Board game company charts winning path

Dennis Northcott has launched a game without frontiers.

The Winnipeg entrepreneur is the co-designer of Galactic Cruise, a board game published last year by Kinson Key Games LLC, the business he co-founded. Since its release, Galactic Cruise has been translated into 11 languages and sold around 50,000 copies worldwide.

It’s also one of three finalists for this year’s Deutsche Spiele Preis, a prestigious community-voted board game award. Northcott will travel to Essen, Germany, later this month, where the winner will be announced at Spiel Essen, an annual board game trade fair.

“It’s been amazing,” Northcott said of the response to Galactic Cruise during an interview in his Island Lakes neighbourhood home earlier this week. “The sales have been great, but it’s also been amazing in terms of people giving their reviews.”

On BoardGameGeek.com, an online forum for board gaming hobbyists and a user-generated game database, Galactic Cruise is currently ranked as the 106th most popular board game, as voted by users. (There are more than 30,000 games on the list.)

“That’s an incredible thing — to see that people like something you made so much,” Northcott said.

It’s validating for the 40-year-old, who left his job as a financial planner in early 2019 to pursue making board games full-time.

While attending a convention in Atlanta in 2022, he met T.K. King, a game designer from Tennessee. The two hit it off, and King introduced Northcott to his childhood friend, Koltin Thompson, with whom he was working on an early version of Galactic Cruise.

Soon, Northcott was meeting with King and Thompson virtually to playtest Galactic Cruise using an online platform. Northcott offered feedback after each session and the three became friends.

The trio started Kinson Key Games at the beginning of 2023 and used the rest of the year to further refine Galactic Cruise. In 2024, they launched a Kickstarter campaign to take pre-orders and raise funds to manufacture the game. In the end, they raised more than US$800,000 from more than 8,000 backers.

Kinson Key Games delivered Galactic Cruise to its backers and started distributing it to stores last year. Created in the Eurogame tradition — a style of strategy board game that focuses on economic planning and resource management rather than direct combat or eliminating other players — Galactic Cruise retails for US$119.

In the game, players are employees of a company called Galactic Cruise. They build and launch ships to send guests on luxurious space vacations as they compete to become the company’s next CEO.

Awards for the game began pouring in.

In May, Galactic Cruise won Heavy Game of the Year at BoardGameGeek’s 20th annual Golden Geek Awards. A couple months later, it received three prizes at the Dice Tower Awards, the board game hobby’s highest-profile jury-voted honours: game of the year, best strategy game and best game from a new designer.

Northcott has come a long way since he created his first board game as a child. Though he doesn’t remember all the details, he remembers that it was inspired by Tool Time, the TV-show-within-a-TV-show on the 1990s sitcom Home Improvement.

“I always enjoy the Euro-style games, where you’re trying to accomplish all these things and you have these resources,” he said, sitting at the custom-made table in his gaming room, where he and friends get together most Saturday afternoons. “My brain just likes doing those types of things — solving those types of problems.”

The wealth of knowledge Northcott has acquired over two decades of serious board game playing is a huge asset, said Thompson.

“He’s just a brilliant gamer and a brilliant creator of things,” he said by phone from his home in Athens, Tenn. “So much of what Galactic Cruise is is largely due to Dennis’s input and design.”

Board games are a roughly US$17 billion global industry and growing about 10 per cent every year, according to KingPandaGames.com. Around 3,500 new board games are published annually

“The demand for board games is larger than it’s ever been — the caveat being that it depends on where you are,” said Brian Mitchell, co-owner of A Muse N Games on Wall Street.

“Here in Winnipeg, I haven’t noticed a dip in board game sales. However, talking to some of my peers throughout the U.S. and different parts of Canada, some of them have seen dips. So, it’s market specific.”

Northcott said he’s looking forward to travelling to Germany and excited about what’s next for Kinson Key Games.

“We probably have the next five years of game releases already planned out,” he said. “There’s a lot happening.”

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca