Matt Terry
Deadwood Games is one person. Matt designs and develops the games, laser-cuts the components, assembles the boxes, and ships them from his workshop in California. There's no studio, no co-founder, no silent investors.
He served in the U.S. Navy. After that, he took a lifelong obsession with board games and a shop full of tools and turned it into this. He wanted to build the kind of game he actually wanted to play — strategic, confrontational, made from materials worth keeping. Deadwood Games is a 100% veteran-owned board game company, and every copy is handcrafted in the USA from the first laser cut to the final box.
California LLC. 100% veteran-owned. Every dollar goes right back into the company.
How It Gets Made
Design
Game pieces, boards, tiles, tokens — all drawn from scratch. Tested, revised, finalized. Nothing hits the laser until it's right.
Cut
A laser cutter etches and cuts each piece from wood. The wood we use is renewable. You can feel the difference the second you pick up a piece.
Assemble
Every game is assembled, inspected, and packed by hand. If a piece isn't up to standard, it gets remade.
The First Print of Pioneers in Peril is 100 copies. That's what one person can build at this quality level. If the model works, the Second Print goes to professional manufacturing.
When you back a Deadwood game, you deal with the person who built it. Questions go to the maker, not a ticket queue.
This is closer to a craft brewery than a publisher. Small-batch. Handmade. Not competing with the big guys — different category entirely.
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