A video-game producer starts a publisher in Madison.

Thunderworks Games was founded in 2013 by Keith Matejka, and it has worked out of Madison, Wisconsin, ever since, the company says. Before he made board games, Matejka spent about fifteen years in the video-game industry, in both development and publishing; the company says his roles there included managing teams of artists, programmers, animators and sound engineers. A 2021 interview with the British board-game site Punchboard describes him as a designer and publisher based in Madison who moved to board games full time after that career.

The start was small. The company says Matejka’s first game, Bullfrogs, published in 2015, and the two titles after it were each funded on Kickstarter by fewer than a thousand backers. Its own timeline lists Roll Player and a game called Blend Off! in 2016, and Dual Powers: Revolution 1917 in 2018.

Roll Player became what the company calls its flagship. Matejka designed it, and English Wikipedia records that it was funded through Kickstarter and published by Thunderworks in 2016. He told Punchboard that the idea came to him while playtesting at Protospiel, a designers’ gathering, in Madison, and that he thinks of the game as a “meta” game: the step before a role-playing session such as Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder. The company’s shop sums it up as building a fantasy hero.

Thunderworks says growth quickened with Roll Player’s first expansion, Monsters & Minions, in 2018; a second, Fiends & Familiars, followed in 2020.

Cartographers and the Kennerspiel list.

The game that changed the company was not Matejka’s own design. Cartographers, published by Thunderworks in 2019, was designed by Jordy Adan and illustrated by Lucas Ribeiro and Luis Francisco, English Wikipedia says. It is a “flip and write” game: players draw a fantasy kingdom’s terrain on their own map sheets as cards are revealed, scoring against changing royal edicts. The rulebook gives its full title as Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale, tying it to the world of the earlier game.

In Germany the game was published by Pegasus Spiele as Der Kartograph, and the Spiel des Jahres association lists it as a nominee for the 2020 Kennerspiel des Jahres, its award for more demanding games. The jury praised its clear structure and the hand-drawn feel of its maps, writing that players experience the voyage of discovery without mechanical ballast. English Wikipedia records that the award went to The Crew. Thunderworks says that nomination, and the attention Cartographers drew, led Matejka to run the company full time from 2019.

An expansion set, Cartographers Heroes, was funded on Kickstarter and released in 2021, and map packs followed in 2021 and 2022, the company’s timeline shows.

Matejka told Punchboard in May 2021 that about half the games he publishes are his own designs, like Roll Player, and half come from other designers, like Cartographers. The same interview credits Cape May, a 2021 Thunderworks release, to the designer Eric Mosso, with illustrations by Michael Menzel and development work by Matejka.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all board-game publishers: Lookout Games, Gamewright, Thunderworks Games, North Star Games, Devir, Horrible Guild and Bézier Games. Board-game publishers sit at many different points in the hobby, from small studios built around the work of one or two designers to companies that now belong to much larger games groups, and a single title can be sold everywhere from a specialist game shop to a toy aisle.

A publisher’s identity is usually carried less by a single box than by a name, a logo on the box and the games it becomes known for, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved, or licensed its games to other publishers in other countries. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and which games and designers made its reputation.

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 any honours from named awarding bodies — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One shared fantasy world, the World of Ulos.

Since Cartographers, Thunderworks has kept a steady release schedule. Its own timeline lists Roll Player Adventures, a cooperative storybook game, in 2021; Tenpenny Parks in 2022; Goblin Vaults and Dawn of Ulos in 2023; Stonespine Architects and Metrorunner in 2024; Emerald Skulls, Citizens of the Spark and FlipToons in 2025; and, in 2026, further Roll Player Adventures and Tenpenny Parks expansions, a second FlipToons season and a card game called Questline. Matejka told Punchboard in 2021 that the company aimed for two or three releases a year.

The company’s branding increasingly gathers those games into one setting. Its website groups Roll Player, Cartographers, Stonespine Architects, Emerald Skulls, Questline and others under the heading “World of Ulos,” a shared fantasy universe, and its homepage line describes strategy board games “from the cold of Wisconsin to the warmth of your home.” Other titles, such as Tenpenny Parks, Metrorunner and Cape May, sit outside that world.

Thunderworks remains a small, founder-led business. The company says it employs a team of five people. Keith Matejka is listed as founder, designer and head of finance and production, and the company says he handles design, development, art direction, customer service and manufacturing; Claire Matejka runs distribution and localisation and is the main contact for retailers and distributors. The company does not say on its website where its games are printed. Its online shop offers stock from warehouses in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and China, and the company says it runs a local warehouse near Madison.

No visual identity guidelines, logo designer or brand colours are published. What carries the brand is the look of the games themselves: hand-drawn maps, heraldic fantasy characters and a recurring world, built by commissioned illustrators such as those credited on Cartographers.

For a design guide, Thunderworks Games shows how a small publisher can turn a run of separate titles into one recognisable world. Compare AEG, another American hobby-game publisher, and Bézier Games. For this guide we use parchment, map ink, forest green and a compass gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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