5
QUESTIONS WITH
Andrew Quartin, CEO 1. Thames & Kosmos is well-known for its fun, modern science kits for kids. What prompted the decision to enter the games category? 1. We wanted to expand on the types of skills we could teach through our products. Games help build social skills, stimulate logical and strategic thinking, promote visual-spatial and math skills, encourage family time, and inspire fairmindedness, confidence, and honorable characteristics. 2. Too much screen time is becoming an epidemic. Board games provide a great alternative to binge digital consumption. 3. Our parent company Kosmos has been publishing board games for more than 30 years. They work with highly esteemed authors such as Klaus Teuber (Settlers of Catan, Dohdles, Tumult Royale) and Reiner Knizia (Lost Cities, Keltis), among others. As with our science kits, the board games are not only fun, enchanting, and addictive, but also beneficial and wholesome in so many ways. 2. What was the inspiration for your inaugural game lineup? Are your games designed in-house or do they come from outside inventors? We felt that our inaugural lineup should focus on a variety of strategy games from celebrated authors. Many of the launches are re-issues of previously published bestsellers with great reviews from the board game community. Some are brand new from incredible authors and others are just games that we really love playing. We work with expert game designers from Germany and around the world. While many of our games are developed by outside designers, we have an incredible team of editors in Germany who are instrumental in further developing each game and preparing it for launch. In addition to our current designers, we are always looking for the next great game inventor. Our editorial team in Stuttgart receives hundreds, if not thousands, of board game submissions every year.
20 • THE TOY BOOK
3. What trends are you seeing in the games category? How does Thames & Kosmos fit in with what’s popular on shelves? The entire category as a whole seems to be trending, and strategy games are particularly strong. In addition to the tangible benefits, strength in the category also helped shape our decision to focus on strategy games in year one. 4. How do STEM-based games offer a different learning experience than science kits? Although math and logic are common themes in our current lineup, I wouldn’t necessarily call our games STEM-based. Teaching science through hands-on experimentation is very important to us, but we also feel that wholesome play, strategic thinking, and social interaction are crucial parts of becoming educated and well-adjusted adults. 5. What is Thames & Kosmos’ mission within the games category? What can we expect to see from you in the future? Our global mission is to stimulate learning, critical thinking, problem-solving, and other important life skills by publishing high-quality, hands-on science experiment kits, craft kits, and board games. A few weeks ago, my colleague was conversing with the young owner of a new company who said that he had played with Thames & Kosmos kits as a teen—more than 10 years ago. He was inspired by our fuel cell science kit and went on to complete a degree in engineering and found a tech company. Today, he is living his dream and is helping other people live theirs. Internally, we talk about this opportunity all the time and it is what drives me personally. With board games as with science kits, we aim to change lives for the better and inspire children to try harder, compete harder, learn harder, think harder, work harder, and play harder. ■
JULY/AUGUST 2015