Homemade Games: Board Games from the Basement

One of the questions I get from time to time, especially from people who discover Kozak Games for the first time, sounds simple on the surface but always leads to a longer conversation. “How and Where are your games made?” Most people expect to hear something about factories, production partners, or at least some kind of professional manufacturing setup. And while part of the process does involve sourcing components from different places around the world, the real answer is much more personal. Most of my games are made at home. More specifically, they are made in my basement. Over the years, that basement slowly stopped being just a storage space and turned into something else entirely — a place where ideas can exist in a physical form, where experiments are not only allowed but encouraged, and where I can move from concept to prototype without waiting for anyone’s approval or timeline. It’s not a perfect workshop, and it definitely doesn’t look like a factory, but it gives me something much more valuable than scale: it gives me freedom.

That freedom becomes especially important when you are working on small, experimental games. If I wake up with an idea or realize that something doesn’t quite work the way I imagined, I don’t need to schedule anything or wait for a production slot. I can simply go downstairs, make changes, print new components, and test them the same day. That kind of flexibility is something I wrote about earlier in Designing Games with Fewer Components, because in many ways, smaller games allow for faster iteration, and faster iteration often leads to better design decisions. A big part of this process revolves around two printers that I use almost every day. They might not look impressive, but they are responsible for a surprising amount of what happens behind the scenes. With them, I can print cards, tokens, rulebooks, stickers, and sometimes even final components for finished games. Since I’ve chosen to use DVD-style packaging for new Kozak Games releases, I also print the box covers at home, which means that the final assembly of each game-inserting components, checking everything, making sure the experience feels complete-is something I do myself. Every copy passes through my hands at some point. It’s a slow process, and sometimes it can feel repetitive, especially when you’re assembling multiple copies of the same game, but it also creates a very direct connection between the creator and the final product. There’s no distance, no abstraction-just the simple reality that what you are holding was physically made, checked, and completed in a small workshop. Of course, not everything can be done at home, and this is where the process becomes a bit more complex. I regularly order components from different factories around the world, whether it’s plastic cubes, wooden pieces, or custom-made elements that carry the Kozak Games identity. Sometimes these components travel long distances before they arrive, and once they do, they become part of a workflow that is both global and deeply local at the same time. On one hand, you have materials produced at scale in different parts of the world.

On the other, you have a single person assembling and finishing the game in a basement. It’s not the most efficient system, and it was never meant to be.

In fact, if you look at it purely from a business perspective, it might seem unnecessarily complicated, slow, and difficult to scale. But this is also where the difference between an indie publisher and a large publisher becomes very clear. Large publishers are built around efficiency, consistency, and volume. Indie creators, on the other hand, often build their processes around flexibility, experimentation, and a certain level of control that is hard to maintain once you move into larger production pipelines. There is also another layer to this approach, one that is less about logistics and more about philosophy.

We live in a time when consumption moves incredibly fast. The board game industry, in particular, has grown at a remarkable pace, with thousands of new titles released every year, often supported by massive print runs and large-scale crowdfunding campaigns. And while this growth brings a lot of creativity and innovation, it also creates situations where games are produced in quantities that far exceed actual demand. Many of those games eventually end up heavily discounted, sitting in warehouses, or quietly disappearing into collections where they might never be played.

And I say this fully aware of my own situation. I have around 500 board games at home. Over time, I’ve found ways to justify that collection-organizing game nights, sharing games with others, creating spaces where those games can actually be played-but even then, I sometimes find myself thinking about how many people own far more games than they realistically have time to experience. A group of four or five players can only explore so much, no matter how enthusiastic they are. That doesn’t make the industry wrong, but it does make me question the idea that bigger is always better. For me, working on a smaller scale, producing games more slowly, and maintaining a direct connection to each copy is not just a limitation — it’s a deliberate choice. It allows me to stay closer to the process, to the design, and to the players who eventually interact with the game. In many ways, this mindset is connected to what I experienced recently at the Maker Faire Philadelphia, where I saw creators from completely different fields coming together with projects that existed not because they needed to scale, but because they needed to exist. That same spirit is something I try to keep in my own work, even when the process becomes slow or challenging. When someone opens a Kozak Games box, they’re not just opening a product that came off a production line. They’re opening something that was assembled, checked, and in some cases even adjusted by hand, in a space that exists specifically for experimentation and creation. And while this approach might never compete with large-scale manufacturing in terms of speed or volume, it offers something that I personally find much more meaningful. And for now, that’s exactly how I want to make games.

See our products:

Read more

Sign up for the newsletter!

Sign up for the newsletter and receive more information about our games.