For NC State student Alex Gregory, his interest in board games went from being a fun hobby to a potential career in the last few months. Combining his love for the medium with his own ideas for making it better, Gregory created his own spinoff of the popular Mafia and Werewolf games earlier this year and recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for it.  

The Lounge: A Mafia Game is a multiplayer and interactive game and comes with its own card set that Gregory developed. Gregory has been part of a group on campus for two years that meets in the quad once a week to play Mafia.

“Originally I had just been making the cards for our group, but I decided about halfway through that, ‘Hey, this might be something other people might be looking for, because it’s a fairly popular game’,” Gregory said.

Gregory, a senior in electrical and computer engineering, said for a long time the group would use regular playing cards, which according to him made the process less efficient. That’s when the light bulb went off.

“I thought it would be nice and easier if we had just a set of cards with the rules on them without having to denote each time this is this and that’s that,” Gregory said. “It was hard to get new players because you would have to explain what each card was. And they didn’t know what the rules were, so they were trying to focus on that…So I got the idea of making our own set of cards.”

Gregory said he made a prototype with a 108 card set this January, that the group began playing with shortly after. Once he got the idea to market it as a product, Gregory said he lacked the entrepreneurial experience to know what steps to take next.

“The first thing I did really was just a lot of research,” Gregory said. “I didn’t have any idea what I was doing when I started out. I spent a lot of time looking at other people and what they had done and just kind of getting a feel for what the market was.”

While he eventually decided on going the Kickstarter route, Gregory said he looked at everything from selling the product online to using on campus resources. One resource, he said, particularly has helped him tremendously.

“I’m actually in a class now that’s replacing my senior design,” Gregory said. “It’s an entrepreneurship senior design. So instead of having a company come in, you form your own group and create your own product and kind of get to prototype and almost launch.”

Gregory said he handled most of the Kickstarter campaign, art work and business side of things, but friends, family and the members of his club have supported him along the way.

Woody Barlow, a senior in computer science, has been playing Mafia with this group for a couple years now. Barlow said that Gregory’s game is significantly more innovative than a lot of other Mafia spin-offs he has seen.

“With all of the custom roles that Alex has created, every game is a new experience,” Barlow said. “Cards have so many unique interactions that there’s always some interesting new strategy for staying in the game. I’ve played games like Werewolf and Resistance, which claim to be based off the same game, but none of them deliver the consistently unique gameplay experience you get from the one hundred plus roles in The Lounge.”

Bryan Allen, a junior in electrical engineering, said he’s been playing Mafia for six years. The Lounge makes the experience of playing much better than it was before, according to Allen.

“Before he did it, we were just using regular playing cards, so Alex came up with something official,” Allen said.

Gregory said one of the primary audiences for this product is college students, mainly because of its accessibility and that it’s designed for groups of people. According to Gregory, he’s also seeking out conventions where he can promote the game.

“It’s a great way to interact with people and it’s an easy game to pick up,” Gregory said.

Upon graduation, Gregory said he plans to go to graduate school for either his MBA or Master’s in electrical engineering. However, he is not opposed to pursuing board games as a career.

“If the opportunity presented itself, I would definitely take it,” Gregory said.