What is Balthazar Games?
We are an independent, small board game publisher located in rainy Olympia, Washington. Our goal is to create entertaining, novel, and humorous games, and are committed to being accessible and fair to everyone we work with and our customers.
We were recently founded by Dr. Benjamin Ragan and Jacob Ficker, who have both long been avid board game designers and hobbyists. We hope to have crowd funding platforms for our first titles available soon, and if you are interested in play testing with us, please join our discord.
Dr. Benjamin Ragan is our Creative Director. Formerly a historian of the supernatural in the context of Anglo-Irish conflict. Dr. Ragan’s master’s thesis concerned witchcraft in the context of the colonization of Ireland and his doctoral dissertation concerned the supernatural in the Irish Revolution. Dr. Ragan has since turned his attentions to game design, applying his artistic and historical skills and knowledge toward making engaging board games.
Jacob Ficker is our Executive Director. A Software Engineer and long time nerd, Jacob uses his mathematical and engineering knowledge to help us make our games better and fairer. As an undergraduate, he did research at the University of Washington in the area of Privacy Preserving Machine Learning. He also has been a principal engineer on software that assesses over a trillion dollars in liability annually. He also has been to Hobbiton and Ben hasn’t.