The evening we ran out of people to play with

We are two brothers, and we grew up around a table. Not a special one. The one in the front room, cleared off after dinner and covered again before anyone came round.

For years that was enough. Then we started buying the boxes nobody we knew had heard of, and the problem arrived with them. A game is not a thing you own. It is a thing you do with other people, and a box on a shelf is a promise you cannot keep on your own.

The teaching turned out to be the hobby

So we got good at teaching. You learn quickly that nobody wants the rulebook read at them. You set the board up first, you explain the one thing the game is actually about, you let people take a bad turn, and you answer questions as they come.

Somewhere in there we noticed that the teaching had become the better half of it. Winning a game of anything is fine. Watching somebody who said they hated board games ask to play again is better, and it is not close.

Then we ran out of people

That is the whole beginning, really. We had a shelf we were proud of and a list of people who had already played most of it. Friends started asking where we had found things. We started ordering two copies instead of one.

At some point we were buying games for other people more often than for ourselves, and it stopped being a favour and started being a small operation on a spreadsheet. That was 2019. It has been getting less small ever since.

What we kept from that table

Three things carried over, and they are still how this works.

• We have played everything we sell. Not read about it. Played it.
• We will teach you any of it, for nothing, whether or not you buy the box.
• Nothing goes on the shelf that we would not happily set up for a friend.

The rest of it is logistics.