A table business that started publishing games.

Allplay began as a furniture business. The company says it was founded by Chad DeShon in 2014 “to sell high-end custom-built board game tables,” and until the end of 2022 it traded as BoardGameTables.com. In an October 2018 interview with The Opinionated Gamers, DeShon, who lives in the Kansas City area and helps run a convention for the train game Age of Steam, said the idea came when a friend waited more than a year for a custom gaming table: “The market needed more supply.” BoardGameWire described the tables in August 2026 as high-end wooden tables manufactured in the US.

The range grew in stages. According to the company’s own timeline and a December 2022 report in Gaming Trend, it added a more affordable line of tables in 2016, board game bags in 2017, published games in 2018, playmats in 2020 and shelves in 2021. Its table models carry names such as Duchess and Jasper; the company dates the third version of the Jasper, in solid oak, to 2023.

The first game it published was On Tour, a roll-and-write that DeShon designed himself and that The Opinionated Gamers reported in 2018 was due out later that year. He told the same site in April 2020: “I basically publish games that I like to play, with a focus on shorter-ish games that are easy to teach.”

Short games, easy to teach.

The early list mixed new designs with reworked older games. In 2018 DeShon told The Opinionated Gamers he had signed Q.E., a game by Gavin Birnbaum, with art, like On Tour, by Anca Gavril. By April 2020 the company had published Loot of Lima, a deduction game by Larry Levy, and was crowdfunding three more: DeShon’s own Sequoia, Mountain Goats, a new version of the dice game Level X, and GPS, a new version of Finito. Bites, a reimplementation of Big Points, was also on the list.

A more recent title is Things in Rings, a party game designed by Peter Hayward with art by Snow Conrad, which The Opinionated Gamers reviewed in September 2024. Players sort cards into three overlapping rings of string while one player, the Knower, holds the secret rules for each ring. In April 2026 American Mensa announced its seven Mensa Select winners for the year; two were Allplay games, Things in Rings and Twinkle Twinkle.

Distribution widened in 2022, when, Gaming Trend reported, the company signed an exclusive agreement with Asmodee North America to place its games in distribution for the first time. By December 2022 it said it had published seventeen games and eight expansions. It has also worked with established names: BoardGameWire reported in 2026 that Allplay had crowdfunded a new edition of Reiner Knizia’s Through the Desert at the end of 2023 and planned a Kickstarter campaign for its sequel, Through the Mountains, and listed River Valley Glassworks and a new edition of the trading game Container among its releases.

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.

A new name for “every part of game night.”

The name changed at the turn of 2023. On 13 December 2022 Gaming Trend reported that BoardGameTables.com was renaming itself Allplay, with a new website to follow in January, because the word “tables” had led people to think its other products were side projects. Stock carrying the old BoardGameTables.com logo would still be sold for a while, the company said. DeShon put the aim simply: “We want families, friends, and even strangers to play games together,” adding that “Tables are still a huge part of our business. That isn’t changing,” and that the company would “continue to focus on games that are easy to teach, but still have layers of strategy.”

The company has grown since. In August 2026 its chief operating officer, Joe Wiggins, told BoardGameWire that it had employed four people five years earlier and was hiring its 22nd full-time employee. Its core games, he said, keep consistent box sizes and simpler rules — “We’ve always made games with constraints – on principle” — and it planned to publish fewer of them each year to make room for three new lines: Masterworks, heavier strategy games developed with the graphic designer Ian O’Toole as a partner, starting with a remake of Chad Jensen’s Dominant Species; Epics, larger hobby games; and Creations, licensed games beginning with John D Clair’s Have a Magical Day. Wiggins said the company had been working on the plans since 2024, and those titles were planned for Kickstarter in 2027. Allplay also runs a partner programme that, the magazine reported, includes more than 40 other publishers, among them Bitewing Games and Cardboard Alchemy.

In a January 2026 newsletter, the review site Meeple Mountain described a visit to Allplay’s offices near Kansas City, set in “a literal man-made cave,” with a warehouse holding pallets of gaming tables and games from Allplay and its partner publishers.

For a design guide, Allplay shows how a furniture brand can rename itself around a wider promise without abandoning the product it started with. Compare Button Shy Games, another American publisher that grew from a small direct-sales business, and AEG. For this guide we use a deep teal, an oak yellow and a muted red with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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