Garphill Games in Numbers

4 employees
26 successful Kickstarter campaigns
90,000+ Kickstarter backers
12 million+ NZD raised on Kickstarter
27 games and 16 expansions published

Garphill Games ("gar-fill") was established in 2009 by New Zealand designer, Shem Phillips. For their first five years, they designed a number of family-style games with very low print runs, which were primarily sold across New Zealand. In 2014, the company launched their first ever Kickstarter campaign. This was for their biggest game yet: Shipwrights of the North Sea. The game gained a lot of interest and helped push Garphill out into the global scene. A year later they followed up with Raiders of the North Sea, which was nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres. This line of viking themed games turned into a trilogy with the final game Explorers of the North Sea.

They decided to continue making medieval trilogies for each of the cardinal directions, following up with the critically acclaimed West Kingdom trilogy. For this trilogy new Sam Macdonald came onboard as a freelance codesigner and later a full time designer at Garphill Games. The West Kingdom was followed up by the South Tigris trilogy, with the whole line of games illustrated by Mihajlo Dimitrievski (a.k.a. The Mico). The East trilogy is forthcoming.

In 2018 Shem’s brother Sam Phillips came on board as a full time illustrator working on the Circadians games and more recently the Ancient Anthology line.

Zach Smith (Circadians: Chaos Order) joined the team in 2024 as Marketing and Media manager, and helped launch the Lens and Veil Podcast, where Shem, Sam and Zach discuss game design.

Garphill Games is based out of Kapiti, New Zealand.