Ryan Laukat, his wife Malorie and Empires of the Void.

Red Raven Games is the publishing house of Ryan Laukat, an American author and illustrator from Salt Lake City, Utah, who founded it in 2011, English Wikipedia says. English Wikipedia says he produced and illustrated its games, and the company’s website speaks of a small team “devoted to making games that are as rewarding to play as they are beautiful to look at.”

The habit started early. Utah Business reported in January 2023 that Laukat was 13 when he taped paper over ordinary playing cards to make his own games. As an adult he and his wife, Malorie, worked on games in their basement, and together they launched their first crowdfunding campaign, on Kickstarter, for Empires of the Void, which English Wikipedia dates to 2012 on release. The magazine says it took about five years after that campaign before board games became Laukat’s full-time career.

Small, quick games came next. English Wikipedia lists Eight-Minute Empire (2012), The Ancient World (2014) and City of Iron among the early Red Raven titles Laukat produced and illustrated. The habit of funding every project through backers stuck: Utah Business counted sixteen more successful campaigns in the eleven years after Empires of the Void.

A house above ground, a cave below and an atlas.

The game that defined the company was Above and Below, designed and illustrated by Laukat and published in 2015 after a Kickstarter that closed that March. English Wikipedia says the idea came from a doodle of a little house above ground with a cave beneath it, drawn while he was sketching box covers at a convention. Players build a village on the surface and send villagers into the caverns, where another player reads their fortunes aloud from an Encounter Book. A villager can be exerted to add a lantern to a cave roll at the cost of being injured, and the game ends after seven rounds, with points from goods, buildings and reputation. Ryan Morgenegg of the Deseret News called it “a shining example of what good game design looks like” in December 2015, and a German edition, Oben und Unten, followed from Schwerkraft Verlag in 2016.

Its sequel widened the frame. Near and Far, funded on Kickstarter in July 2016 and published in 2017, is set in the same world, which Laukat calls Arzium. ICv2 reported in July 2016 that it pairs an atlas of eleven maps with a 100-page storybook so that games link into a campaign, as players hunt for a mysterious “Last Ruin.” English Wikipedia describes players hiring allies and buying supplies in town before setting out to camp, take on quests and build artifacts, with modes running from a tutorial to a ten-game campaign. The Deseret News called it storytelling board gaming at its finest in August 2017, while Ars Technica judged it in January 2018 a story-driven game that almost works. An expansion, Amber Mines, went to Kickstarter in October 2017. ICv2 added that Red Raven was releasing Islebound, another Laukat design, the following month.

English Wikipedia dates Sleeping Gods to 2021 and lists Roam (2019), Knightfall and Now or Never (both 2022) among the titles around it. A follow-up, Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies, opened on Gamefound in April 2022 and reached its funding goal in less than three minutes, Utah Business reported. Not every project went ahead: the magazine says Rift Knights launched on Kickstarter on 9 November 2020 and was cancelled four days later, with Laukat saying it felt the company would not deliver what its fans expected.

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 small team, one illustrator and a world called Arzium.

The company has chosen to stay small. In January 2023 Utah Business put its staff at four employees and two freelancers, including Brenna Asplund, a writer and proofreader who had joined in 2016, and quoted Laukat: “I’m more happy when we can just keep it small … We can be more expressive about the games we want to make.”

The world of Arzium holds the catalogue together. English Wikipedia says Red Raven partnered with Forteller Games in 2021 to add audio narration, sound effects and music to its storybook games, including Above and Below, and that Above and Below: Haunted, which adds ghosts that haunt villagers’ properties, was published in May 2025. The company’s website now lists that game beside Six Sojourns, Creature Caravan, Isle of Night and an Arzium Roleplaying Game, and describes the range as “imaginative, family-friendly board games” sold online and in local game stores around the world.

For a design guide, Red Raven Games shows how a publisher’s identity can rest on one illustrator’s brush: the same painted villagers, coastlines and caves carry from box to box, and the text read aloud at the table is part of the look. Compare Mindclash Games, a crowdfunding-led studio with its own resident artist, and Keymaster Games, another American publisher that leads with illustration. For this guide we use raven red, cave teal and lantern ochre with a book serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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