Mission and Corporate Philosophy

We are a game company.

Our mission is to create innovative, attractive, and above all, really fun parlor games (i.e. non-electronic card and board games) that can be enjoyed by adults and children alike. We believe parlor games not only provide entertainment and friendly competition, but also bring people together and create worthwhile shared experiences. Game-playing provides involvement and interaction, things we need more of in our increasingly passive society.

We are a small game company.

This means not only that we have few employees, but also that our products are designed to be as small and efficiently packaged as possible. We do not believe in making big game boxes that contain mostly air. Our games are sized to fit in your pocket or travel bag, so you can play games wherever you go.

We are an internet-based company.

We believe in taking full advantage of modern technology, and we're using the internet to further our business in many ways. We sell products direct-to-consumer, as well as business-to-business, using our secure online shopping cart. We also publish a weekly webzine and run several different websites and mailing lists, which allow us to keep in touch with our customers, our fanbase, and our local community of friends and associates.

We are an experimental company.

In both our business dealings and our product development efforts, we believe in trying new things, continually re-evaluating both our goals and the successfulness of each experiment, adapting as needed. We use an iterative approach to product design, releasing each new game in a small test run, and increasing the size of subsequent print runs as warranted by demand.

We are a progressive company.

We are environmentally friendly, and strive to recycle and re-use whenever possible. We accept and reuse donated packing peanuts. Being a family-owned, home-based business, we have greatly reduced our day-to-day need for automobiles. We support gay rights and equal rights for all people, and we regard cannabis-consuming adults as potential customers, not criminals.

We are a patriotic company.

While we may complain frequently and bitterly about current management and/or specific policies, we nevertheless love our country and take pride in our great nation's many accomplishments. As part of our commitment to America, we are trying hard to only use domestically manufactured materials in our games and publications. Thus far, we have successfully been resisting the lure of Asia, but it gets increasingly difficult when our customers complain that our prices are too high. Unfortunately, the drawback to doing business locally is that everything costs more than it would if we got less-expensive parts from distant countries where the labor is cheap. Remember, it costs more to buy American, but it's worth it!

We are that hippie game company.

But what exactly is a hippie? The word means different things to different people, not all of them positive. To us, Hippyism encompasses a broad range of radical ideas, lifestyles, and beliefs, some of which we hold ourselves, others of which we merely support. Some of our hippie friends smoke pot, while others are vegetarians, and while stoners and vegans are both frequently stereotyped as hippies, neither practice is required for someone to call themselves a hippie. (Neither is having "been there", as some hippies from the sixties sometimes assert.) Being a hippie means believing in the power of peace and non-violence and political awareness and ecological responsibility and the challenging of authority and love and happiness and yes, a passion for tie-dyes and long hair and sunshine and groovy music and flowers and bright colors. Being a hippie also means being a non-conformist and deciding for yourself what it means to be a hippie, which is how we get around the notion that hippies are supposed to be lazy and anti-capitalistic. We aren't those kinds of hippies.

Today …

… we are still a tiny business, struggling to maintain adequate cashflow. But someday, we will be well-known and highly-profitable. Our mission is to not lose track of our principles, nor forget our friends, when that time comes.

(Updated 2003-06-04)