TOLEDO, Ohio — As Ohio remains under stay-at-home orders, many people are spending quality time with their family. Some of those people play games.
Toledo is home to one game company that is continuing to grow.
Sparr Games was created in 2015 and is owned by graphic designer Jacob Parr and writer Jake Spencer.
Both graduates of Toledo School for the Arts, the beginning of their relationship actually started in dislike for one another due to their competitiveness. After graduating from high school, they reconnected.
“We realized we were really similar,” Parr says. “We just had an urge to constantly one-up each other.”
Once they became friends, they spent their time together playing board games.
Spencer credits the creation of their business to the ancient Egyptian board game Senet, whose rules are said to have been lost in time.
“We were sitting out one day on a patio coming up with different rules and trying to best one another with a cool new rule that we’d come up with, and after a while we realized we really enjoyed doing this.” Spencer says.
That’s when they had the idea to create a prototype for their first game. After three years of process and play testing, Master Thief was born and taken to Kickstarter to raise money for production.
“Our goal was originally $15,000 and we thought that was a high in the sky goal in the first place.” Explained Parr.
They met that goal in five days.
By the end of their campaign, they raised over $47,000 to fund their project.
More than 3,000 copies of Master Thief have since been sold. In 2018, Sparr Games entered a licensing agreement with their manufacturer for mass production of the game, which includes having copies in all Barnes and Noble stores nationally and featured at various conventions across the globe.
Fast-forward to 2020, Parr and Spencer are excited for the future and will be inviting Toledoans to get involved in their next big thing.
“While we're all safe at home in this quarantine type situation, Jake and I have had a great opportunity to focus on crafting our next card game. This card game is something that we're investing a lot of time into, we really believe in it, and when all of this is over, we're going to need a lot of people in Toledo to play test it to bring it to life.”
To be involved in future play testing, Sparr Games recommends visiting their Facebook and Instagram.
Copies of Master Thief and their other two games, Keep an Eye Out and Penny Breadful, are available at Handmade Toledo, Barnes and Noble, and on their website: Sparr.Games.