HOW WE MADEHOW WE MADEHOW WE MADE HIVE
44 February 2019
and was surprised to nd that the hobby was
bigger than he’d ever realised.
“ e rst time I came across the amazing
world of hobby games was when I was about
37,” he says. “I found a games club in Finchley,
North London where I could go and test Hive.
When I walked in I was amazed to see grown
men huddled around all manner of amazing-
looking games.
“ is was way back in 2001 before the
massive growth in the hobby games market,
and I didn’t even realise these kinds of games
existed. But still, the games that were around
then were so cool. While they tried Hive I
played my rst game of Settlers of Catan.”
e group reacted enthusiastically to Yianni’s
design and he incorporated some of their
feedback, tweaking the number of creatures in
the game. Eventually he felt that he’d re ned it
to the point where it was ready for the public.
Without an in-depth knowledge of the gaming
industry, he rst had to read up on the publishing
process; what he found wasn’t encouraging.“I did some online research
and after reading how di cult
it was to get a publishing deal,
I decided not even to try,”
Yianni says. “I went straight to
publishing the game myself.”
He established a company, Gen 42
Games, with the aim of turning Hive from
a promising prototype to a professionally-
published product. It turned out to be a tough
and time-consuming job.
“ e rst games were made out of wood,”
Yianni says. “I found a local cabinet maker,
who had the machinery and was willing to
make the hexagonal blocks for the pieces.
He would make them in batches of a few
hundred at a time without nishing them.
I took them home and set about sanding
them. I also had 22,000 foil hex stickers
printed and 1,000 printed boxes and rule
booklets. e hard work was the sanding and
the sticking of the stickers onto the blocks.
We roped in a few good friends and familyto help with the sanding
and paid them with an
endless supply of beer and
KFC. My wife and I did the
rest, nightly sticking on
the hex insect stickers using
tweezers and packing them in
their boxes. It was a labour of love.”
“After we had made about 100 games
we set about contacting shops, starting
with Leisure Games in Finchley. Mike, the
owner, had heard about the game through
the guys at Finchley Games Club and was
willing to try half a dozen in his shop. I
took them down to him and watched with
pride as he put them out on one of the
shelves and stuck price stickers on them.
Today, Leisure Games is still one of our
best customers.
“Other shops were not as easy to
convince, and we spent a lot of our time
chasing them to get our foot in the door.
Needless to say there were some that did
give us a try and so we continued our home
production and nightly packing of orders.
It wasn’t until they sold out of their stock
and re-orders started to come in that we
realised that we could be on to something.
After the 2005 Nuremberg Toy Fair business
really took o and I gave up my job to
pursue the games business full-
time. at’s when the awards
started to come in, as we
moved away from wood to
the chunky plastic game
pieces we have now.”