Two gamers, a meeting in Atlantic City and a run of reissues.

Stronghold Games is an American hobby board game publisher that began with two gamers and a conversation. A post on the company’s own website dated 1 September 2009 announced that “discussions begin on the formation of a new game publishing company,” and the company’s early About page, preserved by the Internet Archive in 2011, tells the rest. Stephen Buonocore, a New Jersey gamer who had long wanted to work in the board game industry, and Kevin Nesbitt, an Ontario gamer who had co-founded the publisher Valley Games and left it in late 2008, came together in late 2009. At their first meeting, on 25 October 2009 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the page says, they set the mission and the first business plan, and “Stronghold Games was born.” Both were listed as managing directors of Stronghold Games LLC.

The early site carried the slogan “The Fortress of Great Games!” and set out a short creed: high-quality components, no cut corners, and no game published that the founders did not believe in. Its first releases leaned on games that had gone out of print. The company’s later About page names Code 777 and Survive: Escape From Atlantis! as its first publications in 2010; its blog opened preorders for Survive on 10 October 2010 and that year announced reprints of the economic games Outpost and McMulti. In 2011 it released Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War, a design by Robert Abbott that the company said had never been published in North America, followed by preorders for Panic Station and the announcement of a new edition of Richard Hamblen’s Merchant of Venus.

By about 2013 the company’s About page named Buonocore as president of Stronghold Games LLC.

A Swedish game about a red planet.

The game that came to define the brand was not designed in-house. In February 2016 the trade site ICv2 reported that Stronghold had acquired the English-language rights to Terraforming Mars, a Swedish game by Jacob Fryxelius, whose family publisher is FryxGames; the Polish publisher REBEL.pl took limited printing rights in Europe. The same week, ICv2 noted, Stronghold announced a partnership with the German publisher Eggertspiele.

In players’ hands, Terraforming Mars is a game of rival corporations that each contribute to making Mars habitable while competing for the most credit. English Wikipedia credits Isaac Fryxelius with its illustrations and says that after FryxGames first published it in 2016, twelve other publishers, Stronghold among them, issued editions. ICv2 reported in January 2017 that the game had been released worldwide on 28 September 2016, and quoted Buonocore saying that FryxGames had wanted to launch it at the Essen fair in 2015, that Stronghold “did not feel the game was ready,” and that the two companies spent an extra year developing it together.

Expansions followed on a steady schedule. Stronghold’s website lists Hellas & Elysium and Venus Next in 2017, Prelude and Colonies in 2018 and Turmoil in 2019; ICv2 reported in May 2018 that Prelude, designed by Jacob Fryxelius, would be released that August. Later came the card game Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition, with its own expansions dated 2023 on the company’s site, and Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game, dated October 2023.

Alongside Mars, the catalogue on Stronghold’s website includes a run of roll-and-write dice games, among them Twice As Clever, Clever Cubed, Brikks and Dizzle, as well as the board game AuZtralia of 2018 and expansions such as Not Alone: Sanctuary.

Design and documentation.

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.

A brand inside Indie Game Studios since 2018.

Stronghold did not stay on its own. At Gen Con in August 2018, ICv2 reported on 7 August, Stronghold Games and Indie Boards & Cards, the publisher of The Resistance, announced a pending merger to create Indie Game Studios. Indie Boards & Cards, Stronghold and Action Phase Games, which Indie Boards & Cards had merged with in 2016, were to continue as distinct brands. Indie’s chief executive, Travis Worthington, would lead the new company; Buonocore, described as Stronghold’s president and owner, would stay on as president of Stronghold and act as spokesperson for all the group’s brands. The report said Indie Game Studios would be managed from Oakland, California, and Stronghold from Boynton Beach, Florida, and that both companies used Publisher Services International for distribution.

Buonocore later stepped back. BoardGameWire reported in December 2023 that he had launched Stronghold in 2009, served as its president for many years and stepped down in 2020, and that he had become chairman of a new publisher, Play to Z, led by the Z-Man Games founder Zev Shlasinger. Stronghold’s website still lists its catalogue, from Terraforming Mars and its expansions to the roll-and-write games, under the Stronghold name.

For a design guide, Stronghold Games shows how a publisher’s identity can be carried by a licensed hit rather than its own house style: the fortress name and slogan came first, and the Terraforming Mars line now fills much of its catalogue. Compare Indie Boards & Cards, its partner in Indie Game Studios, and Ultra PRO, which makes the sleeves and boxes many hobby players use. For this guide we use Mars rust, rampart grey and parchment with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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