Three designers, a donut game and Gen Con 2017.

Flatout Games describes itself as a board game design collaborative founded in 2017 by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin and Shawn Stankewich. Kickstarter’s creator blog, profiling the studio in November 2025, called it “Seattle-based”; the company’s own website places its administrative and creative work on Coast Salish land, naming the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples.

The story goes back to a single design. In a September 2019 profile for Casual Game Revolution, Justin Spicer wrote that Stankewich’s first game, Dollars to Donuts, brought Melvin into the group, and that the three founders’ enthusiasm led them to form Flatout Games and make a trip to Gen Con in 2017. Stankewich and Johnson had earlier started a company called 2 of Hearts Games, the same profile says. “We launched a podcast, started a Twitter account, and tried to dive deep into the community,” Stankewich told the magazine.

That first Gen Con did not produce a deal: Dollars to Donuts and a second design, Abstract Academy, went unsigned there, according to the profile. Both titles now appear in the company’s own list of published games. The breakthrough came two years later with Point Salad, a card game designed by the three founders and released with Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) at Gen Con 2019, where, Casual Game Revolution reported, it sold out quickly. Stankewich and Johnson were on a cycling trip in Oregon’s Willamette Valley when they went over the contract, the magazine added.

Calico, Cascadia and the CoLab.

In early 2019 the founders set up the Flatout Games CoLab, which the company says brings its founding members together with “established and emerging folks” in the board-game industry. Stankewich told Casual Game Revolution that the groups share equity and decide together: “We want our groups to be as democratic as possible.” The team was spread out even then, the magazine noted, with one member more than 1,500 miles from the others.

The first CoLab project was Calico, a quilting-and-cats puzzle by Kevin Russ, first titled Quixotic Quilts, according to the 2019 profile. Flatout brought in David Iezzi for development, Dylan Mangini for graphic design and Beth Sobel for the artwork, and took the game to Kickstarter; the company dates it to 2020. The profile also named a second title in the works, Lands and Creatures by Randy Flynn.

Flynn’s design became Cascadia, a tile-laying game about the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest, published in 2021 with art by Sobel. In 2022 it won the Spiel des Jahres, the German game-of-the-year award; the jury’s own page credits the game to Randy Flynn and lists its publishers as Flatout Games, AEG and Kosmos. English Wikipedia, citing the trade sites Dicebreaker and GamesRadar of 18 July 2022, records the win.

Since then the catalogue has grown around a few recognisable lines: the Point family, with Point City and Point Galaxy; Cascadia, with expansions, Cascadia Junior and the standalone Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, its most recent Kickstarter at the time of the November 2025 profile; and further titles including Verdant, Fit to Print, illustrated by Ian O’Toole, Knitting Circle and Propolis. Kickstarter said two small-box games, Honeypot and Forage, were due in early 2026.

The same Kickstarter profile described Flatout as known for simple rules and high replayability, and noted that Cascadia: Alpine Lakes had been featured in Wirecutter’s round-up of games from Gen Con. Asked about resources, the founders put it plainly: “people are the most valuable resource.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all board-game publishers: Allplay, Button Shy, Flatout Games, Keymaster Games, Mindclash Games, Red Raven Games and Grail Games. A publisher’s name sits on the box beside the names of the designers who invented the game and the artists who illustrated it, and a single title can pass from one publisher to another as rights are licensed, new editions are made and older editions go out of print.

A board-game publisher’s identity is therefore carried less by one product than by a logo on the box, a run of illustrators and a promise about the kind of games it makes, because the company behind the name may change its partners, its owners or the places where its games are printed. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who runs or owns it now, and where its games are made.

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

Games the founders want to play.

Flatout’s identity is less a single look than a working method. Its games carry the names of the people who made them: Sobel’s illustrations run across Calico and Cascadia, and the company’s website credits CoLab members including Kwanchai Moriya, Emily Vincent and Ian O’Toole alongside the founders. “Our unofficial tag line is that we make the games we love to play,” the founders told Kickstarter in 2025, adding that “the approachability of a game is always a central focus for our team.”

The studio also works with larger partners rather than doing everything itself. The company says its CoLab games have been picked up for retail distribution and licensing by AEG, which co-published Point Salad and Cascadia, while Kosmos appears among Cascadia’s publishers on the Spiel des Jahres page. Kickstarter remains its route to launch, and the founders called their backers “vital to making our games possible.” Beyond board games, Kickstarter reported that the team was developing Whisperstone, a role-playing system that uses physical puzzle pieces.

One naming note: Flatout Games is unrelated to the FlatOut racing video games made by the Finnish studio Bugbear Entertainment.

For a design guide, Flatout Games shows how a small collaborative can build a recognisable catalogue through shared credit and consistent artists. Compare AEG, its long-running publishing partner, and Kosmos, which appears among Cascadia’s publishers. For this guide we use fir green, salmon and a Pacific blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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