The Main Lab is our showcase for premier-level games. These are games that we feel will have wide appeal in the hobby board game market. These games undergo incredible amounts of effort in design, development, art and illustration. They tend to have larger budgets allocated to make them the absolute best we possibly can, plus cover advertising and marketing, Kickstarter, convention presence, and everything else that goes with such a large production.
But there are a lot, and we mean a lot, of really fun, exciting, and engaging games that for one reason or another just aren’t going to be those big triple-A titles. They could just be a quick card game, or maybe a game in a sub-genre that doesn’t have a huge audience. We want to make these games too, and the Fringe Lab lets us do that.
Some Fringe Lab games may only ever be print-and-play, or print-on-demand. Some may go to Kickstarter or sold through a web store but with a lower budget or funding goal. Some may even get elevated to the Main Lab. But make no mistake, these games are on our website because they have been well-developed in the Fringe Lab, thoroughly play-tested by our Test Subjects, and proved to be a whole lot of fun. If you see something that piques your interest, give it a shot!
We do some pretty serious work in the labs, so we need to keep things neat and tidy. The Storage Closet is where we stick things that generally are not full games or expansions; things like promotional game add-ons, extra t-shirts, etc. They are typically available in very limited quantities and once they're gone, they're gone, unless our Lab Rats tell us to make more.