One of the biggest genres in modern board gaming—cooperative games—was virtually non-existent two decades ago. Just 15 years ago, tabletop gaming was in a bit of a rut. On one side were traditional, family-friendly board games that Americans had kept in their hall closets for generations. On the other hand, there were sophisticated strategy wargames and niche miniatures games that only appealed to a few enthusiasts. Regardless, in all instances, players sat around the table looking for a confrontation, whether through slides and ladders or some more violent means. Then, in the early 2000s, everything changed.
Fireside Games co-founder Justin De Witt, creator of the hit cooperative board game lock panicShe remembers the moment when everything changed for him.
“I want to say it was 1999 or 2000,” De Witt told Polygon during a recent video call. “A friend pulled out a copy of Settlers of Catan, and I was blown away. What happened to board games? Now they’re fun! And you don’t have to knock the other one down!”
Now known as katan, the internationally best-selling board game by Klaus Tüber, put “European-style” tabletop games in the spotlight. Eurogames, as they were later called, do not rely on random dice rolls. They also downplay the open confrontation, opting instead to encourage players to compete against each other while pursuing parallel goals. But Eurogames have another quality that made them difficult to sell on the American market, at least initially: They often lack a strong theme. This makes them difficult to describe, difficult to market and kind of boring.
“I didn’t really feel like I was building a village,” De Witt said, recalling the first time he played katan. “I earned points by buying things and trading things. But I wanted something that would make you feel like you were going to die. I wanted players to be like, ‘Oh my God! We work together or we’re doomed!’ Moment.”
This inspired De Witt to invent lock p anic
But the best-selling board game was almost never made. De Witt came from an artistic background and always dreamed of working for Disney one day. After holding a string of tech jobs — and experiencing some unpleasant layoffs as well — he eventually joined Steve Jackson Games, a company best known for its Munchkin line of novel card games.
“That’s when I started working on the idea of a real cooperative game,” De Witt said, “before something that big was out there. I had different ideas about Well, maybe we’re on a pirate shipor Maybe we’re on a spaceship. This is around the same time that The Lord of the Rings movies came out. I was like Oh! We should make a castle!”
The concept inspired by the Battle of Helm’s Deep stuck. De Witt soon had a prototype and some samples of the final game. He and his wife, Anne-Marie De Witt, spent some time driving across the American South demoing the game to independent retailers, running their budding company more or less from the trunk of their car while on vacation. The process taught her a lot about consumer expectations.
“One of the things we had to do lock panic The work from a very early stage was to physically take the players out of the game,” said De Witt. “Rather than having a piece on the board, you became the castle, which is a weird abstract leap I see to this day when people new to gaming are like, ‘Wait, what? I’m not the
At a time before crowdfunding was common, and before investing in tabletop games was even on Silicon Valley’s radar, the De Witts funded the development of lock panic itself. Justin De Witt even did all the art and saved the company a ton of money. Then they bet a tidy sum on this first experimental edition of the finished game.
“There’s a great moment where Anne-Marie literally writes the check,” De Witt said, “and I think Stop. do we really want that? At this point we could still cancel. But no, no… we have to do this. we got to do that. So we’ll take the big check and mail it. The game is made, it arrives and our 3,500 copies sold out in just 10 weeks. We are simply stunned.”
lock panic is now the cornerstone of the Fireside Games catalogue. Your is having a successful small business a handful of other popular titles on the market. Castle Panic Second Edition is a chance to modernize the look of the game, which De Witt coyly admitted “looked ten years old”. The gameplay remains almost completely unchanged. The same art went in lock panic: Big Box Second Edition, which bundles all of the most popular expansions for the game into a single package. Both are ready to welcome the next generation of board gamers to the table.
“We built it as a gateway,” said De Witt. “So many people come up to us and tell us it was their first game or that it’s the game their kids still love to play. […] I think we’re still on the right track.”