A one-man publisher, a free solo game and an Australian start on Kickstarter.

Grail Games began in Sydney in 2014. Its founder, David Harding, announced it on the company’s first website on 20 May 2014 as a new board and card game publisher based in Sydney, and the company’s current site still says that Harding established Grail Games in 2014 as a publishing house for re-releasing and refreshing older titles and small card games.

Harding has explained the start himself. In a long post in April 2021 he wrote that he began the company in mid-2014, when Kickstarter announced that Australian projects could be launched on the platform, and that he picked the name because it had not been used, was easy to understand and described what he wanted to do: bring terrific games back into print and license games from Asia into English. In January 2024 he added the image behind it, likening gamers who seek out a Grail title to Indiana Jones searching for the Holy Grail, and said the company’s slogan had always been “Games worth seeking.”

The first release was tiny. On 9 June 2014 Grail made Elevenses for One available as a free print-and-play solo game of just eleven cards, a sister game to Harding’s own Elevenses, which was then due from Adventureland Games. It casts the player as a maid preparing high tea for her lady before the clock strikes eleven. Later that year Grail took the card game One Zero One to Kickstarter, and in October 2014 it announced an English edition of Too Many Cinderellas, a card game first published in Japan by Taikikennai Games, which kept the Japanese card art but gained a new box by the Australian illustrator John D-C.

Knizia classics, Australiana and Viking fjords.

Harding has said that he built the early catalogue one component at a time: first a game that was only a deck of cards, then titles that added one or two pieces, such as Elevenses, Matcha, Too Many Cinderellas and Cat Box. In February 2015 the company also announced a line of mini solitaire games that included Sid Sackson’s Bowling Solitaire.

The reprints came next. Harding wrote that he emailed Reiner Knizia, one of his design heroes, and that the conversation led to Circus Flohcati and then Medici, Grail’s first full board game, which he paired with art by the illustrator Vincent Dutrait. In January 2018 the trade site ICv2 reported four Grail releases planned for that year: Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, a follow-up to his Tigris & Euphrates due to premiere at Gen Con; Criss Cross, first published in Germany as Kriss Kross; a new edition of Stephenson’s Rocket; and Gerhard Hecht’s Kashgar: Merchants of the Silk Road, first published by Kosmos in 2013. By Harding’s count Grail released ten Knizia games, and in April 2021 he said they would not be reprinted by Grail and would leave its catalogue at the end of that year.

Two later titles set the tone. Boomerang, designed by Scott Almes and launched on Kickstarter in June 2018, is a card-drafting and roll-and-write game about touring “the great south land” and collecting Australiana. Fjords, the tile-laying game by Franz-Benno Delonge, returned through a Kickstarter campaign in March 2021 with new art by Beth Sobel, play for up to four and new modules by Phil Walker-Harding. Harding called it his 20th Kickstarter campaign, and BoardGameWire described it in January 2025 as the company’s most successful one.

Who makes, owns and sells the games.

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 French partner, the Manhattan Project and a return to small boxes.

Grail has not stayed a one-man business. Harding wrote in April 2021 that in late 2020 Grail had formally joined the Matagot & Friends group of companies, and that while he remained in control of Grail’s games, the group helped with production follow-up, marketing and international sales. The company’s website now signs off with “Australia & France.” Days after that post, on 23 April 2021, Grail announced that it had acquired the rights to publish the Manhattan Project family of games, first published by Minion Games in the US, and that it would fulfil an outstanding Kickstarter expansion for Energy Empire.

Harding then stepped away. On 2 January 2024 he announced his return to Grail as studio head after a two-year hiatus and said the company would go back to its roots of reprints and small card games. That year Grail released Manhattan Project: War Machine, crowdfunded a card-game collection that included a refreshed One Zero One and the two-player trick-taking game Tango, and announced a Royal Edition of Marc André’s Barony with English and French rulebooks. In January 2025 BoardGameWire reported that Grail had taken on the publishing of Matagot’s eurogames and strategic card games about three months earlier, and that Harding had become production director of Frost Bite Games, the renamed Canadian publisher Maple Games, which would take the Manhattan Project line and other heavier titles while Grail kept to small games and mid-weight strategy.

The name needs care online. The company’s current site is grailgames.games; its first address, grail-games.com, now shows unrelated content, and grailgames.com is a separate domain that has also had nothing to do with the publisher.

For a design guide, Grail Games shows how a small publisher can build an identity from a promise rather than a single look, with each box given a fresh coat of paint by illustrators such as Vincent Dutrait and Beth Sobel. Compare Catan, the German classic Harding counts among the games he keeps, and Stonemaier Games, another publisher built on Kickstarter. For this guide we use chalice gold, deep navy and fjord teal with a storybook serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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