Our Story: How BoardGamingTees Began

Our daughter was born in 2013, and like a lot of new parents, we quickly realized that everything about our life had to change. While we certainly weren’t night life people, we weren’t the kind of family that sat around in front of the television every night either. So for Christmas that year, I bought Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne and Smash Up!, our first three hobby board games.

The Christmas money we received went largely to our daughter, but also contributed to Dominion.

Then I learned what expansions were.

A few weeks later, we decided to invite our friends over to participate in a quiet night of board gaming, and that went really well, until we realized that staying up until 2AM with a newborn means a hellish week to come.

Board Gaming Takes Over Our Lives

By June of 2014, our little apartment was stuffed. Baby things? Yep. Board games? Much more so.

They were on top of our bookshelves, hidden into our coffee table, and slid below the couch. A few were stored under our bed. It was when I finally filled the last little storage nook in our coat closet near the front door that I realized that we had a problem.

So we bought a house.

Our friends all congratulated us on a job well done – buying a house for our daughter to grow up in, and giving her a backyard to play in was setting her up for success.

We knew the truth. We did it so we could have a designated game room.

My mother bought us a beautiful raised dining table to function as our dedicated gaming zone, and we installed shelves shortly thereafter, and it wasn’t long before they were filled.

Today we’re preserving our collection as a tidy set of “however many fit on these shelves without spreading out” – which means that we have around 200 games today, along with about 50 expansions. When new games come in, old games leave. That means that in the intervening years, we’ve eclipsed 300 games that we’ve gotten rid of to keep the greatest hits.

A Sign of Things to Come

It wasn’t long before we found ourselves driving to Origins Game Fair in Ohio for our first convention.

It was only a year after that before we dragged our best friends along with us. And we hit Gen Con the following year. And more conventions after that.

Now it’s an every-year thing.

Because game nights are fantastic. So are trips to our Friendly Local Game Store. But they’re not the same as spending time immersed in the hobby. Conventions were where we realized that board gaming wasn't just something we did—it was a community we belonged to.

The People Behind the Brand

We’re lucky enough to have a few separate friend groups that we see regularly. But when we see them, it’s for a night of board games, usually deep strategy games.

When family members come over for holidays, we play party games.

When we host parties at our day jobs, we do so as game days.

When I’m teaching a particularly rowdy group of kids for the day, I find a board game to play to bring them together.

And for a date night for my wife and me, our go-to choice is a night at home, with some take-out from our favorite local Chinese restaurant, and a two-player eurogame.

The Great Coffee Spill of 2026

The decision to start BoardGamingTees was born from our trip to Origins in 2026. This was not our first trip to a convention, or our first trip to Origins. We had been there a number of times, and had walked the halls of the Columbus Convention Center before.

On the day I arrived, while unpacking my suitcase, I accidentally knocked over my travel coffee mug, and spilled it on my shirts. It was near-empty, but not quite enough.

Four of the five shirts I had brought with me were now decorated with a nice brown coffee streak.

Tide pens are a nice thought, but they didn’t do the trick, at least this time.

But no worries. I was at Origins. People sell things there, and I could surely find a cool board game shirt to wear to cover me for at least one day, right?

At Origins, there are a lot of geek-wear clothing companies, with shirts about Star Trek, the Goonies, or science. There are a lot of companies that sell shirts based on the Lord of the Rings. A few sell shirts for RPG players, and there are a couple of companies selling shirts based on Pokemon and other popular video games. But no shirts I wanted to wear.

So I wore my coffee-stained shirts, went home, and did some research.

There are a few companies that make shirts based on the games they own. There are plenty of shirts on Etsy and Amazon, but they lean on cliches, pictures of meeples or mechanisms. But there didn’t seem to be a brand made for someone like me.

Someone who finds value in the community and the experience, rather than the cardboard itself.

So BoardGamingTees was born in late August 2026. If you’re reading this years from now, we hope that sentence has aged well.

From Stain to Storefront

You can read more on our company’s About Us page that describes our company’s mission, or our how we design page that describes what goes in to producing the art. We’re also maintaining a blog that documents some of our gaming experiences, where we’re posting about once per week.

And we love hearing from customers (or even potential customers). Please reach out with questions or other thoughts using our contact form.

What We Play Today

And since this entire story started with the games we play, it seems appropriate to end there too.

Our Family’s Favorite Games (last updated September 2026):

We primarily enjoy mid-to-heavy weight eurogames, and have a strong lean towards any multiplayer games that also play well with two players. Direct conflict, or war games? Not usually our thing, but there are exceptions. We do like legacy games and one-shot escape-room-in-a-box style games because we can play them without having them take up any permanent room on our shelves, but surprisingly, we don’t often enjoy campaign games. We’re also not very into D&D-style role-playing games, and while two of our three family members are very much into video games, that’s not a universal around here either.

We love board games, so that’s our focus. And it always will be.