A science card game that turned into a publisher.

Alley Cat Games calls itself “an independent board game publisher,” and its roots are in a laboratory. On 7 June 2016 Nature’s news blog reported the Kickstarter launch of Lab Wars, a card game designed by Caezar Al-Jassar, then a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, and Kuly Heer, a clinical psychologist. Players took roles from PhD student to emeritus professor, gathering equipment and papers while sabotaging rival labs; Al-Jassar told Nature that the sabotage cards were based on real or rumoured events, and the art was full of in-jokes such as a fictional journal called Nurture.

Al-Jassar later described that campaign as the start of the company. In an interview with The Naked Scientists in December 2019, introduced as being from a Cambridge-based publisher, he said he had developed Lab Wars during the last six months of his postdoc, that the Kickstarter was picked up by a range of science news outlets — the biggest being Nature — and that the company had run about ten or eleven Kickstarter campaigns since. The register of companies records Alley Cat Games Ltd as incorporated in England on 16 August 2016, a private company classed under other publishing activities, with Al-Jassar a director since that day.

The publisher’s breakout came with a game from outside designers. Cardboard Republic reported in November 2018 that Dice Hospital, co-designed by Stan Kordonskiy, was picked up by Alley Cat and taken to Kickstarter, and that Al-Jassar brought in Mike Nudd to develop it further; the company now credits Nudd as co-designer. A Zatu preview in July 2018 described it as a one-to-four-player worker-placement game, funded on Kickstarter and due to reach backers that September.

Dice as patients, cats in tins.

Alley Cat’s games tend to make a component carry the theme. In Dice Hospital, the company explains, the dice are the patients, and a low number means a patient in poor health; players move staff as workers and treat the dice on personal hospital boards. Al-Jassar told The Naked Scientists that the studio prefers thematic games to abstract ones in which players are “just” moving pieces around. The idea carried on to Dice Theme Park, which the company says was designed by Daryl Andrews and Adrian Adamescu with lead development by Mike Nudd and which it presents as the spiritual successor to Dice Hospital. Dice Hospital is also playable online on Board Game Arena.

A second strand is the pocket game. Kittin is a dexterity race in a mint tin: flip a card, grab cat-shaped pieces in six colours and stack them to match, then shout “MEOW!” The company built a licensed version on the same rules, Pusheen, and other tins followed — Tinderblox, in which players use tweezers to build a campfire of logs and cinder cubes, and Bookshelf, in which a sleeping cat must always move to the highest shelf. BoardGameWire reported in February 2026 that Bookshelf was designed by Al-Jassar himself.

The larger boxes carry other people’s art and names. The company’s page for the second edition of Calimala, by Fabio Lopiano, credits Ian O’Toole with its art and graphic design, and BoardGameWire named Toni López as the designer of Ada’s Dream. Cats recur across the catalogue, from the stacking pieces of Kittin to the sleeping cat of Bookshelf.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all board-game publishers: Fowers Games, Alley Cat Games, Dire Wolf, Rebel, Ludonaute, Catch Up Games and Next Move Games. Board-game publishers in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small studios still run by the people who started them to labels that now belong to much larger games groups, and a single name can appear everywhere from a hobby-shop shelf to a department-store toy aisle.

A publisher’s identity is usually carried less by a single box than by a logo on many boxes, a house style of art and graphic design, and the games it becomes known for, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, merged its studios or moved its production far from where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its games are designed and 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.

A crowdfunding publisher that changed its mix.

The company’s list has grown heavier over time. BoardGameWire reported on 9 February 2026 that Alley Cat had pivoted several years earlier towards crowdfunding more complex designs, with Al-Jassar saying the team had noticed Kickstarter tastes moving towards heavier games. The same report listed Autobahn, Arborea and Baghdad: The City of Peace among its heavier recent titles, and quoted Al-Jassar calling Ada’s Dream the most complex game the company had produced. Lighter boxes such as Timber Town, Barbecubes and Tic Tac Trek remained alongside them.

The way those games reach players has also changed. BoardGameWire reported that during the Baghdad Kickstarter the company said it would stop producing retail editions of its crowdfunded titles for the foreseeable future, citing competition, rising costs and uncertainty over US tariffs, and that there would be no retail print run of Ada’s Dream. The company’s shipping page, updated in June 2026, says it no longer ships from the UK to the United States because of tariffs and instead sends orders from stock held in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and the EU.

Materials are part of the pitch too. The company’s sustainability policy says it is increasing its use of FSC-certified materials, that the Tinderblox Sunset edition uses FSC-compliant wood and no shrink wrap, and that it plants a tree through Ecologi for qualifying web-store orders. The name needs a little care: several unrelated British companies are registered under “Alley Cat” names, and the publisher’s own site is alleycatgames.com.

For a design guide, Alley Cat Games shows how a small publisher can let one component carry the whole theme — dice as patients, cats as stacking pieces — while keeping a cat as its recurring motif. Compare Board&Dice, the Wrocław publisher, and Fowers Games, Tim Fowers’s self-published label. For this guide we use alley rose, brick and night slate with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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