A developer from Indie Boards & Cards strikes out on his own.

Kolossal Games is an American board game publisher formed in 2017 by Travis R. Chance, according to an interview he gave the American site Casual Game Revolution in December 2018. Chance came to it from Action Phase Games and Indie Boards & Cards: when the two companies merged in 2016, the trade site ICv2 reported, he joined Indie Boards & Cards as director of product development and marketing. In the same interview he said he had spent about a decade as a drummer in New York before turning to games.

He described a publisher built around presentation and a direct relationship with buyers. “Presentation is so important in making your game stand out these days,” he told Casual Game Revolution, and he set out a business model that keeps deep discounters out of online sales, which he said “hurts us as a publisher” and “hurts retailers.” The interview named the games that put the new company on the map — Western Legends and Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy, both funded on Kickstarter — and noted that Kolossal had chosen to relaunch the campaign for Mezo rather than let the first one run on.

The company’s own about page puts the same ideas in a vision statement. It says it wants “to be a large publisher with a passionate team of people who love their jobs making amazing, diverse, accessible, inclusive games and to have a direct relationship with our customers.” Its listed principles include “We push game mechanics, art, and presentation above industry standards” and “We make our games easy to learn and inclusive” — claims the company makes for itself.

An open-world western, a wasteland and a haunted manor.

Western Legends is the game most closely tied to the brand. The company describes it as an open-world sandbox for two to six players set in the American Wild West, in which players take the roles of historical figures and earn “Legendary Points” by gambling, driving cattle, prospecting for gold, robbing the bank, fighting bandits or keeping the peace; poker cards drive both movement and combat. GamingTrend, in January 2019, described it as one of the publisher’s early games, in an interview about its Ante Up expansion in which Chance said the team “did extensive historical research, primarily to make sure we had a diverse cast of historical characters.” The game’s designer is the French designer Hervé Lemaître, according to the publisher’s alliance shop.

Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy was a partnership rather than an in-house design. It is the second edition of the space-strategy game Eclipse from the Finnish studio Lautapelit.fi, and GamingTrend reported in July 2018 that “Kolossal Games has created a Kickstarter campaign to fund this new edition,” with gameplay changes left to the original designer, Touko, and his co-designer Sampo Sikiö.

Chance designs too. Ruination, a post-apocalyptic area-control game for two to four players set in a ruined Eurasia, credits him as designer and Roland MacDonald as artist, and the company quotes a Dice Tower review on its page. All Manor of Evil sends players to rob the house of H. P. Lovecraft while some of them secretly try to wake an elder god.

Board game publishing.

The seven brands in this group are all board game publishers and accessory makers: Stronghold Games, Ultra PRO, Indie Boards & Cards, Kolossal Games, Board&Dice, Hachette Boardgames and Lucky Duck Games. Names in this trade sit at many different points, from small studios still run by the people who started them to labels that now belong to much larger toy, book or games groups, and a single game can pass through a designer, a publisher, a crowdfunding page and a distributor before it reaches a table.

A board game publisher’s identity is usually carried less by one box than by a logo on many boxes, a name and the kind of game it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, licensed its games abroad or had them manufactured far from where they were designed. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its games are actually made.

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

From its own shop to an independent publishers’ storefront.

Kolossal’s newest chapter is collective. Its own website now says that “Kolossal Games, a member of the Independent Publisher Alliance,” has moved its shop to the alliance’s recently launched US website, which the company says gives a direct line to its US warehouse inventory, shipping to Canada and rewards for returning customers; it adds that its own domains will redirect there, and in October 2026 kolossalgames.com already did.

The Independent Publishers Alliance, or IPA, says it was created in 2024 to “champion and elevate independent board game publishers.” Its stated principles are “Publisher owned,” “Creatives in charge” and “Committed to independence,” and its guidelines favour publishers free from external investors or large corporations, owned by individuals or a family, with the owners involved in making the games. The French publisher Matagot says it co-founded the alliance in 2024 with twelve other independent publishers. The alliance runs a shared online store and shared booths at conventions such as Essen, Cannes and Gen Con, according to its website.

The Western Legends line continues under that banner. Western Legends Stories, again by Hervé Lemaître, is a standalone campaign game that is not compatible with the original, in which players begin as unknown characters and build a reputation through branching story decks and a map that grows as they play, the alliance’s blog says. In October 2026 it said that backer fulfilment was under way and that the game would make its physical debut on the IPA booth at Essen Spiel. The company’s site also previews Legacy of Eastbrook Hills, a cooperative mystery in five episodes, and Bharat: Kings of Legend, set in ancient India.

For a design guide, Kolossal Games shows a small publisher that names presentation among its founding principles. Compare Indie Boards & Cards, where its founder worked before, and Portal Games, another publisher known for story-led games. For this guide we use rust, saddle brown and dust with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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