Chairmen of the boards Duo has long been dreaming up diversions, and now they’re building it into a business that’s all fun and games By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:00 AM CST Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023

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This article was published 02/12/2023 (987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

David Plumridge doesn’t recall any Christmas get-togethers when he and his relatives haven’t hunkered down following their evening repast, for a few spirited rounds of rummy or hearts.

It’s much the same story with Connor Wielgosz, only in his situation, it’s usually Candy Land or Battleship commanding everyone’s attention.

The two friends have little reason to doubt those long-held traditions won’t continue a few weeks from now, only this holiday season, what is being contested at their respective gatherings will almost certainly be diversions they dreamed up themselves.

Plumridge and Wielgosz are the founders of Glass Jar Games. If you consider that an estimated 3,500 new card and board games are released annually, and that when the curtain closes on 2023, the duo will have been responsible for eight of those… well, even they agree that isn’t too shabby a number, for an enterprise that is scarcely six months old.

“We’ve been so busy that I haven’t really had time to think about it, but it is pretty wild that we’re still so new and are already up to that many,” Wielgosz says, seated next to Plumridge in a Tache Avenue coffee shop down the street from his abode, which currently doubles as Glass Jar Games’ “world headquarters.”

What’s doubly interesting is that there are close to 30 other games they could launch “tomorrow,” if they had the necessary time and resources, interjects Plumridge.

“It’s true, I probably have 200 more (ideas) on my phone,” Wielgosz says, pausing to take a bite out of a chocolate croissant. “So yeah, who knows where we’ll be, next December.”

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Wielgosz, 28, and Plumridge, 32, met in 2017, when both were employed at Across the Board Game Café, an Exchange District resto where customers have access to a 1,500-plus board game library.

Both held the title of game expert, which, in addition to serving duties, also required them to guide parties through games they weren’t familiar with, by going over the rules and assisting with the setup.

They enjoyed every aspect of their job, save one: certain Eurostyle games that could take as long as half an hour to explain, before anybody even rolled a die.

“What I preferred — and I think David’s with me on this — were games that people were enjoying, within 90 seconds of removing them from the box,” Wielgosz says. “That way, we could move around the room at a quicker pace and interact with more tables, instead of going over how to play something like (Settlers of) Cataan, for 20 minutes.”

Plumridge says it wasn’t long after they met, perhaps a couple of months, when they began hooking up at the end of their shifts to discuss coming up with games of their own that would be highly entertaining to play, while not overly difficult to comprehend.

Among their initial ideas was one dubbed Imposters, which would require players to deduce which suggestion didn’t belong from a categorized list of, say, musical instruments or sports teams mascots.

They labelled another of their brainstorms Heat Streak. In this one, players would attempt to answer thermal-related questions — for example, “what is the recommended cooking temperature for an egg, to ensure it’s safe to eat?” — in an effort to build their way up a likeness of a thermometer.

Another, called That’s Too High, called on participants to settle on the closest number, without going over, to queries such as “how many elevators are in the Empire State Building?”

On the topic of questions, here’s another: why work on multiple games simultaneously, versus perfecting a single entry, and running with that?

That’s easy, Plumridge replies. If and when they hit a roadblock with a particular game — to this day, they pound away at as many as five at once — they would set it aside for a spell, and move on to something else, before returning to it with a fresh mind. (So what they’re trying to tell me is that I’d be a stronger writer if I was penning 10 stories at the same time?)

Wielgosz guesses it was the spring of 2019 when they commenced testing prototypes of their games on friends and family. Buoyed by the positive feedback they were receiving, they started to investigate how to sell their games commercially.

Sustainability and environmental consciousness are top-of-mind to both of them, so they toyed around with packaging required parts — rules, cards, pencils — inside sealed mason jars, hence their name, Glass Jar Games.

The tag stuck, but they ended up parking the jar component — “for now,” they stress — owing to the higher-than-expected costs involved.

An alternative was recyclable foil packs; at least it was until they were informed overseas companies offering that service would only accept minimum orders of “something crazy like” 1,000 units per game, which, at the time, they couldn’t afford, either.

They were still in the development stage when COVID struck, in March 2020.

No longer able to gather in groups to continue testing games, they returned to the creative side of things. They ultimately arrived at a few more they were highly satisfied with, including a Manitoba-centric trivia game solely based on the province’s rich history. (“Who knew the person who inspired the James Bond character was born in Winnipeg?” Wielgosz says, referring to Second World War spy Sir William Stephenson.)

Wielgosz, who has co-written and directed three plays for the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, and Plumridge, and is currently a brand trainer at Activate Games, an interactive gaming facility with two locations in the city, received the “kick in the pants” they needed to launch Glass Jar Games, after Plumridge purchased a printer capable of handling the uncoated, recyclable style of paper they’d chosen for their game cards.

They had to pay for the device somehow, they chuckle, which is how they found themselves in Brandon at the end of May, where they were registered vendors at that city’s PrairieCon event.

Unsure of what to expect, sales-wise, they arrived with a few dozen copies each of the aforementioned Imposters, Heat Streak and That’s Too High, every last one of which they’d personally printed, cut, assembled and packaged by hand.

By the time the three-day affair was in the books, they were completely sold out of Heat Streak, and had little to none left of the other two.

It would appear Glass Jar Games was no longer a hobby, they told one another on the drive home, but rather a venture that definitely had legs.

Since then, there’s nary been a weekend when the two haven’t been at one sales market or another, inviting passers-by to take a stab at their line of games, which, as of three weeks ago, includes an entry that tests people’s mastery of bizarre or interesting facts associated with the Christmas season. (Let’s just say you’ll do dandy if you’re familiar with the average width of a male reindeer’s antlers.)

“We’re in a few stores now, too, including Wittypeg in Transcona, and Made Here, in the concourse under the Fairmont (Hotel),” says Wielgosz, who along with Plumridge, also hosts a weekly quiz night at Friskee Pearl Bar & Eatery, every Wednesday evening.

Sure, they always believed in their endeavour, during the extended, six-year buildup to their official unveiling, they maintain. Still, they find it somewhat surreal to finally be picturing people on the receiving end of one of their games this Christmas, the same way they would have torn the wrapping off Monopoly or Clue, in years past.

“I was at a friend’s birthday party a week ago, and a person I’d never met before was like ‘so you’re the guy who made Heat Streak; my buddies and I love that game,’” says Plumridge. “I’ve gotta say, that’s a pretty cool thing to hear, and it definitely inspires us to come up with even more games people can have a great time with.”

For more information, go to glassjargames.ca

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca