Hidden roles, bluffing and a publisher that kept its name.

Indie Boards & Cards is an American board and card game publisher that started in 2009, the year given by the trade site ICv2 in 2018 and by BoardGameWire in 2024; an archived 2014 version of its website carries the line “Copyright 2009 Indie Boards and Cards.” In 2016 ICv2 reported that the company operated from Oakland, California, with a regional office in Indianapolis, Indiana, and named Travis Worthington as its chief executive. He still held that title in 2024, according to BoardGameWire.

In 2018 ICv2 named The Resistance, Coup and Aeon’s End as the games it was known for. The Resistance is a social-deduction party game designed by Don Eskridge and dated 2010 by English Wikipedia. Players are rebels, and some of them are secretly spies working against the group; the company’s page describes it as inspired by Mafia and Werewolf but built to “eliminate player elimination.” In 2014 the company’s home page invited visitors to watch The Resistance being played on TableTop, the web video series, and listed its other early titles: Flash Point: Fire Rescue, Gauntlet of Fools and Haggis.

Two games from 2012 widened the line. The Resistance: Avalon, also by Eskridge, moves the same hidden-loyalty idea to King Arthur’s court, with Merlin knowing the agents of evil but able to speak of them only in riddles; the company says it can be played on its own or combined with the original. Ars Technica, in a 2017 buyer’s guide quoted by English Wikipedia, said Avalon “requires more than a little cunning, treachery, and a willingness to make wild, baseless accusations.” Coup, designed by Rikki Tahta, is a short bluffing game for two to six players in which each player holds face-down character cards as “influence.” English Wikipedia says Coup and the game Grifters share The Resistance’s setting; the company’s current page sets Coup in a corrupt Italian city-state.

Fire rescue, breach mages and tree spirits.

The catalogue soon moved beyond hidden roles. Flash Point: Fire Rescue, released in 2011 and designed by Kevin Lanzing, is a cooperative game in which players are firefighters searching a burning building; its illustration is credited to Luis Francisco and George Patsouras, two illustrators whose names recur across the publisher’s Resistance and Avalon pages. The company has kept the line going with expansions such as Honor & Duty and, in its current listings, Flash Point: Legacy of Flame (2025) and Flash Point: Golden State Heroes (2026).

Aeon’s End, designed by Kevin Riley and dated September 2017 on the company’s site for its current edition, is a cooperative deck-building game in which “breach mages” defend the underground city of Gravehold from creatures called The Nameless. The company describes a variable turn order “that simulates the chaos of an attack” and rules that make players plan every discarded card. Aeon’s End has grown into a family of standalone sets, a legacy edition and expansions through Beyond the Breach, dated January 2026. A related cooperative system, Astro Knights, carries the same approach into science fiction.

Lighter family games sit alongside. Kodama: The Tree Spirits (2016), designed by Daniel Solis, asks players to grow trees from cards to please forest spirits, and has been followed by Kokoro, Kodama Duo and Kodama 3D. The site also lists a Sherlock Files range of deduction games.

For a design guide, the publisher’s website is a useful record of how it treats each game as its own brand. Every title gets a page listing designer, illustrators, player count, time and age, and several offer press files: The Resistance page offers “Logo & Box Retail Assets,” and the Aeon’s End page lists a 3D box image, a 2D cover and a logo for download. The company’s own strapline is informal — “We make games… you’ve probably played them!” — and logo files are offered game by game rather than for the publisher alone.

Board game publishing.

The seven brands in this group are all board game publishers and accessory makers: Stronghold Games, Ultra PRO, Indie Boards & Cards, Kolossal Games, Board&Dice, Hachette Boardgames and Lucky Duck Games. Names in this trade sit at many different points, from small studios still run by the people who started them to labels that now belong to much larger toy, book or games groups, and a single game can pass through a designer, a publisher, a crowdfunding page and a distributor before it reaches a table.

A board game publisher’s identity is usually carried less by one box than by a logo on many boxes, a name and the kind of game it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, licensed its games abroad or had them manufactured far from where they were designed. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its games are actually 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.

Two mergers, three brands, one Oakland office.

The company grew by merger. In June 2016 ICv2 reported that Indie Boards & Cards and Action Phase Games, which had recently released Kodama, were combining: most new releases would carry the Indie Boards & Cards imprint, apart from Action Phase’s Heroes Wanted line, and Action Phase’s Travis R. Chance and Nick Little joined as directors of product development. Worthington told ICv2 the company “was at a critical point” and could not keep growing “without bringing on a very talented group of game designers and developers.” Chance later left to start Kolossal Games.

Two years later, at Gen Con in August 2018, Indie Boards & Cards and Stronghold Games, the publisher of Terraforming Mars, announced a merger to form Indie Game Studios, ICv2 reported. The new company would be managed from Oakland, with Stronghold run from Boynton Beach, Florida, and Indie Boards & Cards, Stronghold and Action Phase kept as three distinct brands. Worthington became chief executive of Indie Game Studios while remaining president of Indie Boards & Cards and Action Phase; Stronghold’s owner, Stephen Buonocore, stayed on as its president. “As the industry consolidates around a few major corporate players, we needed to get bigger,” Worthington said; Buonocore said, “We cannot simply operate as we did 10 years ago.” In 2024 BoardGameWire described the two as sister businesses that had both kept their names since the merger.

Licensing is the newest strand. In September 2024 BoardGameWire reported a multi-year agreement with Skybound Tabletop for cooperative deck-building games based on the comic Invincible; Invincible: The Card Game draws on the Aeon’s End and Astro Knights systems, and the company’s site lists it, with two expansions, for January 2025.

For a design guide, Indie Boards & Cards shows a publisher that supplies identity files game by game. Compare Stronghold Games, its sister brand inside Indie Game Studios, and Kolossal Games, founded by a former colleague. For this guide we use a strong red, ink and card cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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