Made by a dad with 20 years in the toy industry.
We make hands-on, screen-free games for the part of the brain AI can't replace.
For 20 years I designed toys and games for the big guys. Hundreds of products for major retailers all over the world. Over 10 patents. A ToyAward nomination at Nuremberg, the world's largest toy fair. Multiple industrial design awards. A few things that ended up on the Today Show, and a few that sold over a million units.
I loved it. I also spent a lot of that time in rooms deciding what kids want without a kid anywhere in the building.
Then I started paying attention to what happened at my own table. My son and I kept coming back to the same handful of games, and it was never the ones with the biggest budgets or the most plastic. It was the ones that made us think, argue, bluff, and laugh at the same time. The ones where a seven-year-old can beat a grown adult without anybody letting him.
That's what Brain Thunder is. Hands-on, screen-free games built for the part of the brain that doesn't get exercised anywhere else. Every one of them starts at our table and doesn't ship until it's the game everybody asks to play again.
It turned out to be the most rewarding work I've done, because the payoff isn't a sell-through number. It's an hour across the table from my kid, both of us actually there, and the kind of thinking that sticks around long after the box goes back on the shelf.
I hope they do the same for you and yours.
— Blake, Tulsa, OK
Invented at 30,000 feet.
Cheesecake Bazooka didn't come from a design studio. It came from a delayed flight out of Burbank.
My son and I had been sitting at the gate long enough to play rock-paper-scissors more times than any two people should. So we started inventing new throws to break the ties. Water glass rusts your scissors. Then something beats water glass. Then something beats that. Within a few minutes we had a pile of ridiculous things, each one somehow beating the last, and we were laughing hard enough that the people around us were looking over.
By the time we boarded it had rules. By the time we landed it was a game.
What came after is the part nobody sees: thousands of hours of art, product design, prototypes, playtests, and factory runs to turn a thing two people made up at an airport into a box that works for any family at any table. That's the 20 years of toy industry showing up.
But the game itself, the part that makes people laugh, that was invented by a kid who was bored. He still says it's his game. Honestly, he might be right. We're still arguing about it, which is sort of the whole point.
Analog intelligence.
We build for the kid who asks weird questions and connects the wrong dots. In a world where machines do the rote stuff, the only skills left worth being good at are the loud, creative, hard-to-measure ones. Arguing. Bluffing. Mashing two stupid ideas into one brilliant one. That's analog intelligence — the kind you only get by doing.
You bring the brain. We bring the thunder.
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