of time and patience with us as we successfully slogged through the production process in the middle of a worldwide shipping crisis.

Our game would not be here without our friend Jeff Lee. Jeff founded RDG with us and was instrumental in developing our company and helping us push through the production process of All Rise. He’s going to be an amazing Dad!

Additionally. Tom’s Mom did all the art for our first game All Rise. She’s an amazing person, an incredibly talented artist, and most importantly she was willing to do revisions for free.

Lastly, we must give a shoutout to everyone who backed us on Kickstarter to bring our first game to life. There were over 600 backers who helped us. We don’t have 600 friends. Garrett recently lost two and is now down to just five. So the fact that total strangers went out of their way to trust us with their hard-earned and ever-depreciating American dollars to make All Rise real kind of blows our minds.

Thank you all.

Website: www.roughdraftgames.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roughdraftgames/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RoughDraftGames

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RoughDraftGames/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCetzsFXbfIK9-19VKcWf3ZA

Other: https://rough-draft-games-store.myshopify.com/