Inc.: The Game of Business

Inc. is a board game about running a company. You buy small businesses and corporations, hire and pay employees, ride out the market when it lurches — there’s a Black Monday space and a Venture Capital space — and the first player to a million dollars in assets wins. The board wasn’t the usual folding chipboard. It was a laminated mat that rolled up into a tube, a trick that pulled the per-unit cost down far enough that four people with day jobs could actually afford a print run. This was 1999. Three years before Stalefish Labs, before Tall Tales, before I’d have called myself a game designer out loud.

It started at dinner. Four of us at the 101st Airborne in Nashville in 1998 — me, my wife, and Travis and Sarah Foster — talking about wanting a money-and-business game that wasn’t Monopoly. I think I asked why nobody made one. Sarah said: so make one. Travis, who illustrated for a living, went home that same night and started sketching boards. Two weeks later we had something playable. We named the company Gas Hound Games (a nod to the Fosters’ flatulent dog) and kept going.

The part I’m still proud of is that we shipped it ourselves. We shopped the prototype around; a toy agent named Andrew Bergman got excited, then went quiet once the big manufacturers passed — “Guys, I’m out of the loop now.” So we funded it instead of waiting for someone to bless it. Fifteen hundred dollars a couple, a first run of a thousand units, no loans. Travis bartered illustrations for Dave Ramsey’s financial workbooks in exchange for twenty radio spots on his show — a scrappy trade typical of two young couples who had more skill and ambition than cash, and it put the game in front of a national audience we couldn’t have bought our way to. By Christmas 1999 Inc. was on the shelf at three Nashville stores — Phillips Toy Mart, The Games Store, and Davis-Kidd Booksellers — and we sold close to two hundred copies locally in the two weeks before the holiday. We put up incthegame.com and waited to see what happened.

The Nashville Scene wrote it up in January 2000 — Adam Gold, under the headline “Toy Story” — right as Bergman circled back post-holidays and put the old question in front of us again: keep self-publishing, or license it to someone with national distribution. I don’t remember the deliberation as cleanly as the article makes it sound. What I do remember is that this was the real beginning of the thread that runs through everything I’ve made for the entertainment side since. Tall Tales and Stalefish Labs came after. Inc. came first. The game still has an entry on BoardGameGeek, which is a strange and nice thing to be able to say about something four friends laminated and rolled into tubes a quarter century ago.