Sandwich Shop Games

We make the games. People make them fun.

Company we built: We built Sandwich Shop Games to make original games that bring people together. Our work covered everything from rules and handwritten prototypes to packaging, production, and shipping. We also built tools for our writers and brought GENSMAK! to TV and mobile.
Impact: Sandwich Shop was acquired by Sandbox Creations, along with the games and tools we built around them.
Stage: Acquired by Sandbox Creations
Links: gensmak.com

Our studio

A game was worth pursuing when people wanted another round. We kept prototypes rough while we figured out which rules sparked laughter, arguments, strategy, and reasons to play again.

Handwritten order and poison cards from an early game prototype — **We started with blank cards.**
Handwritten cards let us change the rules between rounds and throw out what wasn’t working before investing in artwork and production.

We built the first 250 ourselves.
Making and shipping the early GENSMAK! boxes by hand let us refine the structure and packaging before moving to production.

Early GENSMAK! game boxes being packed by hand

A GENSMAK! product photo shoot in progress

GENSMAK! artwork being reviewed on a laptop

Stacks of Sandwich Shop Games shipping boxes

GENSMAK!

GENSMAK! is a trivia game spanning five generations of pop culture. Its questions give people a reason to share stories, debate an answer, attempt an impression, and discover something about each other.

A hand choosing a GENSMAK! question card

GENSMAK! running as a digital game — We brought *GENSMAK!* from cards to Google TV, Comcast, and iOS, expanding a physical game into experiences for the living room and mobile.

Game Machine, Sandwich Shop’s trivia knowledge graph — Writing thousands of questions across five generations needed its own tools. We built Game Machine, a trivia knowledge graph that helped our writers spot gaps in the question library’s pop-culture coverage and decide what to write next.

Wirecutter's GENSMAK! recommendation displayed on a desktop monitor

Bad Chef

Players race to keep a kitchen running by calling out the dishes they need. One person is secretly sabotaging the restaurant, so the louder and more chaotic things get, the harder it is to tell who is actually helping.

Bad Chef rulebook open to the game mechanics — The Bad Chef needs to cause enough trouble to derail the kitchen while still looking like part of the team.

Two players holding Bad Chef order cards — Shared orders and dishes split between players make coordination essential—and give the Bad Chef room to interfere.

Sandwich Shop was acquired by Sandbox Creations