By Andrew Paulsen
Andrew Brown doesn’t live in Thunder Bay anymore, but his inspiration for the creation of his first board game, Get Off My Lawn, stems from the time he lived here with his grandmother.
“She used to obsess over her lawn,” he says. “She couldn’t go to sleep at night if she didn’t mow her lawn every day.” Brown, tired of the typical themes found in most board games, used this unique concept as the foundation for his debut game.
“It’s a simple card game where you’re trying to build your own lawn. This game is different from other games in the sense that it’s more complex than Uno but simpler then Catan.” Brown recognizes the difficulties in appealing to a wide range of modern gamers. “There’s a huge gap between casual gamers and people who game all the time, and my game is in kind of the middle there.” For the casual gamers he kept the rules simple and easy to play. For the hardcore gamer, Brown believes the game offers a nice filler before more complex and longer games, but still offers more depth than the average “filler” game.
The game is currently being Kickstarted, which appealed to Brown after having seen others launch their games this way. “The great thing about Kickstarter is that it helps you gain traffic with people that you never thought you’d be able to reach out to,” he says. “Kickstarter is starting to become part of the formula for creating a board game. If you have a successful Kickstarter it means you did a good job marketing, meaning that you pulled in people, which provides validation for retailers to buy into your game.”
He may now reside in London, Ontario but Brown admits, “I would love to come up to Thunder Bay and open up a board game café.”
