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Right after graduating from ��ñ��, Evan Duda (Game and Interactive Media Design ’21) met up with a friend of his brother’s from church—someone he’d heard was “crazy about board games.” 

Duda knew the type: He was just as geeked about board games, and had spent countless hours designing, crafting, and tweaking his own, called The Waste of Parts. Sure, he wasn’t an artist and his pieces were just basic cardstock with hand-written text. But the game was solid—the math, the interactive dynamics, the numerous other variables had all been play-tested. Much of the testing was done by Duda himself, sequestered in his room during the COVID-19 pandemic—but also with friends and at local gaming conventions once the world started to open back up. The game had even been his capstone project at ��ñ��.

He played the game one night with his brother’s friend. They talked for two hours afterward. At some point in that conversation, it became clear that the friend, Eric Bittermann, was the owner and founder of a small but well-regarded board game publishing company, , located in the Chicago area. 

“I didn’t know he had a publishing company,” Duda laughs. “I just knew he was a guy who was crazy about board games.” 

“I brought the game over to our team. We do play-testing for different game designs, but mostly they come internally. We don’t typically take outside designs and publish them. So this was a unique situation,” says Bittermann. “But the game was a hit pretty much from the get-go. You can tell he took a lot of time to iron out the math to balance it out. 

After several more months of internal testing and blind play-testing, Bittermann offered Duda a contract for his game. Duda made a counteroffer to intern with the company in exchange for a higher percentage of the game’s revenues. Bittermann accepted. 

Still, the question remained: How well would the game be received? 

With the details ironed out, they launched an online fundraising campaign through an online Kickstarter-esqe platform called Gamefound.

“Kickstarting board games, specifically for new titles, that’s how it’s done for a majority of these titles,” Duda says. “You’re raising the immediate funds for the production, but also it really informs you whether there’s an audience.” 

Bittermann says he wasn’t quite sure what to expect. 

“We had some data from our community, a certain number of followers. But it’s a brand-new IP, completely different from what we’d done before, so we didn’t have a lot of variables to go off of,” he says. “It’s a really unique theme.” 

He was a bit relieved when the campaign from roughly 1,500 backers, with additional money expected by the time the game launches later in 2025.

“Anything more than $150,000 would be a pretty sizable success,” Bittermann says. 

Still, Duda’s game is a bit of a departure for the company in other ways. Sky Kingdom typically publishes fantasy board games, where players cooperate on an epic adventure that can take many nights to complete. 

The Waste of Parts isn’t that. 

In Duda’s game, players take on the role of the crew members of a ramshackle mechanical ship walking across an irradiated, post-apocalyptic wasteland, searching for sanctuary. Once residents of a dying village, the crew members had little time to ready the ship before their dire situation became clear: the voyage was now or never. 

The game board displays the various compartments of the ship, which is soon assailed by monsters that the crew scrambles to repel. As they do, the ship picks up salvage from the wrecks of travelers that weren’t as lucky, and players upgrade their crew members as well as the ship’s components, replacing them with new board pieces.

The game’s voyage—for better or worse—typically takes about two hours to complete. 

“I’ve always loved that kind of storytelling in a board game. It’s unique in a genre that can’t be replicated in a movie. Crafting your story in a low-stakes environment, just creating a story with people you love and enjoy time with,” Duda says. 

But regardless of the story, Duda says most of his mental power went toward the game’s mechanics. 

“Especially for my first game, I wanted a gameplay loop that’s repeatable and fun and you could play over and over again, and no game would be the same twice,” Duda says. “I was shooting for a 60 percent success rate, influenced by player knowledge and how they choose. You’re always in a balancing act of trying not to be overwhelmed by enemies.” 

“The strength was it played fast,” Bittermann agrees. “The tension of the game rises as the game goes on. You’re trying to figure out how to survive, there’s too many enemies; there’s a lot of co-op action.” 

Duda says the countless hours he put into the game became worth it months before even meeting Bittermann—when he played it with his own friend group of lifelong board gamers. 

“It was one of the best nights of my life,” Duda says. “They loved it so much. They played it twice, and I said, ‘OK, there’s something here.’…That was my drive to work on it for something more than a college grade.”

—Tad Vezner