A card game nobody else wanted to publish, and the company built around it.

25th Century Games is a board-game publisher based in Atlanta, Georgia; its own site describes it as a tabletop board-game publishing company located in the city. It was started by Chad Elkins. In an interview published by the British retailer Zatu on 10 May 2019, Elkins said he started the publisher in 2016. He had been working at a mobile-game studio that was not interested in branching out into tabletop games, so he arranged to publish a card-game version of one of its mobile games himself, and that, the interview says, is how 25th Century Games was born. The same interview notes that Elkins had earlier worked at NASA during the wind-down of the space shuttle programme.

The podcast Board Gaming with English introduced Elkins in February 2020 as the founder and lead designer of the Atlanta company, which it said made tabletop games and puzzles to bring people together face to face. In that episode Elkins talked about adding historical and educational context to his games to spark players’ interest, and about putting design and enjoyment first. The company’s Kickstarter campaigns of 2024 and 2025 ran under Elkins’ own creator account, according to Kicktraq and Wargamer.

The early catalogue came largely from Kickstarter. The Zatu interview lists Space Explorers, crowdfunded in October 2018 and then heading to retail; Kingswood, crowdfunded in April 2019, designed by Henry Audubon with art by Tristam Rossin, which the interview says came with custom wooden meeples and a weighted King’s Favor coin for the starting player; Winner Winner Chicken Dinner, an Elkins design illustrated by Shawna Tenney; and Jurassic Parts, designed by Kevin Lanzing and illustrated by Andrew Bosley. The company’s shop still has a Space Explorers collection.

Out of this world, by way of ancient Egypt.

The company’s slogan, on its homepage, is “Out of this world games,” and its most visible design project of recent years has been a classic reprinted with new art. On 2 May 2022 One Board Family previewed 25th Century’s new edition of Ra, the auction game by Reiner Knizia first published in 1999, describing all-new artwork by the artist Ian O’Toole and unchanged rules, and noting that the campaign would launch on Gamefound the next day. The same preview praised the publisher for not skimping on production value or style. Meeple Mountain reviewed the same edition on 2 May 2022 ahead of that campaign.

Ra has since grown into a range. The company’s shop now lists a regular edition, a deluxe Pharaoh Edition and a Sun God Edition, a Traders expansion, and accessories such as metal coins, statues and enamel pins, alongside Ra & Write, a roll-and-write spin-off that carries the same art direction. Wargamer, which noted that Knizia has created more than 700 published games, reported in December 2025 that 25th Century was crowdfunding reprints of two more Knizia games, Ra: The Dice Game, a dice game first published in 2009 and based on Ra, and Rheinländer, a 1999 abstract game about dukes building on land along the Rhine, on Kickstarter; the publisher said the new Rheinländer kept its core rules and added optional modules, a visual overhaul and a double-sided board.

The Knizia line is broader than Ra. The company’s Reiner Knizia Collection also includes Ratzia, Botswana, Circus Flohcati and Penguin Party.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all board-game publishers: Deep Water Games, Sit Down! Games, Funforge, Tasty Minstrel Games, Brotherwise Games, 25th Century Games and CMYK. Publishers of this kind sit between the people who design games and the people who play them: they choose which designs to back, commission the art, the box and the components, and arrange for the finished game to be manufactured, translated and sold.

Many of them work across borders. A game designed in one country is often licensed to publishers elsewhere and sold under a different title in each market; in July 2024, for example, the Spiel des Jahres jury in Germany gave its Kennerspiel des Jahres to “e-Mission (Daybreak),” a game sold in Germany by Schmidt and in English as Daybreak by CMYK, according to the award’s website and BoardGameWire. Crowdfunding is another route to market: CMYK, for one, took its first game, Monikers, to Kickstarter in June 2014, Kill Screen reported.

For a publisher, identity is carried less by a single product than by a name, a logo and the look its boxes share on a shelf, while each game keeps its own title, art and designers. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started each company, who owns it now, and where it is based.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its best-known games and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Mensa seals, imports and a catalogue sorted by how people play.

The publisher has also been recognised by American Mensa, whose members play and rate new games each year for its Mensa Select seal, named 25th Century’s Gartenbau among its winners in April 2023, and in April 2025 named two more of its games, Agueda: City of Umbrellas and Diatoms, among that year’s seven winners. The company’s shop gathers these and related titles, among them Blazon, Donut Shop and Wine Cellar, in a dedicated Mensa collection.

A second strand of the business brings games in from abroad. From 6 to 23 February 2024 the company ran a Kickstarter campaign called the 2024 Import Collection, which it described as a way to travel around the world of gaming without leaving home, offering new editions and fresh printings of hard-to-find games, and Wargamer noted that its 2025 Knizia campaign also offered a range of imported board games. The shop is sorted by how people play rather than by brand, with collections for two-player games, solo games, party games, travel-friendly games and roll-and-write titles, and the company invites designers to submit new games through its site.

The publisher’s own site is 25thcenturygames.com.

For a design guide, 25th Century Games shows how a small publisher can pair a playful space-age name with careful curation, letting a classic such as Ra carry a premium art direction while its own originals keep a lighter touch. Compare Grail Games, David Harding’s Sydney publisher of reprints, and Gamewright, the Massachusetts family-game maker. For this guide we use orbit blue, sun gold and rocket red with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep 25th Century Games’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.