Three founders and a pipeline from Asia.

Deep Water Games announced itself on 8 December 2017. A post on its own blog that day, signed by Nolan Nasser, said “Deep Water Games and Distribution” had been formed by Jacob Way, then chief executive of the printer KrakenPrint, Nolan Nasser, founder of N3 Art and a game developer, and Travis McIntire, editor-in-chief of the comics publisher Source Point Press. Nasser was named chief executive and Way chief operations officer. The plan, the post said, was to have games in players’ hands by March 2018.

The first products were not home-grown. The launch announcement described a partnership with the Asian publisher EmperorS4 to bring four of its titles to North America: the deduction game Herbalism, the two-player abstract Shadows in Kyoto, the card game Crows Overkill and the memory game Hanzi. Way said in the same post that the arrangement was meant to run both ways, with Deep Water also signing North American games for localisation into Asian markets. In May 2018 the trade site ICv2 reported that the distributor Publisher Services, Inc. would handle the company’s US sales, warehousing and shipping, describing Deep Water as a new company focused on English-language versions of successful international games that had not been available in North America.

The team grew in its first weeks. In January 2018 the blog welcomed Ian Zang as lead game developer; he and Nasser had met at the Origins convention in 2017, and his job was to run game submissions, develop incoming titles and help staff convention booths. In February the company named the winner of its own 108-card design contest, which drew 26 entries, and listed runners-up including Gladius by Victoria Cana and Alexandre Uboldi — a game that still appears in the catalogue today.

From Herbalism to Welcome To….

Crowdfunding came first. In March 2018 the blog said Herbalism was already reaching backers, less than a month after the company’s first Kickstarter campaign closed, and announced a second campaign for EmperorS4’s Mystery of the Temples alongside Sorcerer & Stones and Round House. The same post announced the signing of Sovereign Skies, a rondel strategy game by Aaron Andrew Wilson about colonised planets forming a democracy, aimed at players who wanted strategy in under an hour.

Another signing came from France. On 2 April 2018 Deep Water announced that, in partnership with Blue Cocker Games, it would release Welcome To… worldwide in English that August. Designed by Benoit Turpin, the game swaps dice for a deck of cards in the roll-and-write format: players plan 1950s American suburbs, writing house numbers onto a sheet and chasing parks, pools and city objectives, with everyone taking turns at once. The company ran a small advance print run to meet early demand and took copies to Origins in Columbus, Ohio. Its store still sells the game today, with seasonal and themed neighbourhood expansions, Halloween and Winter Wonderland among them.

A November 2022 post named MonsDRAWsity, Fantastic Factories and Floor Plan alongside Welcome To… as the games that best fit its approach, and in October 2022 the company announced Space Bound, a flicking game with magnetic ships designed by Matt Leacock and Josh Cappel and developed by Brieger Creative, as one of its landmark releases for 2023.

Read the system.

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.

Ox Eye Media, then Friendly Skeleton.

The founders’ other businesses soon merged with the games label. A company post from October 2021 described Ox Eye Media as “an American entertainment company founded in 2019 by the merging of Deep Water Games, Source Point Press and N3 Art,” and called Deep Water a Midwest publisher and distributor of board games and board-game accessories. Since 2019, then, Deep Water has sat inside Ox Eye Media, next to a comics publisher whose catalogue Ox Eye listed as including Felix the Cat and Monstrous, and an accessories maker. The shared web store of the period mixed board games with comic books, playmats and variant covers.

The clearest statement of what the games side stood for came in that November 2022 post, credited to Jacob Way and titled “The Origin of Our Mission Statement.” It said the company had started out wanting games that were cheap and played in under an hour, then adopted Bushnell’s law, the Atari founder’s line that the best games are “easy to learn and difficult to master.” It set out three rules: games should be easy to play, should represent everyone — at first expressed as a vow never to make a game about a castle — and should be affordable. Floor Plan was offered as the example of a familiar theme, house-building, designed with representation built in. The mission it ended on: “to bring more people to the table by making games more accessible.”

The name did not last. On 15 August 2023 the Dice Tower Now news podcast led with “Deep Water Games rebrands as Friendly Skeleton.” The old deepwatergaming.com address now forwards to friendlyskeleton.com, a store whose footer reads Ox Eye Media and whose About page calls the team “makers of games with good bones,” promising games that are easy to play, inclusive and affordable — the same three ideas as the 2022 post. Welcome To…, Floor Plan, MonsDRAWsity and Sovereign Skies are all sold under the new name. The similar-looking domain deepwatergames.com is an unrelated parked domain.

For a design guide, Deep Water Games shows a publisher that wrote its brand as a set of rules — easy, inclusive, affordable — and then changed its name to fit them. Compare Gamewright, another American family-game publisher, and Horrible Guild, the Italian publisher of the roll-and-write Railroad Ink. For this guide we use a deep teal, a bone white and a buoy orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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