One desk, one game, a million ideas
Who is behind BuMM Games, what a warehouse has to do with a board game, and who else gets a say.
Who is behind BuMM Games
BuMM Games is a publisher in the making, and for the most part it is one person. My name is Marc, I was born in 1991 and I live in Hollenbach in Bavaria. There is no department for anything here: the rules, the costing, this website, the boxes that will need packing later and every last piece of correspondence all cross the same desk, held up by a family that puts a great deal of love into it.
The name BuMM Games stands for Bär und Mieze & Maus. I am the Bär, the Mieze is my wife Sabrina, and my stepdaughter is the Maus.
What a warehouse has to do with a board game
I trained in warehouse logistics and worked in it for a few years before moving into IT, most recently six years of software support for an ERP system and the databases underneath it. That sounds like two lives with nothing to do with each other, but it is close to the exact mix that small publishers tend to come unstuck on: printing a game is one thing, getting a thousand boxes across Europe and keeping a system running behind them is another, and I am counting on that groundwork. Games have had a hold on me all my life, so discovering board games a few years ago felt like finding a puzzle piece I had not known was missing. The dream of making one of my own turned up more or less on the spot, and until now I simply never went after it.
Who else gets a say
The pencil drawings over in the development section are not mine. They are my wife’s, who backs this whole thing with an artistic eye, advice, ideas, playtests, an open ear and a great deal of patience. Her own path here has been a colourful one, which is why she keeps seeing the game from an angle I would have walked straight past.
Last and no less important: we ask our Maus what she makes of everything we come up with, which makes her at least as valuable a member of this team as our cats, who reliably provide calm and chaos in equal measure.
