Fowers Games

The first game Tim Fowers ever made was a 3D chess set in middle school, and by his own account it turned out not to be fun. He told the Deseret News in 2016 that he enjoyed designing it and building the board in shop class anyway. The board games that pay the bills came much later, after a career writing code.

Fowers was a programmer in 2005 when he and a co-worker entered a game contest. They caught the bug, he said, and started making video games full time, and board games crept in along the way. He tries to make each kind borrow from the other. In a 2015 interview with Theology of Games he said he had been making games for 10 years and was living in Southern California.

Then he came back. Fowers told the Deseret News he had lived in Utah about half his life and returned to make board games full time, and he called it a great state to start a business. The company lists a post office box in Centerville. Its About page names a small team, with Becky Fowers on customer support.

Paperback came first among the hits. It is a deckbuilder in which the cards are letters and every hand has to become a word, and the stronger letters carry abilities such as drawing more cards. Players help an aspiring author named Paige Turner finish westerns and crime noir novels. The game's page notes it was shown at the Game Developers Conference in 2014, and the store now sells a 10th anniversary edition.

Burgle Bros made the name. It is a cooperative heist for one to four players: the crew has to crack a safe on each floor of a three-story building and escape before a guard catches anyone. If one player is caught, everybody loses. Fowers said the design came together fast once he figured out how to move the guard intelligently, and the game ships in an oblong box that looks like the building.

He funded it on Kickstarter, which he called a magic bullet for board games. The downside, he told the Deseret News, is that you are instantly famous for something you haven't done yet. That also describes most heist crews before the first safe.

Fowers has said he sells direct because he watched designers move many thousands of copies a year and still not make a living. Orders ship from warehouses in the US, UK, Germany, China and Australia, which the store says keeps buyers clear of import taxes. Hardback, the follow-up to Paperback, is sold out for now, with a reprint planned.

In the 2016 interview he teased what came next, a fugitive versus marshal game that took five minutes to play. Fugitive now lists a playing time of 10 minutes, so somewhere in development the chase got twice as long.