We’re the Smith family, and we’ve been playing games together for as long as we can remember. We love them enough that, eventually, we decided to make one of our own — not as a full-time studio, but as a passion project.

There are GameSmiths across three generations of our family, though most of us are siblings who grew up around the same table. With almost ten years between the oldest and youngest, game nights were never one-size-fits-all. We spent years tweaking house rules to keep games challenging for the older kids while still being fun for the younger ones. Without realizing it at the time, that constant tinkering taught us a lot about balance, pacing, and what actually makes games fun.

Like most families, we all have full-time jobs, responsibilities, and families of our own. GameSmiths isn’t something we do instead of life — it’s something we do because we love games, and because we enjoy building something together. We care deeply about the games we make, but we care just as much about sitting down at the table with the people we love.

In 2013, we pulled a bunch of our favorite ideas together into a single game. It wasn’t perfect — but it was fun. So we kept playing it, breaking it, fixing it, and playing it again. Eventually friends started asking to join in, and before long they were encouraging us to take it beyond our family game nights.

By 2016, we were working with playtest groups. In 2019, we published Six Empires.

Seeing Six Empires go from a family project to a finished game was a huge moment for us — not just as a company, but as a family. The response to the game exceeded anything we expected, and that success gave us the confidence to keep going, keep improving, and keep building games the same way we always have: thoughtfully, collaboratively, and with a lot of care.

We couldn’t resist taking one of our favorite ideas from Six Empires and turning it into an unofficial companion for one of our family’s favorite games. That project became World on Fire, and if you already know the game it pairs with, we’re pretty sure you’ll feel right at home.

At the end of the day, GameSmiths exists because we love strategy games, we love history, we love building things together, and we love sitting down at a table to see what happens when a good plan meets a better one.