How 30 Years of Friendship Became a Board Game Business

Jason Hsieh (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed. Today’s guest is Mike and Craig, who bring over 30 years of professional experience in many different types of indie board games publishing. And as co-founders of Flatworks Gaming, Mike has also helped to launch multiple different titles in the industry. And before that, he was also a gamer at heart.

So thank you so much for both of you to join today’s interview and share some of your experience and your journey and your knowledge with our listener on the show today.

Craig Blythe (00:28)
Thanks Jason.

Mike Warth (00:29)
Yep, thanks a lot.

Jason Hsieh (00:30)
So I guess who want to go first and kind of talk about like your background in the industry. How do you get started and you your journey so far.

Craig Blythe (00:38)
I’ll let Mike go.

Mike Warth (00:39)
Yeah. I started early playing games, you know, was “Sorry!” and life games when I was really young. I had a vibrating NFL football game from a tutor. A lot of these people had these, games in the early seventies and, I played that game a lot, a metal board and it vibrated and moved your, moved your little, football guys around and the football.

Played “Stratego” and chess a lot with my dad. win a game of chess until I was, you know, high school, actually junior, senior in high school. I think my dad gave me that competitive spirit when he didn’t let me win. He actually made me earn it. But, know, Craig and I are Gen X. So we got the Atari 2600, the Nintendo, that little tech game for football that you can put in your hands. You know,

the TSR 80 computer and a space shuttle program that we had on there. So, you played board games and then we moved to video games. But then, in high school, we started playing D&D, Starfleet battles, Star Trek RPGs. So for Flatworks, it’s Craig, Charlie Sinning and I who started it.

We knew each other back then and we were playing games all the way back when we were very young

Jason Hsieh (01:48)
I see. I guess, did you started together initially or did you create join the company later on?

Mike Warth (01:54)
Well for Flatworks, we started it together. yeah, it was a long, a long history of, deciding what actually we wanted to do. getting into the industry, was, a little daunting. when we first started, there’s a lot of things that happened, you know, ever since we were younger, but played D and D I had,

jumping into trying to make games over the years and just not successful at it. But it wasn’t really until 2010 where Craig and I went up to Gen Con. when I joined a tournament. Actually, Craig and I played Axis and Allies tournament and we got beat. We were doing really well for an hour and then just went downhill.

Craig Blythe (02:34)
quickly.

Mike Warth (02:34)
went to Gen Con and I joined the Catan Settlers of America tournament. And we didn’t know, or I didn’t even know how to play the game. So we did that on So Thursday we go to the game library. Craig and I and actually Charlie Sinning’s wife Rose was there and I learned the game and I won the tournament on Sunday. Just learned the game. But you know, that was

30 years of playing games, learning games. And that’s the point where, you know, we came back and we were driving back and I talked to Charlie on the phone and talked to Craig and we were like, we should really start doing this. Actually start making games. But, you know, I went back for a master’s degree at college, so it delayed it even more.

After that time, 2013, 2014, that’s when we actually decided, yeah, let’s make a company.

Jason Hsieh (03:25)
I Out of all the different games you have, which one is the first one that your team worked together on?

Mike Warth (03:30)
Actually, Craig, think it was King’s Tournament. Yeah. We did King’s Tournament, made, I don’t know, 20, 30 copies of it and sold it at local game conventions. But that was the very first one.

Craig Blythe (03:44)
It’s almost like the game War that you play with cards, you know, when you were played and you just flipped over a card to see, you know, who we get the higher card and we kind of added a few things to it. yeah, King’s Tournament was almost like war whenever we started out. That was our first foray into making a game that was fun and we were proud of and we let our friends play it and ask them how the experience was.

Yeah, and from there, it just kind of grew. Mike is really good with the strategy, with the headwind, with the tailwind. And I was kind of there for the theming and just kind of the progressing along. So we all had these ideas that we could throw together

to make them really kind of cohesive and they weren’t always ideas that each of us liked. But if it was the good of the game, that’s what we were looking for most and the ideas we were throwing together.

Jason Hsieh (04:42)
I see. And I believe that game is kind of discontinued. Is that game still available?

Mike Warth (04:47)
So it’s out of print. We sold everything. But we really are thinking about running a Kickstarter, probably again to reprint it. And for Dwarven Smithy.

Craig Blythe (04:56)
That’s for Dwarven Smithy.

Not King’s Tournament.

Mike Warth (05:00)
That’s long and gone.

Jason Hsieh (05:02)
I see, I see, I see. So let’s talk about the next few games. I guess you have a few games that is actually very successful and have loyal fan base, especially the one that you just mentioned. How did the idea of games come from?

Mike Warth (05:15)
Well, that one’s my story. I actually was going to work and I was sitting at a light and I looked down, my phone went off and I looked down for the message and I look up and a big old truck just about hit me and my heart started racing. I thought it was a dump truck, but later on I find out it was a towing company and it was called Smith’s towing company. So I turn, start going up, my heart’s calming down.

And Smiths became Smith, became Smithy. And I’m like, okay, who’s Smithy? That’s Dwarven Smithy. So the theme came before any mechanics. By the time I got to work, I came up with Dwarven Smithy and thinking about what mechanics and we’ve been working for a year together every Tuesday, coming up with games and playing these games ourselves. So we had a list of mechanics that

we wanted to add and I didn’t tell Craig or Charlie for a good month. I put the game together and kind of surprised them one day and said, Hey guys, I’ve been working on a game. Let’s try it out. And we tried it and it worked. And it was, we knew from that point, it was, that was the game that we needed to be working on.

Jason Hsieh (06:25)
I see. For our audience that have never tried that game, can you just give a quick, maybe one, two minute version of an overview of how the game is being played? And I see if you have a copy with you.

Mike Warth (06:35)
this is our copy of game. so this is a Tableau hand management game where you are drawing resources and orders into your hand. And you have the world’s smallest Smithy in front of you. And in front of you, you have a market that you can sell to other players. You have a workshop.

which is safe from other players. have a place for tools and apprentices. So you’re taking these cards into your hand and You got hand management. You’re trying to manage. You can only have six cards in your hand, seven cards in your workshop, and you have to wait. So it’s a crafting game. So you put down a metal. You have to wait a turn before it’s refined. Then you can take that metal and then you can craft

a shield, then you have to wait again for it to finish. And by doing that, you have to manage your hand, you have to manage the board, you’re looking at when other players are managing. The game is telling you all this information about what’s come out of the deck so far, and you’re trying to keep all of that together and thinking about the thought process, your strategy.

As you play the cards and your strategy going into the game might be one thing, but you have to play the cards as they’re drawn to you. And then you have to change your strategy accordingly. And of course it’s a dwarven game. So you got to have, coins with it. So the player with the most coins at the end of the game wins. All right. So, we tested this with three players.

probably most of the time, but we made sure it was a two player and a four player game too. But we always played, Charlie, Craig and I, played, you know, three people for two years before we let anybody see it . That’s our best selling game so far.

Jason Hsieh (08:17)
I see. And that is the one that you’re planning to do another Kickstarter campaign on, correct?

Mike Warth (08:22)
Yeah, we’ve gotten feedback. It’s been out of print for a year and a half to two years, and we’re still getting feedback and people still play it and people still love it. I mean, it’s on board game geek. It has a 7.3 rating with over 300 people on it. 300 people, rating it. So it’s got a really good rating. It’s got a strong backing and we love the game. I still play the game once a month. and, when we go to convention, we’re playing it again.

We still get people to come up to us asking us, know, you going to come out with more things? I get, can I get mats? Can I, you are you going to make some more coins? So people are still excited about the game.

Craig Blythe (08:57)
Usually if they play it, they want to buy it and they’ll call us and say, where can I get this game at? Yeah, it’s funny because when we were making it, we knew that it was fun and that it was good, but people love to build things. They love to craft things. that’s where they get that love for it. We always say that it’s competitive, but not combative.

that way, you you really want to be the one with the most gold at the end, but you’re not beating somebody with your, you know, with it to get that way. But in the crafting and making of items, that’s where that fun lies.

Jason Hsieh (09:32)
I see. What was the reason, just curious, that it was out of print for like a year and a half?

Mike Warth (09:36)
It’s really just financial. We got, into other games too. and it sold out a little bit quicker than what we thought. So, I mean, once, when it went through COVID, it just, sold a lot of games and, ⁓ and then coming in the back end of that, it’s just, we were unprepared, I guess, to, reprint so quickly. so yeah.

That’s kind of where we’re at. We just love the game so much, and we try to tell people about it whenever we can.

Craig Blythe (10:05)
We had two ways that we bought it out. One was just a basic game. It had cardboard coins and that was the basic stripped down model. And then the deluxe version had these metal coins and people loved playing with the metal coins. And so they bought up all of our deluxe copies. So we had to have a coin Kickstarter.

to get more metal coins and people would buy two packs of metal coins, not just for that game, but for other games. There were even people who bought two copies of the deluxe game and then they would take the metal coins out of the other game and then they would resell it as a basic game. So they had two bags of the metal coins. So metal coins became big and Mike and I could, because we played it so much came out with the, game mat.

and the artwork and the colors popped so much on the mat, people were like, where can I get this? So we came out with mats for the game that sold really well. And then we kind of went on from there and had an expansion pack for it, which added more intrigue to the game. And there’s two styles to play the game. You can play the beginner.

which usually takes about an hour, hour and a half, where you can play the long version, which the items are a little harder to assemble the jewels and everything for, and that plays in about two hours, two and a half hours.

Mike Warth (11:33)
And what’s interesting with that is, you know, I’ve had this come up with talking to other developers, is how they, how can they demo their game quickly? And what we found was, we needed, the game was about an hour and a half long and we needed a way to play it in an hour. That way we could get more people to play the game. so we stripped it down and made it easier to play. And then it played in an hour.

And we were able to teach people and play in an hour. then that was the starter game. And then we did a full game. That’s the hour and a half game. So we decided early on that we were going to put both games, we were going to do it both ways. So we just put an icon on the cards to say what’s the starter game, what’s the full game. And we just included it.

Jason Hsieh (12:17)
I see, I see. How was the feedback from the players?

Mike Warth (12:20)
It was great. I say great. it was one of those things where when someone make a plays what you make and say they really love it, that’s what makes you a game developer. That’s what you really want to have. You know, early on in the process, we spent a lot of time with the game ourselves. I mean, we spent about two years developing the game, which probably was a little bit too long.

If we knew now what we knew then, it would have probably been a year. But we held on to it. And then once we were ready, we started going to board game conventions and showing it and playtesting it and getting feedback. We used the unpub feedback form and we made it our own and gave it numbers. And I’m a numbers guy. So every time we changed something or did something, we always noted it.

And we got feedback. And that was a really important thing, was to get player feedback and just start inching that game to making it where the fun value was the highest.

Jason Hsieh (13:18)
I see, see. And I know you have a few other games under your belt as well. You want to talk about a few other ones that you currently also have?

Mike Warth (13:25)
Yeah. So Charlie left the company to pursue some other interests, but he left us. don’t have the game right here with me, but that’s called squadron dice. It’s a an aerial combat dice game where players are taking to the sky, trying to knock each other out. Very competitive game, very take that type of game. And the other one’s called paraphrase.

which is a game designer took popular song titles from the 1960s all the way up to 2019. what she did, the designer did, Rachel Palmer is her name, she song titles, paraphrased them, and made a game out of it.

Jason Hsieh (14:08)
Okay, okay, yeah.

Mike Warth (14:09)
And this is our paraphrase game.

Jason Hsieh (14:12)
Mm-hmm.

What is the rule for that game look like? So you need to guess, I guess the player need to guess the right song based on that.

Craig Blythe (14:19)
Yeah,

the premise came about. Rachel, she edits church bulletins and stuff. So she had to come up with a homemade game for their family Christmas exchange. And she came up with this game where she took a popular song title. She rearranged it into a phrase.

And then she would say this phrase, you had to guess the song title. And if you guessed the song title, you get three points. If you can tell us the artist, you get another point. And if you can sing it, it doesn’t have to be well. But if you can sing it, you get another point. And it lends itself to becoming almost like a sing along. I am a person who I love music. You know, it’s just any type. You have always loved it. And ⁓

We when we created Flatworks, we wanted to design edit and publish board games and so when we met her we were on our way out of a convention down here in the Cincinnati area and She just kind of stepped out in the aisle and she gave us a question she said, you know, she said do you like songs? I said, I love songs. I love music and the clue that she gave me was a dog like

creature that is ravenous. I can’t remember what the phrase was. And I was like, it’s hungry like a wolf. And she said, yeah, who sang it? And I was like, well, that was Duran Duran. She said, yeah. She said, can you sing it? And I launched right into my best version of Hungry Like the Wolf. And I was like, that’s great. And at that time, she was just kind of developing it. And I walked out of that convention saying, Mike, that game is going to be unreal.

I mean, because it touches every single part and the possibilities are limitless in the songs that you can choose. And it came around a little later that Mike and I had the opportunity to talk to her again and bring that game to life. you know, she bought us the game and we changed some things. We edited some things. We helped her develop the phrases and the songs and made sure that

there was no copyright infringement. And it is taken off from there. There’s two volumes, there’s 213 songs in each volume. And it goes all the way from the 60s all the way up to the you know, current 2020.

with all of these artists and all of these songs and you can play it a variety of ways. Sometimes you can play it with teams head to head or you can take it to a barbecue or a party and one person gets up and starts throwing out these paraphrases and the whole group starts answering and some of the most unlikeliest of people that you would see that you would think they cannot know this song and they’re up there singing a Taylor Swift song.

You know, and you’re like, I would have never known that, but it just catches on. becomes infectious and people, know, there are these big sing-alongs going on in a backyard party and stuff. So I have loved this game from the very beginning.

Jason Hsieh (17:24)
Thank you for sharing that. It sounds like a fun party game to play with.

Craig Blythe (17:28)
Yeah,

it is.

Jason Hsieh (17:29)
So over your journey running the publishing company, what would you say is one of the biggest challenge or hurdle that you have faced as a company?

Mike Warth (17:38)
⁓ you can go Craig.

Craig Blythe (17:40)
I was just saying, sometimes when you come up with a game, becomes almost like a part of your family. So, you know, what we have to do sometimes is break the game or attempt to break the game because you want to see what the holes are in it. And sometimes, you know, changing the ideas are like pulling teeth. So when we came up with the idea of a

market or for the dwarven smithy game, Mike was like, no, I hate it. We cannot do this. This will not work. I do not like this. we, you know, but he said, okay, well, let’s play it that way. And then at the end of playing, he said, you know what? It works. It works. So sometimes, you know, having a something that is almost like part of your family and changing something seems wrong.

But you kind of have to get through that growing process of kind of letting go and letting your friends kind of move things around and just, you know, let’s just try it. If it doesn’t work, we can always take it out. So sometimes it’s just that. Mike and I have been friends ever since the sixth grade. you know, so then, we know each other very well. And sometimes that that bending and that changing of things.

Sometimes that’s a little tough, but we have managed to respect each other’s viewpoints. I respect his ideas and his mechanics and his numbers are spot on. He is a numbers guy through and through, statistics, probabilities, what comes up on a dice. He is fantastic at that. And so I think that we have respected each other so much that in something like that,

I would trust his numbers above anything else. And he may look at me and say, you know what? I don’t understand the idea, but I trust that idea. I trust that theme. so that’s also what makes us really good at designing games together, because we each bring something different to the table. But sometimes that rending or that melding of those ideas, you know…

We won’t get heated at each other, but we’re each going to be pushing our point, and then we’ll go, OK, let’s try it. Let’s see how it works.

Mike Warth (19:48)
You really have to be willing to try different things and be flexible. But you know, behind the numbers, behind all that kind of stuff, it’s really finding the fun of your game. It’s finding what is going to be the most enjoyment someone is going to have playing your game. And sometimes you have to give up the hill. You have to not be king of the hill. You have to give a little bit for the game to be more fun.

You can’t be so that you can’t bend a little bit. I think I’ve been to more now than I used to on a lot of these things. But yeah, when you’re friends, it’s, easy making games. You’re having a lot of fun.

Jason Hsieh (20:25)
And based on your experience, what role does the community itself, the feedback getting from the community play into the way you designing and also changing the game?

Craig Blythe (20:35)
Well, I think you get lots of great ideas from those people who see something that maybe you didn’t. There was a metal that we had to change in Dwarven Smithy as we were playing it. You know, there’s four types of metal that you’re searching for and one of the types of metal, which I believe was bronze, was it bronze? Yeah, it was bronze. So we had silver, gold.

Mike Warth (20:53)
Yeah, it was brawdy.

Craig Blythe (20:57)
iron and bronze and a guy sat down to play it and he was halfway through it and he’s like, where’s the mithril? And we looked at each other like, the mithril, you know, Tolkien’s views and everything, you know, and all the things we’ve seen about dwarves, mithril is a metal. So was taking out bronze and putting mithril in.

So and a lot of that comes from the people that you meet and the people that you listen to and their view. And now Mithril was a large part of the metal for that game. So I think the the community helps you develop that game because what does the community want? They want a great game. And if they can help make that game, you know, better, I think that they play a role in the success of the game as well.

Mike Warth (21:43)
And we took the games to a lot of board game conventions and to get feedback. I mean, we play tested Dwarven Smithy before we did our Kickstarter, at least 150. Gameplays. So it was a lot. But another thing that really helped us was we got to meet other designers and in Cincinnati area. And actually that group of, designers, we came up and became the Cincinnati tabletop.

game designers. We actually meet still. It’s the last Wednesday of every month over in Cincinnati and last Wednesday of every month at seven o’clock. Not everybody makes it all the time, but we all meet, we support each other. It’s local game designers that are playing each other’s games, giving you honest feedback, but most important, we’re supporting each other.

And getting that feedback from designers is one thing, but taking your game. A lot of times you want to hold it close and you don’t want to change it because you know, as soon as you put it out there, you’re going to start getting feedback. And that’s a big hurdle for new game designers to get over is to, you have to give it up. You have to, you know, once you have the idea and you have the rules, post your rules, let people know about your game, which is really hard because

Someone’s going to steal my game. Well, the community will give justice to anyone who steals a game. The community has done that many times before. So don’t worry about that. If you’re a game designer, design your game. Don’t worry. Write up your rules. Put it out there. Put it on a website. Let people know that this is your game. And let people give you feedback to make it better.

Jason Hsieh (23:20)
Yeah, that’s a very good suggestion as well. looking into the future, what is the goal for the next one to three years? Publishing more games, reprinting some of the previous games, and what are some of the things you are currently working on to take the business to the next level?

Mike Warth (23:35)
Well, we’d like to do Dwarven Smithy, reprint here in the fall. I’m going on vacation next month, so I have to push it off a little bit. So we’d like to do that. We’d like to do a volume three and a movie version of paraphrase. So, but right now we’re fighting doing anything because of the, tariffs in China. Right now our games are made,

by Wingo and Game Land. We’ve reached out to them. We’ve got quotes. We know how much this costs, but it’s a little up in the air. I think the new tariff has been pushed for 90 days, which pushes us to like November, which is right the time we wanted to do a Kickstarter. So that’s the hard part right now for us to decide. But yeah, we have worked on a few other games. We have percolating.

around that we’ve been working on. But in the short term, next six months, we really like to do that volume three of paraphrase because people love it so much and do our Dwarven Smithy reprint. And you never know, we might come up next month and a new game pops up and we’ll start working on that one.

Craig Blythe (24:37)
You know, whenever we first first came out, there was three games that we, that we had kind of, that we were, working on. And one of them was “Kings Tournament.” One of them was a game that we have out now called squadron dice, which is aerial combat dice game. Yeah. And, and there was one that we called “Ped War.” The original idea was, was called “Swoop.”

We had changed it into a “Ped War” was like a matching game

Mike Warth (25:01)
Celtic changing or Celtic matching game.

Craig Blythe (25:04)
Yeah. And, when we came out with, with “Squadron Dice”, really, we really liked it a lot, but the price point on dice was so high that we couldn’t put the game out without it being, you know, really expensive. Since that time though, dice has come down. We talked with the people who were making resin dice and, know, we’re, screen printing stuff on. And, and since that time we got.

Squadron Dice into a great price point. And, Squadron Dice is out there, as well. And we sell that game and then Ped War or Swoop we have kicked around and we are still playing it. We’re still adding things and, and we play tested it up at Gen Con a couple of times in the first exposure play test hall. And, that’s something that,

we’ve messed with the theming on. So it’s just a matter of us kind of sitting back down with that and going, OK, what are we going to do with this?

Mike Warth (25:53)
I see. And I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you an example of someone keeping something close and not wanting to let it go. So I’ll do that. I’ll do that for myself. I want to create a reverse deck builder where the deck is already built. In my mind, it’s called realms. Realms of Tiberium, where you reverse deck build, you already have the deck built and you’re trying to undo it.

And that is something where I haven’t seen with the mechanics that I’m thinking about, I haven’t seen a game do that, but, that’s something I would like to develop over the next year. With the same kind of theme of like a Dwarven Smithy, and really nice art and things like that. But if you’re a new developer or a new designer of a game,

Like I said, don’t be afraid to push it out there. You know, ideas are easy. It’s actually getting the mechanics down right down on a piece of paper and, get it out there.

Jason Hsieh (26:44)
Yeah, that’s a really good piece of advice. So as well, kind of wrapping up today’s interview, where is for those listeners that’s interested to learn more about you and your businesses, where is the best place for people to find you online?

Mike Warth (26:57)
Well, you can go to Flatworks Gaming is our main website, but dwarvensmithy.com or paraphrase.com that takes you straight to those pages. We have a sign up for updates where if you’re interested in the game, interested in the reprint of Dwarven Smithy, you’re interested in getting paraphrase right now or paraphrase volume three, you can go out there and sign up and

you put your email, we don’t use the email for anything else other than for information, for Kickstarter and things like that. so just go out to our website and you also hit us up on Facebook. we’re also on Twitter, not as much on Twitter anymore, but, still out on Facebook, send us messages. One thing that we told ourselves a long time ago and Craig’s already nodding because he knows where I’m going with this customer service. We are always there if something’s wrong.

You missing a card, dog ate your card. Just let us know. And I’ll ship you a new card. I got plenty of reserve that we can do that. We want to take care of our customers because we know that word of mouth is the best marketing that we could ever do. And we’re also good people and we play games too. And we just want everyone to enjoy the games that we have offered to them.

Craig Blythe (28:09)
And as as gamers, we know what it’s like your dog hit your card or you can’t find this or you lost the piece and you’re thinking, I can’t play this game with without a piece. As two gamers, We understand that. And we just want to get something into your hands that you can trust it that we will do right.

Mike Warth (28:26)
Yep. And I the last thing I’d leave people with is don’t talk yourself out of making a board game. You can overanalyze everything, but don’t just start at the beginning. Begin with the end in mind, always knowing where you want to go, but start at the beginning. Just slowly work through it. Don’t overanalyze everything. Learn what you can.

Jason Hsieh (28:27)
See.

Mike Warth (28:50)
Write down what you need to learn for later, but just stay on topic. Try to build your game and things will fall into place. Go meet people. Go to conventions.

Craig Blythe (28:59)
Yeah, and if you see us at a con, flag us down. We’ll be more than happy to sit down with you and talk to you about your game or, you know, just chat. We, love to meet people.

Mike Warth (29:07)
Absolutely.

Jason Hsieh (29:08)
Thank so much for sharing that. And thank you so much for both of your time today, sharing your journey, your experiences, and your knowledge with our listener and with our show.

Mike Warth (29:16)
Absolutely. Thanks, Jason.

Jason Hsieh (29:17)
Yeah, and thank you for our listener for tuning in to this episode of Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. We hope you have enjoyed today’s conversation and find it insightful and inspiring. If you like what you have heard, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform so you never miss an episode. We really appreciate your support and would love it if you can leave us a review and share the podcast with your friend and colleague. For more resource tips and the latest update we in the toys end game industry, visit our website at toy-launch.com.

Join the conversation and connect with us on social media using #toybusinessunboxed. We’ll love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future episodes. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joy through toys. This is Jason Hsieh signing off on the Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much, everyone.