Back to the table

Some of my favorite memories happened at a table.

When I was a kid, I played games with my grandmother. Clue. Apples to Apples. Nothing fancy, just the two of us, a worn box, and a whole evening that belonged to no one else. I didn’t understand it then, but those nights were quietly teaching me something. The best moments are small, and shared, and they happen when everyone is looking at each other instead of a screen.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of that slipped off. Friends moved into little glowing rectangles. We stayed in touch and drifted anyway. You can be in a group chat with someone for years and never once really sit with them.

Board games are the one thing I know that pulls people back. The phones go face down. Everyone leans in. For an hour or two you are completely, gloriously present with the people in the room, laughing at a terrible bluff, groaning at a dice roll, arguing happily about the rules. It feels like being a kid at my grandmother’s table all over again.

The first time someone I love sat down to play it.

So I started making one.

Excalibrew is small and silly and nowhere near finished. Right now it is hand-cut cards, a board sketched out in Canva late at night, and a candle burning on the dining table while the rules get explained for the very first time.

The whole game, in paper.

Where it lives when it is not on the table.

Under all the puns and the coffee and the little cardboard dragon, this is the real reason I am doing it.

I want to make moments like the ones my grandmother gave me. The kind you only get around a table, together, with the people you love. I want to make them for other people.

Thank you for being here at the very beginning.

— Chris