Greenville's The Good Game Company lets the good times roll

At the end of many sporting events, the teams will meet on the field to shake hands or hive five and say, “Good game… good game… good game…”

It was this repetitive tradition that inspired Dave Yearick to name his company The Good Game Co., which has gained a following as one of the leading independent boardgame creators and distributors in the Southeast.

“I think my true inspiration for it (the name) was hearing it over and over again as I coached youth football for many, many years,” said Yearick, owner and founder of The Good Game Co. “When the players meet in the middle of the field to shake hands at the end of the game, there’s just a lot of handshaking or hand slapping [and] saying ‘Good game, good game, good game,” and that was one inspiration.”

“The other reason,” he added, “is it’s just a good name.”

Finding a passion for creating games

While a good name may help inspire a company, Yearick’s history with creating boardgames started in the 1990s, when he invented a boardgame called Tribond with his two college roommates, Tim Walsh and Ed Muccini.

After college, Yearick began to work in the retail clothing business but continued to pursue freelance toy and game inventing, which he found to be more successful than his regular job.

“I started having more success in my side hustle than my real job, so I decided to pursue just freelance toy and inventing, which is a big part of the industry,” said Yearick. “Many items that are brought to market from mid-sized to very large toy companies like Mattel and Hasbro are actually invented by freelance, outside inventors, so that’s how I got into it.”

With his focus shifting solely to inventing games and toys, around 2010 Yearick started Moonracer Industries, a company that owns an outdoor sports toys line called Djubi.

He also eventually licensed around 20 boardgames, before starting The Good Game Co. in 2018.

Enter The Good Game Co.

Cooper and Dave Yearick of The Good Game Company with a sales representative.

The Good Game Co. launched by introducing four games, which were inspired by Yearick’s ideas over the years, to the market. The games were:

Idiom Addict
Wordy Word
The Epic Beard Game
Doodad

Since 2018, the boardgame company’s product line has grown to 17 family- or party-game titles, including five versions of the game Not It!

The Good Game Co., which now includes Yearick’s sons Cooper and Rudiger, also handles all parts of game production, except manufacturing the game itself, said Yearick.

The process includes:

Coming up with game ideas
Producing test prototypes of its games
Play testing by inviting people to play the games
Contracting artists for artwork

Once packaged, The Good Game Co. works with vendors such as Barnes and Noble to arrange exclusive releases of certain game titles, allowing select retailers to be the only ones with a particular game title for a set amount of time, said Yearick.