Photo: Celine Grouard
Congratulations, you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who hit it big! Now you've got money to burn, but you're bored. So what's next? If you're Eric Hautemont, you indulge a lifelong hobby and cofound a board game company. The surprising part? That's a success too.
Hautemont, who got his first payout from selling a computer graphics startup, grew up playing strategy games in the '70s and '80s. Now these tabletop games are having a renaissance, and Hautemont's company, Days of Wonder, is at the fore. He thinks his cardboard masterpieces provide an analog antidote to an increasingly digital world. "There's an unconscious craving for the physical stuff," he says.
As board gaming's popularity has exploded—in large part due to the crossover success of Germany's Settlers of Catan—American publishers have flooded the market with English-language reprints of European games. Days of Wonder, though, sticks to a Pixar-like model of sporadic, thoughtfully crafted releases. Since its formation in 2002, the company has published only 11 full-scale games, but titles like Ticket to Ride (object: establish a network of train routes) have sold millions of copies—almost unheard of for a tabletop game.
Hautemont's new game, Relic Runners (below), has all the hallmarks of a Days of Wonder production. These include lavishly detailed components, like the titular relics that players are trying to find (which make Monopoly tokens look like junk). The rules are complex but immediately grokkable, and playtime satisfies without devolving into a slog. Time to roll the dice.
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