If you haven’t heard of Chip Theory Games, they are an independent board game publisher founded by Josh and Adam Carlson, who are the main designers for the popular titles that the company is known for.

While Hoplomachus was their first title to debut on Kickstarter, CTG is best known for Too Many Bones, which catapulted the publisher to great heights in the industry and has garnered a wide fanbase who now passionately follows Chip Theory Games.

Beyond the TMB craze, the company is also famous for premium components and transparent, meaningful customer service, both on Kickstarter and with the board game community at large.

I’ve reviewed a couple of their games, but I was mainly excited to talk with Josh Carlson and learn more about the mentality at Chip Theory Games and what’s in store for the popular tabletop publisher.

Devon: Hey Josh! Thanks for taking the time to sit down and talk with me.

Josh: Thanks for having me. It’s always good to chat with fans and other members of the board game community.

Devon: I worked with your team back when I wrote for GameTyrant, reviewing Too Many Bones and Cloudspire, so I’m excited to be bringing that relationship with me to Quackalope to share all of the awesome things on the horizon for Chip Theory Games!

Josh: We’ve got a lot of exciting things coming in 2021, so it should be a big year for us.

Devon: I can’t wait to hear all about them. At least one of them I’m aware of because you all finished the campaign for burncycle back in November of 2020, so that big new adventure is on the way. And it went swimmingly from the looks of it, with almost $500,000 in funding.

Josh: Yeah, we were pleased with that and enjoyed getting to showoff the development for that game with our fans.

Devon: On the topic of interacting with your fans, or the community at large, I wanted to give a shoutout to the “Meet the Team” series you’ve been doing on your website. The series is a really great way to peek behind the curtain and humanize what can sometimes feel like a faceless entity when thinking about publishers or companies in the board game industry. I’m especially jealous of Jillian’s travel memories.

Josh: I appreciate that! We’ve been doing it for about a year now, with the first one from March of 2020. It’s been good in showing off all of the people who help make Chip Theory Games what it is.

Devon: It’s a nice touch, putting a face and a story to a name. And speaking of faces and stories, I thought it would be interesting to—instead of fast-forwarding to the future of CTG—rewind and explore the start of the company, your first game Hoplomachus, and how you came to be where you are in this creative space.

Josh: Chip Theory really started as a hobby. Adam and I are cousins and we grew up playing a lot of board games, PC games, and would occasionally find ourselves playing some variation of poker.

Hoplomachus was heavily inspired by an obscure little PC game we loved—and actually at one point attempted to buy the rights to—called SpiritWars. We wanted to sort of develop a board game version, and Kickstarter was brand new at the time.

Devon: So the theme or architecture for the game originated from SpiritWars. What about your production ideas? Those were novel at the time, in the early days of Kickstarter.

Josh: The chips and neoprene components side of things really were rooted in our love for poker and how well heavy chips and neoprene mesh together. We liked how the weight of game decisions often correlated to the weight of the components we were holding. The chips and felt made everything feel meaningful. Though we’ve always had an enthusiasm for nice components in games, we never set out to be “the high-end component company.” That’s really something that evolved over time.

Devon: I fully agree on how satisfying it is to fiddle with poker chips. The tactile aspect of that component is really something I love about the game. And they do work well with the mats. What about everything else, though?

Josh: The rest just sort of evolved organically. When Too Many Bones was originally conceptualized, we knew it was going to be something that was a little out there. We knew it needed 130 custom dice (expensive), and that right there was something no other game was really doing. We had established the chip and neoprene aesthetic already (expensive), so it was really with TMB that we decided to push the limits of what kind of production you can put into a board game.

Devon: Milk-proof?

Josh: Ha, exactly. We were (and still are) committed to direct-to-customer sales and didn’t really have any interest in selling via distribution. This meant that though the margin was important, it was much less important to us. For all of those reasons, we decided to make TMB one of the more outrageous (at the time, anyway) board game productions we could. Something that would really blow people away at an aesthetic level right out of the gate.

Devon: And I can attest to that. I didn’t play and review Too Many Bones until March of last year, four full years since the successful campaign on Kickstarter, and it blew me away when I unboxed it. It’s still the nicest quality game I own (competing of course with Cloudspire), though other games are certainly starting to contend.

Josh: Well, I’m glad you enjoyed it. And, yeah, other companies are starting to copy that model, to great success.

Devon: Definitely.

Devon: While we’re on Kickstarter and the campaigns for your games, I did want to ask about the Strategist pledge. I talked a little bit with Josh Wielgus about the concept, but how did that pledge level come about how do you think it reflects your attitude towards backers and your stance toward customer service?

Josh: Well, the Strategist pledge level specifically has become sort of this legendary deal—but it also serves our overall company ethos, which is all about embracing our community, listening, and doing good by them, sometimes to the detriment of our bottom line.

Devon: And I guess for clarification, I should mention that the Strategist pledge is a super-limited option that allows you to back at a high-dollar range (around $650 for the burncycle campaign) and then get all future Chip Theory Games projects for free. It’s pretty remarkable.

Josh: It’s unique, for sure. Having a pledge level like this isn’t really something we need anymore—but in the early days, we desperately needed those large pledges. Now, the community loves it and views it as a sort of lottery ticket on Kickstarter launch days, and we love allowing them to look forward to that.

Devon: All of the initial comments in the Kickstarter for burncycle were backers discussing how close they were to the Strategist levels. It was a wonderfully quirky moment.

Josh: But we’ve extended that fun and community-driven attitude into other areas as well. Many folks may not know that we have riddles embedded with Too Many Bones and a couple of expansions, leading folks down the road of a sort of metagame they can solve to get exclusive game content. Don’t tell anyone…

Devon: My lips are sealed!

Josh: We’ve also offered goofy promos for $1.00 on April Fools’ Day. We sell Update Packs at a loss for changes we make between print runs in our games. And we try to be as charitable as we can be in other areas.

Ultimately, the customers back our unproven games and keep us doing what we love. Not embracing the community in every possible way we can seems foolish to us.

Devon: I think that ethos has served you well. Too Many Bones has a massive following and the CTG community is one of the most passionate I’ve seen.

Devon: It really took off after Too Many Bones, didn’t it? Hoplomachus did well, but it was really TMB that pushed you to another level as a company? What changed for you as a team when that game did as well as it did?

Josh: Well, a lot of folks don’t realize that TMB was developed primarily by two dudes working full-time jobs and moonlighting as game designers. TMB changed everything for us, including providing an avenue to actually begin to hire a team. The biggest things (other than the money) were the industry recognition and the sudden need for a significantly larger focus on customer service.

Devon: I imagine it kicked everything into high gear for you.

Josh: Certainly. The industry recognition meant that people suddenly knew about us and our sales increased exponentially overnight. But, one of the reasons you don’t see a lot of games out there with as many custom non-cardboard components as TMB is that they are beasts to manufacture and introduce a myriad of opportunities for errors, which of course means things like replacement components are super important.

Devon: I hadn’t thought about all of the specifics that must be involved with components once you get past cardboard.

Josh: Not only that but when you charge $130 for your game, people expect perfection. So, we quit our day jobs to go full time and spent the next year adding a bunch of new employees to help run a real company. It was essentially the moment we had to grow up and either run a real company or let it stay a hobby forever. Obviously, we chose the former!

Devon: And there are so many of us that are happy you did!

Devon: Because then we wouldn’t have a game like Cloudspire, which carries on some of the ideas you started with Too Many Bones, but it also pivots in a much different direction, doesn’t it?

Josh: I hope so, given our intentions with the design.

Devon: It’s quite the game, with tower-defense mechanisms and a massive amount of gameplay depth with the asymmetric races. And now burncycle is introducing stealth mechanics! How important has it been for CTG to do something new with each game?

Josh: I’d say it’s very intentional but in two different ways: 1) We like making cool stuff and 2) We’re not interested in making the same cool stuff over and over. We always want to make sure we’re swinging for the fences. Too Many Bones was so incredibly popular right away and has, nearly single-handedly, sustained the company over the last three years. A lot of folks would look at that and say, “Well, you should just make TMB games forever!”

Devon: I wouldn’t blame you.

Josh: We looked at that and said, “What can we do to make sure we don’t just get pigeonholed as ‘The Too Many Bones Company’?”

Cloudspire and burncycle are both reactions to that on some level. They incorporate a lot of signature Chip Theory elements like squad tactics, asymmetrical abilities, a focus on solo play but put really different twists on them and do a lot of things games with lesser production values can’t necessarily pull off due to component limitations.

Devon: I would also say the Cloudspire digs even deeper in some ways than Too Many Bones.

Josh: Cloudspire is a huge, complicated game with a rather simple objective. I don’t know that we’ll ever make another game with that level of complexity, but we wanted to push those boundaries. burncycle is a bit simpler but still does a lot of unique things with stealth, asymmetry, and turn sequencing that other games aren’t really trying. We don’t want to repeat ourselves, so those strong differentiations are important to us.

Devon: If you had to pick a favorite part of each CTG game, what would it be and why?

Josh: Hoplomachus: This one is really about the simplicity. It’s right there for you on the mat with no card management or other complicated mechanics. Draw your units and outplay your opponent—human or AI.

Devon: I haven’t had a chance to play Hoplomachus but I want to now!

Josh: In Too Many Bones, it would be character building and how utterly unique every single Gearloc is. We’ve heard players say before that every Gearloc is like its own unique game and we take a tremendous amount of pride in that. You really do need to approach the entire game in a unique way based on the character you’re playing.

Devon: I wholeheartedly agree with that. My games, which were positively less elegant than most TMB players, consisted of a lot of head-scratching as to how best to utilize the incredibly diverse range of abilities between the different Gearlocs.

Josh: There are so many ways to go about it. And then there is Cloudspire. I still love the tower defense aspects of this game so much. The idea of mobile units versus stationary towers/spires still makes me smile. We also took a very different approach to the solo mode, with an entirely separate (and very elaborate) campaign.

Devon: So it’s clear that you all really focus on making each game a separate and memorable experience. How do you take that same attitude and apply it as a publisher? Like, what’s an internal commitment or passion that drives your decisions as a team?

Josh: I think it’s our aforementioned commitment to customers, along with a commitment to doing whatever we can to not be like other companies. The fancy components are an extension of that, but more and more companies are beginning to copy that model. We pride ourselves on listening to the community and doing things that they find interesting, surprising, and engaging.

I’m smiling as I write this because we have some pretty big surprises coming in the Too Many Bones universe in the next year, and I don’t think anyone will see it coming. The most concise way I think we can phrase it is that we are truly player-driven, not profit-driven.

Devon: Well, color me freaking excited. No doubt I’ll be waiting with my mouse, keyboard, and wallet when that happens.

Josh: It’s going to be really good.

Devon: There are a ton of great publishers who are active on Kickstarter, but I think the CTG approach is quite interesting. You are really focused on communicating with the backers, opening up a dialogue, and getting active feedback on games. What ideas or values created that type of transparency and rapport-building with the Kickstarter community?

Josh: Really what it’s all about is the fact that backers have already paid for an unproven product. We think it’s relatively elementary that folks who have paid upfront for a product a year in advance should know exactly what’s going on with the development of that product. We also tend to put things on Kickstarter a lot earlier than other companies, because we are truly asking for funds to help bring a project to completion. As Kickstarter moves more and more toward a glorified preorder system, we continue to feel that community engagement throughout the development process is an important piece of the crowdfunding puzzle. If you’re not including the community in the development of the game, then (in our opinion) you might as well just offer actual preorders on your website.

Devon: You really don’t see many games on there anymore that are in the middle of development. I hadn’t noticed that.

Devon: Earlier you mentioned some upcoming Too Many Bones content, which I’m pumped about. But what else is next for CTG? It could be other games or goals for the company’s future, however you want to take it.

Josh: Well, we continue to grow which means in the next six months we’ll be moving into a new facility to better facilitate the multiple teams and projects we have going at the same time.

Devon: That’s a good sign!

Josh: Yes, and we have three big-box titles in development right now (burncycle, Victorum, and an unannounced licensed project) that should see 2021 likely be the biggest year yet for CTG. As a company, we don’t want to get much larger than we are right now in terms of staff and that sort of thing, but we continue to aspire to make big, bold games that have a long and evergreen tail in terms of sales. This means we release new franchises a bit less often than a lot of other companies, but each one really stands on its own.

Devon: I’d say your current track record speaks for itself.

Josh: We’ve been blessed with a tremendous amount of success in the past year and a half as well, so we’re always looking at how we can give back. We have several initiatives in place to make sure that we’re not just out here making crazy games but are actively working to make our community (locally and globally) a better place.

Devon: I appreciate that sentiment and I hope it’s one that more people in the hobby continue to uphold.

Josh: Obviously, 2020 was rough for everyone, so having been blessed with success during a tremendously difficult year, we feel like paying it forward is super important.

Devon: Well, I can’t wait to see what evolves from that process. And I just want to say thanks for taking the time to talk with me! I love your games and am happy that we had the chance to look at what CTG is doing as a company.

Josh: Thanks for having me!

Devon: Of course! We like talking with awesome people around the Quackalope pond!

For more information on Chip Theory Games, check out their recent Kickstarter for burncycle or visit their website for all things Too Many Bones, Cloudspire, and Hoplomachus.

Also, the first Quackalope podcast interview episode is out so enjoy a conversation with James Hudson of Druid City Games and Skybound Games as he talks about Bloodstone and his time in the board game hobby!