Feb. 5, 2025

Side quest success: Ferris State alum turned product designer deepens adventure into board game creation

Mat Hanson’s idea of board games used to be confined to the classics, such as Monopoly, Parcheesi, and Risk. But a random night out changed everything.

Hanson, who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Industrial Design from Ferris State University’s Kendall College of Art and Design, was working at Cleveland-based design studio Process4 when he met up with some friends at board game café—essentially a coffee shop filled with every kind of tabletop game imaginable. He’d never knew such a place existed and couldn’t believe he hadn’t discovered it sooner.

“There's 100 feet or more of all these games I had never even heard of, and they were just really wild, creative, and cool,” he said.

That first experience turned into regular meetups at the café over the next several years. As Hanson met other enthusiasts and tried his hands at more and more games—most of them far more intricate and dynamic than the staples of his youth—a thought inevitably popped into his head: wouldn’t it be cool to make one?

Fast forward to today, and Hanson is the creator of two published board games that are sold and played all over the world. His latest offering, Ice and Idols, was purchased by Inside Up Games and just wrapped a wildly successful launch Kickstarter launch campaign.

Ice and Idols is a fast-paced strategy/spatial puzzle game that challenges players to navigate a shifting, maze-like pathway on which unique character traits, triggered events, and unlockable abilities all impact a player’s progress. A total of 948 unique backers helped the game exceed its Kickstarter funding goal by a whopping 130 percent, proof of Hanson’s penchant for envisioning games that people are drawn to play.

“It always feels good to see that there are so many people who like an idea that you came up with that it can be crowd funded,” he said. “But it’s also humbling because there are literally thousands of new games coming out every year into a field that is very crowded.”

In moving from dreaming up game concepts to developing them, Hanson realized his industrial design background gave him an edge over his peers. Now a vice president at Process4, he’s helped everyone from weekend hobbyists to Fortune 500 companies evolve products from inception to launch.

“My career in industrial design has taught me that there’s a time for ideation and experimentation, but at the end of the day it’s about getting a finished product to market and staying on task and on time,” he said. “Turning an idea into a tangible prototype isn’t a skill a lot of people have, and it wasn’t until I got into game design that I really realized just how refined my own skill set had become.”

For his first game—the Tron-inspired tabletop racing strategy offering Reality Shift—Hanson envisioned players navigating a color-coded, magnetic three-dimensional racetrack that shifts in accordance with action cards played to unlock a path to the finish line (or block an opponent’s).

He had no idea how to make it but needed a quick prototype to test the game’s mechanics.

“I found a $20 magnetic dry erase board, cut it up on a table saw, and jointed the edges together, and that was it,” said Hanson.

Four months later, he was finalizing a deal with a game publishing company looking to put Reality Shift into production.

“I was extremely fortunate of with how quickly the first game came together,” said Hanson. “There was refinement, for sure, but it was this little lightning in a bottle moment I had where it just kind of worked right out of the gate from the time I cut that first piece.”

Board games typically gestate for much longer. Ice and Idols, for instance, took years to come to fruition. That’s one of the reasons Hanson prefers the side hustle of game creation to the business of game production.

After games pass the concept and mechanics stage, there’s the design of the board and the game pieces—which needs to foster a good tactile player experience while being able to pack neatly in a standard box size. Then there are the graphics and illustrations that adorn the box, board, and player manual. And perhaps most daunting: balancing production costs, timelines, and supply with perceived customer demand.

Still, Hanson never shies away from helping his publishers solve physical game design challenges when the need arises.

“I always encourage publishers to keep me connected to the process, and I’m happy when I can be a part of making the game the best it can be,” he said. “My mindset as a designer is always looking at things under a microscope and asking, ‘is there any rock we’ve left unturned here? Where can this be even just a little bit better?’”

And it isn’t just about having fun outside of your 9-to-5. Hanson sees side work like his as essential to any designer’s growth—especially when they involve creating from a place of passion and personal interest.

“I think it just goes to being able to take criticism constructively,” he said. “You sit this game you’ve spent months or even years developing in front of someone who spends 45 minutes with it and finds a ton of flaws. A lot of people tend to get devasted by that kind of feedback, whatever they’re making, but you have to keep an open mind and take an objective look at what’s working for users and what isn’t.”

See more of Mat Hanson’s board game creations at sonofhangames.com.