Board game inventor and entrepreneur Dave Yearick wants the public to know his industry is still alive — and doing quite well.
“People may not realize this, but the board-game industry is thriving,” said Yearick, whose Greenville-based The Good Game Company markets a full line of traditional board games along with an outdoor pitch-and-catch game named Djubi.
It feels counterintuitive to suggest board games are still in vogue in a world overwhelmed with digital options. Yearick said board games represent a reprieve.
“Everyday life has become so digitized, but people still enjoy and respond to analog things — sand timers, dice, cards, checkers, pawns, etc.,” he said. “And they enjoy connecting with one another in-person, not in a virtual gaming room.”
Yearick’s initiation into the industry came during his time attending Colgate University in the 1990s.
“Together with two of my buddies, we came up with a game named Tribond, which was a riff on Trivial Pursuit, whose inventor had also gone to Colgate,” he said. “The object of the game is to guess what three random items have in common. For example, if you ask about a car, a tree and an elephant, they all have one thing in common: a trunk.”
Tribond sold more than 3 million copies.
“Call it beginner’s luck,” Yearick said, chuckling.
Eventually, the men brokered a deal to sell the rights to Tribond. Yearick said that company recently went bankrupt.
“So maybe now’s the time to go get the rights to Tribond back?” Yearick observes. “We’ll see. I’m thinking about it. There is some nostalgic value to it. People recall playing it, and there would be some unique workarounds.”
When did the Good Game Company launch?
Yearick launched The Good Game Company in 2019. These days, he runs it with son Rudiger out of a space in an old textile mill-turned-commercial space on Bramlett Road in West Greenville.
While the company has a robust e-commerce site — thegoodgamecompany.com — for its almost 20 lines, you’ll also find the company’s products in stores.
“We sell to specialty shops — mom-and-pops, small chains, independent retailers,” Yearick said. “But we also sell to mid-tiers like Barnes & Noble and Kohl’s, and mass-market retailers like Walmart and Target.”
A dice tower family game named Not It is a big seller right now, he said, along with a party game named Fuzzy Logic.
“Fuzzy Logic is always a crowd-pleaser,” Yearick said.
As for the economic forces at work in the industry, Yearick said tariffs and stiff competition from Europe are the currently challenges.
“We’re paying 30% in tariffs and have had to adjust our wholesale prices,” Yearick said. “We recognize pricing is important, and we can’t price them beyond their value. So we’ve had to approach the issue delicately.”
Yearick says the European influence has to do with high-level strategy board games that have a big audience in the U.S.
“It’s a very, very competitive global market,” he said. “We do well, we make a good product, but we’re all competing for shelf space and e-commerce clicks with all the other companies. It’s not all that hard to invent and take a good game to market. The challenge is selling it.
