Our Story Hi. I'm Tim. I run a greeting card company.
To make our cards, I add immature and occasionally indecent captions to old photographs. It's going pretty well.
My comedy education is rooted in Monty Python, Kids in the Hall, South Park, Broad City, Steve Martin's stand-up albums, The Onion (Hi, Scott!), and a bunch of other deeply questionable influences.
Four years ago, I made a party game for adults. We launched it, and eventually it got picked up by a big-box retailer called Books-A-Million. We sold a few thousand copies.
But something wasn't working. Sales slowed. Then they stopped. The game fizzled out.
I still had 4,000 copies sitting in our warehouse. My daughter, then nine years old, built a cardboard playhouse on top of the pallets of unsold games.
I considered the project a failure.
Years passed.
Last winter, I felt the urge to return to the game. I wanted to make it better. I wanted to see if we could have fun with it again.
So I applied for an exhibitor booth at Gamehole Con, a gaming convention here in Madison, Wisconsin.
We were accepted.
We were going to relaunch Death by Captions. A new, improved edition.
Fast-forward to today. It's Day Two of the convention, and my first time at a gaming convention of any kind.
This morning, as attendees passed our booth, I worried that we didn't belong. People come to this convention to explore and play tabletop games. Not necessarily to play an absurdist party game that occasionally makes Cards Against Humanity look tasteful.
Most people pass us by on their way to events. But every once in a while, someone stops, laughs, chats with us, and buys a game.
They're all different ages. They dress differently. Some have kids with them. (Part of our job at the booth is to gently steer families away. We even hung caution tape around our booth.)
But there's something these people seem to have in common. A sense of playfulness, mixed with a little mischief.
They're weird in the same ways we are.
And after spending so much time alone writing and designing this game, getting to talk and joke with these people is a blessed relief.
Anyway, I'm cautiously optimistic.
Now I've got to get back to the booth.
Sincerely,
Timothy W. Sanders
10/16/26
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