Rising Sun was one of them.

A creation of Eric Lang, the lead designer for Singapore-based publisher CMON, Rising Sun is a conflict- and negotiation-intensive contest in which each player runs a warring clan. They seek alliances, recruit and train soldiers, harvest crops, launch attacks and betray allies. They can even call mythical monsters down upon enemies and have priests entreat the gods for favors. All of these actions gain players points, with the goal being to compile the highest score and be proclaimed emperor.

Thanks to the boom in innovative designs and the passion of avid players like Stagno, hobby board gaming has evolved into its own, diverse economic niche. More game cafés are popping up, with a cover charge that gives you and your buddies access to a game library. Conventions draw thousands of attendees, and the biggest ones—GenCon in Indianapolis and the Internationale Spieltage game fair in Essen, Germany—see tens of thousands.

While many game publishers are still small fry, there are some giants. Hasbro Inc., the world’s largest game maker, owns Wizards of the Coast, publisher of both D&D and the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering. The latter has its own pro tour and is played by more than 20 million people worldwide.

The biggest player in the hobby game industry though is French publisher Asmodee, whose catalog includes such perennial favorites as Carcassonne, 7 Wonders and Catan, the first so-called Eurogame to achieve popularity in the U.S. From 2014 to 2018, Asmodee’s revenues grew from $140 million to $495 million.

Last year, the company was sold by private-equity firm Eurazeo to PAI Partners for more than $1 billion. CMON, which publishes Rising Sun, listed revenues in its 2017 report of $28.8 million, an increase of 41.9% over the previous year. 

In America, one venerable game maker is Steve Jackson Games of Austin, Texas. Its most popular title is Munchkin, a card game whose players are diminutive fantasy heroes that basically clobber each other until one emerges triumphant. The company issues annual stakeholder reports, reporting gross income of $5.3 million last year. But most hobby board game publishers in the U.S. employ only a few people, and frequently sell just one or two games.

Given that serious hobby gamers don’t blink at spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on their gaming experience, it’s not surprising that a niche-within-a-niche industry has sprung up to supply custom accessories at premium prices.

Take something as mundane as a game box organizer. Rising Sun comes with 60 exquisitely detailed miniatures, 200 tokens and plastic counters, 30 plastic coins, a deck of cards and five player screens used to hide your stuff from opponents. Setting up and putting away such a complex system can take a fair amount of time.

Greg Spence of San Diego solved that by building his own custom organizers. Eventually, he started his own business, the Broken Token, in 2013.