KTBG: Where Kids Get a Taste of Serious Games

Kids Table Board Games (KTBG), established in 2015 by Josh and Helaina Cappel, occupies the area that loosely divides board games into the vaguely defined categories of casual and serious.

- Skip Maloney

This focus shift is aligned with the growth of their two children, now 10 and 12, who were 3 and 5 when KTBG's first game, Foodfighters, was published. “KTBG has grown with the kids. The games and the kids are growing at the same pace,” explains Helaina.

While sticking to their motto “serious games for casual gamers and casual games for serious gamers,” KTBG's designs continue to explore and expand on the very definitions of serious and casual. In effect, rather than putting more weight on one side or the other, they're balancing their designs by applying weight to both sides of the divide. Games like Foodfighters, Wreck Raiders, and Fossilis may challenge the younger members of their stated age range with a degree of complexity but are also appealing to those younger players due to their food fighting, diving for sunken treasure, and dinosaur theme.

"We didn't get into board games as a hobby until a few years into our marriage," says Josh.

“My parents used to make me play games and I hated them when I was a kid," said Helaina. "And of course, it was the classics like Monopoly and Sorry, and I just didn't have a connection with them. And then, one day, Josh came home with Settlers of Catan."

“At first,” she adds, “I told him I don't like games. I'll play it with you because you want me to, but I'm not going to like this.' Everything changed after that."

"It was," noted Josh, with a chuckle, "love at first sheep."

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

In the meantime, Josh had become interested in designing games before he knew about the hobby board game industry. While exploring the world of board game design, he came upon an online community, The Board Game Designers Forum (BGDF), which opened his eyes to a whole new generation of board games.