Board Games are what we play.
Board Gaming is what brings us together.
Our company fundamentally believes that the value of our hobby doesn’t lie in the cardboard. It isn’t in mechanics, or design, or even the art.
We value the community, the experience and the shared culture of gaming.
Shirt Design Concepts
We exist to recognize and celebrate the shared experience of hobby board gamers. Our shirt design concepts start there.
We know that you just backed another big box crowdfunded behemoth, because there’s a good chance we just did too.
We also know that when it arrives, you have nowhere to put it on your shelf, because neither do we.
We know that you’ve bought expansions you didn’t need just because it helps complete the collection. We understand the need to buy upgraded components and storage solutions for the games you love.
Our shirt designs are meant to capture the essence of the people who would wear them, by reflecting the values of discovery, collection, ritual, quality, cleverness, friendship and identity of being a board gamer.
We don’t want to make shirts with meeples on them. We want to design shirts for board gamers.
We want to make the uniform of game night.
Our Visual Design Principles
We believe that gaming is for everyone, and we don’t think every gamer wants to dress the same.
Some of our designs are very loud and colorful. Some are deliberately subtle. Some have a vintage aesthetic, while others are funny. Some barely look like board gaming shirts at all.
Most of them are about experiences non-gamers simply wouldn’t understand.
But you do, because you’re a board gamer like us.
At the same time, we know that there are aspects of gaming culture that we don’t want to celebrate.
You won’t find shirts that promote gatekeeping, aggressive gaming stereotypes, or generic nerd & geek jokes. We don’t poke fun at others, or make jokes at the expense of the uninitiated.
You won’t find us using intellectual property that belongs to someone else.
This is a product that you’d want to wear because it reflects who you are as a person. Something that makes your buddy compliment you on game night, or inspires a stranger at a convention to ask where you got it.
We are not in the business of making cheap, novelty t-shirts that happen to have board gaming components on them.
Mostly, we want to design the kinds of things that we want to wear.
From an Idea to a Shirt
Most designs begin with an observation.
Something somebody says during game night. A behavior we've seen at conventions. The problem of fitting one more game onto an already-full shelf. Analysis paralysis. Protecting your carefully planned turn from the player immediately before you. Trying to organize five adults with jobs and families for the same Saturday night.
From there, we look for the actual idea behind the joke or observation.
Then we experiment.
That may mean different layouts, illustration styles, typography, garment colors, wording, or entirely different visual approaches to the same concept. Some ideas work almost immediately. Others go through many versions.
And plenty never become shirts at all.
We look at whether the concept actually makes sense to hobby gamers, whether the visual components are believable, whether the artwork still works when printed on fabric, whether it fits the personality of the rest of our collection, and—most importantly—whether we'd actually wear it.
We also use generative AI as one of the tools in this process. It can help us explore and develop visual interpretations of concepts we've created. Those uses are explained in detail on our AI & Content Transparency page.
The final decision about what becomes a BoardGamingTees product is ours.
Details Matter
Board gamers notice details.
We do too.
If a design uses components, we want them to make sense. If something is supposed to resemble a resource cube, game timer, card, die, scoring sheet, or other familiar tabletop object, we don't want it to look like somebody designed it without ever having played a modern board game.
We also spend a lot of time on things that have nothing to do with the joke itself: proportions, print size, negative space, typography, color combinations, garment color, and how the artwork actually sits on a shirt.
Sometimes the best change we can make to a design is removing something.
Our goal isn't to fit as much “board game stuff” onto a shirt as possible.
It's to make a good shirt.
Our Shirts
We tested a bunch of different options for our manufacturer, and one stood out above the others for providing the highest quality garment we can afford to sell at a reasonable price.
We use Comfort Colors 1717 heavyweight tee for every t-shirt design on our site.
They feature 100% soft ring spun US Cotton fabric with cotton threads, and are made with OEKO-TEX certified low-impact dyes. Garment-dyed fabric gives these shirts a softer, lived-in feel from the moment you open the package, and the relaxed fit makes sure that you’re comfortable wearing them even after a long day of walking convention halls.
And we value consistency. Rather than putting our designs on to cheaper fabric, or making different fits, fabrics and cuts just for the sake of variety, we decided to focus our efforts on just the one winning item. If you have a BoardGamingTees product you love, you know that you can order another and you’ll get the same fabric, cut and quality each time.
We want every gamer to feel welcome here, so we offer sizes from S to 4X on every design.
Colors
We also know that you have good taste, so every design allows you a to choose between few curated fabric color options.
We purposefully selected colors that we think will look good on each garment. You won’t find every design in every color.
When something looks really good in black or navy, we provide that option, as well as a few brighter shades like brick, blue jean, hemp or ivory. We think that the curated color approach gives a good middle ground of providing you the freedom to dress how you want, but with the knowledge that the final product is going to look good.
And if you want everything in black, we understand that too.
The Goal
At the end of the day, our goal is simple:
Make a really good shirt that reflects the culture and values of the person who wears it.
Something that makes you feel at home in the dealer halls of Gen Con, or at the table of weekly board game night. Something that earns you a compliment when you visit your Friendly Local Game Store, or when you order a coffee at the new board game cafe.
