Anyone who has been to a game store, or even Target for that matter, will likely be aware that we are truly living in the golden age of board gaming. And of course anyone who has ever stumbled upon Kickstarter won’t help but notice the games there, as they make up the site’s largest segment and receive hundreds of millions of pledges each year. Celebrities play games at home and athletes play them in the locker room, and they are increasingly sneaking into other realms of pop culture as well.

While a lot has been written on the board game revolution, most people generally agree it began with the breakout hit Settlers of Catan (now called just Catan, by the way) a quarter century ago. But the press and pop culture alike tend to focus much more on the games themselves – and less on the people behind them.

That’s why the new documentary Gamemaster is so refreshing. The movie, available today for purchase through VOD and digital HD platforms including iTunes, Amazon Prime video, Google Play, and YouTube, focuses much less on the games themselves and instead shows us the designers who are creating them.

No modern game documentary could avoid Klaus Teuber, the German who invented Catan and then built an empire out of it, or Reiner Knizia, a fellow German who has his name on over 600 games, and Gamemaster doesn’t disappoint in this regard. But thankfully, most of the movie focuses instead on designers who are much less well known.

Charlie Bink is an outdoor enthusiast and the son of outdoor enthusiasts who took his love for national parks and converted it into the highly rated Trekking the National Parks. Jason Serrato grew up on the streets of LA, and, like Bink, decided to take what he knew – the gang-controlled streets of his youth – and combine it with his love for miniatures to create Thug Life: The Game. Scott Rogers is a more stereotypical nerd whose path closely followed an inspirational figure from his life. Just as George Lucas tried and failed to get the rights to make Flash Gordon, and then went ahead and made his own version of a space adventure, Rogers tried and failed to get the rights to make a Star Wars game, and then went ahead and made Rayguns and Rocketships.

Then there’s Elan Lee, who with a friend created a game they called Bomb Squad, which was just a marked-up regular deck of cards with a ruleset built on the premise of creating Russian roulette with cards. Later, they would team up with The Oatmeal artist Matthew Inman to draw custom cards, the result of which would go on to become the most successful Kickstarter up to that point: Exploding Kittens. And finally, there’s Nashra Balagamwala, who took a college class project and developed it into Arranged!, a way for her to push back against her Pakistani family’s cultural expectations that she enter into an arranged marriage.

The movie spends a lot of time with these five, as they recount the trials and tribulations of designing their games and bringing them to market. And that is refreshing, as well. Too often, creative endeavors are presented as though they magically spring, fully formed, from the mind of their creators. But here we follow Serrato as he pushes back against allegations of racist portrayals in his game and deals with a failed Kickstarter campaign caused by his desire to include miniatures, and thus a core part of the original concept of the game, that drove the price point too high for his intended audience: kids in his neighborhood.

Lee had an entirely different issue, having to figure out how to scale his process to go from his plan of producing a few thousand copies of the game to meet the demands of the 219,382 people who eventually backed the game. Bink had modest success with the first edition of Trekking but then discovered the challenges of working with his parents. Rogers went another way altogether, going the traditional publishing route and facing rejection after rejection as a result, while Balagamwala saw her family ostracize her over her game.

First-time director Charles Mruz handles each of these stories with care. He never seeks to judge his subjects, instead allowing them space to tell their own stories, while still weaving them into his overall narrative.

Later in the film, Mruz moves away from his subjects for a bit and covers the bigger industry, shown mostly through the stories of the two big board game events each year: Gen Con here in the States and Germany’s Essen Spiel. I’ve been to the former and can say that the movie very nicely captures the essence of the event. In fact, I showed those scenes to my son to give him a better idea of what to expect when I take him next year, because there’s a big difference from hearing me say how big it is and actually seeing it.

(It was also, I’ll admit, a bit strange seeing these conventions, every one of which has now been cancelled due to the pandemic. It’s why my son is going to Gen Con next year and not in a few weeks. The loss of these huge events, which designers use to get their games in front of publishers and publishers use to get their games in front of the public, will almost certainly have long-lasting impacts on the industry, but that is ultimately a story that will need to be told later.)

With his coverage of Essen, Mruz moves a bit more into the realm of the Big Boys of the industry, taking the time to interview Teuber and Knizia, and goes a bit into the process behind the Spiel des Jahres, the Oscars of the board game industry. Viewers of the movie get to be there when reclusive designer Bruno Cathala won the top prize in 2017.

As enjoyable as it is to see these rock stars of my hobby on screen (I’ve been fortunate enough to meet and interview Matt Leacock, the designer of Pandemic, and I’ll admit it was cool to see him interviewed in the very kitchen of his Northern California home that I interviewed him in), the movie also doesn’t pull any punches about the realities of trying to make it in the industry.

The Teubers and Cathalas of the world, who could live off their exceptionally popular games, are the extreme exception. While Lee was able to start a company and create a growing empire of games around Exploding Kittens, he also explains how he and his partners ended up making almost nothing on the original game, despite the over $8 million it raised. Likewise, Bink describes his need to continue to work a “regular” job even as he struggled to produce to a second editing of Trekking.

In the end, Gamemaster is an honest, caring look not just at the board game industry but also – and more importantly – at the people in the industry. Without question, it’s a must-see for anyone who’s into games, but I suspect a lot of people in the wider audience will find it worth 97 minutes of their time to watch.

Note: The Roarbots was provided with a free screener for review purposes, but the opinions here are my own.