Cavemen, Neolithic gods and towers of worship are all parts of the new board game created by Jeremy Burnham, lead designer and founder of EGRA Games.
Burnham, a 2012 University alumnus, came up with the idea of the game as well as his company while studying business at Harvard.
The premise of the game, Stack & Attack, is that each player is a Neanderthal trying to stack stone towers to the sky to worship the gods. Players compete to see who can stack their tower the fastest, but have to make decisions to either go to the quarry and gather new rocks, to continue trying to stack or to knock down other players’ towers.
During one of his classes at Harvard, Burnham and his classmates had to group together and create individual businesses. Burnham said he immediately knew what he wanted his business to be.
“I always, personally, just wanted to publish kind of an old-fashioned board game,” Burnham said. “And I ended up being able to convince a couple of my classmates to jump on board.”
Burnham said the group had three or four brainstorming sessions, all of which ended in disappointment.
“During one session, my friend and current business partner Chris Finlayson said sarcastically, ‘Why don’t we make a game where we build houses and throw stones at each other?’” Burnham said. “We kind of laughed it off. We had two other better ideas that we decided to spend 80 percent of our time on.”
Burnham said that no one made any progress on the “better” ideas, but two people had working prototypes of Stack & Attack.
Once the product was created, the group had to figure out exactly how they were going to brand this new game.
Burnham said coming up with a company name took a lot of brainstorming, but finally one member of the group from Russia suggested EGRA, which is Russian for the word “game.”
“It’s funny because really, our company’s name is ‘Game Games,’” Burnham said.
After the class ended, Burnham decided to bring the class project into the real world.
The founders of EGRA Games wanted to make sure that the board game would be profitable, so they sent out about 100 copies of the game to game bloggers and other influential people in the gaming industry to get their feedback.
The remaining copies of the game were sold to hobby stores in Massachusetts.
According to Burnham, the feedback has been positive.
“There are a lot of casual gamers and hardcore gamers out there,” Burnham said. “Our game sits in between those two categories. It’s a transition from casual games to intense strategy games.”
Stack & Attack is modeled after Bohnanza, a German strategy game that came to the U.S. 15 years ago.
Burnham said that initially he wanted to make a physical game that sits in the store, but the company also has other goals.
“We are thinking about going in three directions,” Burnham said. “We could come out with an expansion to [Stack & Attack] or a complementary game along the same line as our first one, or we could convert this game into an app.”
Burnham said that he learned when a physical game is converted into an app, both products work together because people who play the app can only play it solo, making them more likely to buy the board game to play it with friends.
EGRA Games just started its own Kickstarter campaign, which will give the creators a sense of how big the demand is beyond the local Massachusetts area.
Burnham said anyone can go to the Kickstarter website and pledge their financial support of any amount to help fund the creation, distribution and production of Stack & Attack.