A designer’s second company, and a marble game to start it.

Horrible Guild is an Italian publisher of board games and role-playing games, and it was not always called that. The company says it was founded in 2014 by Lorenzo Silva and was known as Horrible Games until late 2019; the legal entity behind its websites still carries the Horrible Games name. Its stated aim is to design, develop and produce innovative games with a strong visual style. Silva is its chief executive, and the company credits him as an author of Horse Fever, Dungeon Fighter, Potion Explosion, Railroad Ink and The King’s Dilemma.

The first two of those titles predate Horrible Games. Italian Wikipedia says Cranio Creations was founded in Milan in 2009 by Lorenzo Tucci Sorrentino and Lorenzo Silva, that its first published title was Horse Fever in 2009, and that Dungeon Fighter followed in 2011.

The game that put the new company on the map was Potion Explosion, designed by Silva with Andrea Crespi and Stefano Castelli. Players draw coloured ingredient marbles from a dispenser, and marbles of the same colour that touch “explode” into the player’s hand. ICv2 reported in September 2018 that Horrible Games was publishing a second edition, replacing the original cardboard dispenser with a plastic one that needs no assembly, together with an expansion, The 6th Student, both premiering at Spiel in Essen that October; CMON published the game in the United States and confirmed plans to release both there.

Roll-and-write maps, a legacy council and a card game of clues.

Next came Railroad Ink, designed by Silva and Hjalmar Hach, a competitive puzzle game in which players roll dice and draw transport routes on their own boards, as a University of North Texas library catalogue record describes it. That record gives the Deep Blue Edition as published by Horrible Games in Milan, and dates it 2018 with a 2019 imprint; the colour-named editions turned the game into a small family of boxes, and the company lists a later Railroad Ink Challenge and a spin-off, Railroad Tiles. Zatu, writing in October 2019, mentioned the Deep Blue Edition alongside Potion Explosion and Dragon Castle.

The more ambitious project was The King’s Dilemma, a legacy game designed by Silva and Hach, with writing by Carlo Burelli and art by Giorgio Baroni, according to the company. The company says players represent the Houses governing the Kingdom of Ankist, draw a card from a Dilemma deck each round, bargain with one another and make choices that move the story on, weighing the kingdom’s needs against their own House’s advantage. On 18 May 2020 the Spiel des Jahres jury named it one of three nominees for the Kennerspiel des Jahres 2020, credited to Horrible Guild and HeidelBÄR Games, ICv2 reported; the award went to The Crew from Kosmos.

The third line is Similo, a cooperative deduction card game designed by Hach, Pierluca Zizzi and Martino Chiacchiera, in which, the company says, the goal is to make the other players guess one secret card by showing which cards it resembles and which it does not. It has become a series with licensed and themed decks; the company lists Similo: Animals, Similo: Jurassic World and Similo: The Lord of the Rings, and ICv2 reported on 5 October 2026 that a Batman edition, an officially licensed DC product, would reach retail on 29 January 2027. Hach is now the company’s lead designer and head of research and development.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all board-game publishers: Lookout Games, Gamewright, Thunderworks Games, North Star Games, Devir, Horrible Guild and Bézier Games. Board-game publishers sit at many different points in the hobby, from small studios built around the work of one or two designers to companies that now belong to much larger games groups, and a single title can be sold everywhere from a specialist game shop to a toy aisle.

A publisher’s identity is usually carried less by a single box than by a name, a logo on the box and the games it becomes known for, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved, or licensed its games to other publishers in other countries. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and which games and designers made its reputation.

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 any honours from named awarding bodies — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Why the name changed, and what the guild publishes now.

The new name arrived in autumn 2019. The retailer Zatu reported on 28 October 2019 that Horrible Games had become Horrible Guild, with the new name and logo debuting at Essen the weekend before, alongside refreshed social media accounts and a rebuilt website. The company said the studio had grown from two people at its founding to seven, and that the new name reflected “a bigger group of people sharing the same goal.” It also noted, with some humour, that fans would no longer have to explain that it does not actually make horrible games.

The catalogue has kept widening since. The company’s own listing now runs from small family titles such as Tiny Turbo Cars and A Carnivore Did It! to Dragon Castle, Evergreen, Flower Fields and a licensed Vampire: The Masquerade – Vendetta, plus role-playing games including Wilderfeast and Vileborn. It also publishes digital adaptations of its own board games, among them versions of Potion Explosion, Railroad Ink Challenge and The King’s Dilemma, and its team includes a head of narrative and role-playing as well as a digital products developer. For its tenth anniversary the company issued Similo: 10 Years of Horribleness, a limited deck illustrated by many of the artists it has worked with.

For a design guide, Horrible Guild shows how a joke of a name can be kept rather than dropped — softened from “games” to “guild” so that it describes the people instead of the product — while the games themselves are sold on colour, components and a clear visual style. Compare CMON, the American publisher of Potion Explosion, and Kosmos, whose The Crew beat The King’s Dilemma to the 2020 Kennerspiel. For this guide we use violet, marble lime and parchment with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Horrible Guild’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.