A design contest between siblings that became a publishing company.

Brotherwise Games is a board-game publisher based in Los Angeles. Its own press releases describe it as an LA-based company founded by the brothers Chris and Johnny O’Neal in 2012, and the custom-printing service The Game Crafter gave the same founders and the same year when it profiled the pair in April 2013. The company calls the two of them the “Brothers Wise.” A July 2026 release from the company named Chris O’Neal as chief executive, and Johnny O’Neal signs the posts on the company’s news page.

The first product was the one that made the name. Boss Monster is a card game for two to four players in which each player is the villain at the end of a video-game dungeon, building rooms to lure adventurers in and defeat them. The Game Crafter reported in April 2013 that the game began years earlier as a different design of Johnny’s, a popularity game in which the currency was friends, before it took on its sword-and-sorcery theme. The brothers funded the game on Kickstarter, and The Game Crafter’s profile described a campaign run like a full-time job, with more than 200 press releases sent in its first two weeks.

The same profile showed how a small studio got its first copies made. The O’Neals prototyped and play-tested Boss Monster through The Game Crafter’s print-on-demand service and, having promised backers early prototypes by Christmas, ordered about 200 copies from it in early December. At the time of the interview they were fulfilling the campaign and talking to distributors, with retail availability planned for the summer of 2013 and two expansions already in development.

Side-scrolling rooms, eight-bit art and a tagline about the table.

The look of Boss Monster grew out of its rules rather than the other way round. In its April 2013 profile The Game Crafter reported that the game’s 8-bit and 16-bit retro style followed naturally from its layout: each player builds a dungeon as a row of room cards that reads from side to side, like a level in an old side-scrolling console game. The company’s current site promotes Super Boss Monster, which it says brings new mechanics and all-new art while staying fully compatible with the earlier cards, and Dungeon Kart, a turn-based racing game the company sets in the same world.

The house line is spelled out on the homepage: “Games that bring everyone to the table!”, which the company marks as a trademark. Its 2026 press boilerplate puts the same idea in business terms, saying Brotherwise aims for strong themes and accessible rules that bridge the gap between core and casual players.

Other designers widened the catalogue. Unearth, a dice-placement and set-collection game designed by Jason Harner and Matthew Ransom with art by Jesse Riggle, was reviewed under the Brotherwise name by Board Game Quest in July 2017; the company now sells a tenth-anniversary edition with what it calls new graphic design, new content and updated gameplay. The current catalogue also includes Empire’s End, which the company credits to the designer John D Clair with artwork by Kwanchai Moriya, and Adulthood, a game about spending time and energy that features the art of Tim Brierly, according to the company.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all board-game publishers: Deep Water Games, Sit Down! Games, Funforge, Tasty Minstrel Games, Brotherwise Games, 25th Century Games and CMYK. Publishers of this kind sit between the people who design games and the people who play them: they choose which designs to back, commission the art, the box and the components, and arrange for the finished game to be manufactured, translated and sold.

Many of them work across borders. A game designed in one country is often licensed to publishers elsewhere and sold under a different title in each market; in July 2024, for example, the Spiel des Jahres jury in Germany gave its Kennerspiel des Jahres to “e-Mission (Daybreak),” a game sold in Germany by Schmidt and in English as Daybreak by CMYK, according to the award’s website and BoardGameWire. Crowdfunding is another route to market: CMYK, for one, took its first game, Monikers, to Kickstarter in June 2014, Kill Screen reported.

For a publisher, identity is carried less by a single product than by a name, a logo and the look its boxes share on a shelf, while each game keeps its own title, art and designers. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started each company, who owns it now, and where it is based.

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 how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a card game of its own to the games of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere.

The second line of the business began with Call to Adventure, a hero-building board game that uses what Brotherwise calls its Rune Adventure System. ICv2 reported on 7 August 2018 that, while Call to Adventure was on Kickstarter, Brotherwise had announced a partnership with the novelist Brandon Sanderson to make a game set in his Stormlight Archive fantasy series, using the same system. In that game, ICv2 explained, two to four players collect runes to overcome challenges on the world of Roshar, each aiming to become one of the Knights Radiant of Sanderson’s books. The company says that game, Call to Adventure: The Stormlight Archive, was its first partnership with Dragonsteel, Sanderson’s company.

That partnership has since grown into a large part of the catalogue. Brotherwise now describes itself as the official games partner for Sanderson’s Cosmere, the shared universe of his novels, and lists Stormlight premium miniatures, the Mistborn Deckbuilding Game and the Cosmere Roleplaying Game as projects developed with Dragonsteel. English Wikipedia, citing Polygon and Dicebreaker, says the roleplaying game was announced by Dragonsteel in November 2023 and went to Kickstarter on 6 August 2024, with Brotherwise producing it; the Stormlight hardcover followed in September 2025. In July 2026 Brotherwise announced Stormlight: War for Roshar, a war game designed by John D Clair and made with Dragonsteel Books, which the company said would be crowdfunded that autumn and reach shops after fulfilment in 2027.

The company’s own site is brotherwisegames.com, and its 2026 press releases carry a Los Angeles dateline.

For a design guide, Brotherwise Games shows how a two-person studio can build an identity out of one game’s pixel-art world, then lend that clarity to licensed fantasy without losing its own voice. Compare Thunderworks Games, another American publisher that grew from Kickstarter, and Bézier Games, Ted Alspach’s Werewolf publisher. For this guide we use dungeon purple, torch orange and dungeon black with a pixel sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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