The past year has seen social and mobile developers making a serious push into bringing popular board games to digital platforms. Groups like Goko and Keesing Games have launched high-profile projects like Settlers of Catan and Stratego. Carlsbad, Calif.-based Playdek, however, was one of the industry pioneers when it comes to bringing board and hobby games to mobile devices. The company’s launched new titles at a measured pace and has more planned for the next year. We recently sat down to chat with Director of Business Development George Rothrock and CTO Gary Weiss about Playdek’s ongoing efforts to bring the popular hobby genre of board games to digital audiences.Playdek was founded in 2011, an outgrowth from Incinerator Studios. The company focused on porting physical games to tablets because its staff loves the genre and because the market wasn’t being seriously tapped into. “We’re passionate board gamers, hobby gamers and card gamers,” Rothrock says. “When we were looking around at the market, we saw there was this huge number of people playing hobby games and nobody was addressing it in a serious manner.”
