Greater Than Games has always been more than a company — it’s been a group of people who genuinely love what they do, care about the community they serve, and happen to be really good at their jobs. So as we step into this new chapter, we thought you deserved to know who’s actually behind the curtain. Spoiler: there’s no curtain. It’s just us. Five people in a room who’ve spent years making games together and are absolutely delighted to be back at it.
I’m Christopher Badell, and I’m writing this, so let me start with myself and then tell you about some of my favorite people.
Christopher Badell — Chief Creative Officer & Co-Founder
I’m a game designer. That’s the simplest way to say it. I design games — cooperative games, party games, card games, roleplaying games — and I’ve been doing it professionally for fifteen years under the Greater Than Games banner. GTG started with one game, grew into a catalog of over fifty titles across wildly different genres and player counts, and is now, as of today, back in my hands and pointed directly at what’s next.
What’s next is a lot of things. Digital Detox, the party game about stopping doom-scrolling that I designed and that is coming out this summer, is one of them. Crime Scene Tamperer, a competitive party game set in the Homestar Runner universe that we developed with the Brothers Chaps, is another. Defenders of the Realm: Definitive Edition is coming to crowdfunding later this year. And Sentinel Comics — the fictional superhero universe that Adam Rebottaro and I built from scratch, which spawned Sentinels of the Multiverse and the Sentinel Comics RPG and hundreds of hours of podcast lore — is very much alive and moving forward, with new Definitive Edition content in development and a new expansion coming to crowdfunding in 2027.
Sentinel Comics is where GTG started, and it’ll always be a core part of what we do. But it’s never been the whole story. This new version of Greater Than Games is a company with a lot of creative directions, a small team that punches well above its weight, and a genuine commitment to making games worth your time across a whole range of experiences — from a deeply replayable cooperative card game to a party game that works best when someone at the table is embarrassingly bad at keeping a straight face.
The origin of Sentinel Comics — the real origin, the one I haven’t gotten tired of telling — you can find in this episode of The Letters Page. I won’t summarize it here, because it’s better when you hear it.
As for our slogan “Play Greater” — where that came from — the honest answer is that it was born from exasperation. We were in a marketing meeting, probably a decade ago, trying to come up with a slogan. Everything we wrote was too long, too flowery, too fake-sounding, not enough, or some combination of all four. Finally, exasperated, I flippantly said: “What if we just say ‘Play Greater Than Games Games’?” And we all realized the first two words were doing all the work. It means “play our games.” It also means “play better games than you were playing before.” It also means “play at a higher level than you thought you could.” A lot in two words. It stuck. It’s been ours ever since.
Paul Bender — Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
Here’s something you might not know: without Paul Bender, none of this exists.
I built the Sentinel Comics universe with Adam. Paul built the company. He met me through a medieval reenactment group in the late 2000s — we were the kind of people who did that — and the two of us started playing tabletop games together. Eventually I showed him a card game I’d been working on, the thing that would someday become Sentinels of the Multiverse. He thought it was great. And then he was the one who pitched me on actually starting a company around it. For the record: he also came up with the name “Sentinels of the Multiverse.” So if you love this thing we built, a significant portion of that love belongs to Paul Bender.
Before GTG, Paul co-founded and ran a web startup, then worked as a software engineer. He’s been attending Gen Con since 2002, which means he has walked those convention floors as an attendee, an exhibitor, and everything in between for over two decades. He’s the person who makes sure that every relationship — with printers, distributors, attorneys, accountants, conventions — is actually managed, and that GTG doesn’t accidentally do something that results in legal trouble or financial ruin. (His direct advice to other indie publishers: pay actual money to actual attorneys and actual accountants. He means it.)
His management philosophy, held consistently across every version of this company, is that a business can be efficient and successful while genuinely putting people first. At a five-person company, that means everyone gets a say — in the insurance plan, in how the work gets structured, in what we’re building and why. That’s how Paul has always run things, and it’s how we’re running things now.
In Paul’s words:
“We learned so much the first time we started a game company and over the many years of running the first iteration of Greater Than Games that we’re eager to do it again, but without running into the pitfalls that we did the first time around.”
“GTG is a brand and a project that we grew over many years and put a lot of ourselves into. The things we believe about games, and about building teams, and about who we work with: all that comes from what we believe. And as a result, it’s become something more than just the two of us.”
Outside of work, Paul is raising his children, reading a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction books, playing video games that feel like spreadsheets, and spending almost every Thursday evening in a local pub singing old drinking songs and shanties with a vast collection of old men. Thursday has been his favorite day of the week since high school, when his school ran its schedule backwards on Tuesdays and Thursdays and started an hour later on Thursdays specifically. He has held this view of Thursday for almost thirty years and shows no signs of wavering.
Katie Nale — Chief Operating Officer
One of the things Paul has always said he’s most proud of is the team of people GTG has assembled over the years. Katie Nale is a good example of why.
Katie came to Greater Than Games the same way a lot of people came to it: through Sentinels of the Multiverse. Her husband Matt brought the game home from PAX East 2012. She played it a lot — with him, with their friends back in New Jersey — and when Matt eventually moved to Saint Louis to work at GTG, she made the leap with him. After a few years of getting to know her, we posted a job she was overqualified for. Katie started at GTG in January 2019 as Customer Service Manager, answering emails, sending out replacement parts, and figuring out how this whole thing worked. She was very good at it. She kept getting more to do.
Over the following years, her role grew considerably: she added Demo Team Manager, took over Client Services, became Director of Publishing Operations, and then — after the Flat River acquisition — became Hobby Marketing Manager under FRG. From there, she went on to Asmodee as Senior Hobby Sales Manager, where she learned what it looks like to manage a large, diverse team at a very large company. She came back to GTG because, in her words, “It’s a lot easier to pivot with a team of this size, and I have a lot more say over what goes on with GTG than anyone would with a larger company.”
As COO, the first problem she’s working on is getting physical products into the hands of as many people as possible — through distribution, events, and direct-to-consumer channels — and building an online presence that makes it genuinely easy for the community to interact with GTG, its products, and its people. She has built these systems before. She knows what works.
The demo team deserves its own mention. Managing GTG’s convention demo program — training the game runners, organizing the operations, keeping an extraordinary group of booth helpers energized and running across events — was, by her own account, the most fun part of every job she’s held here. Organized chaos, intense excitement, a lot of running around, a lot of laughter, and some of the best people she’s ever worked alongside. That spirit is coming back.
Katie has a lot to say about who we are and what we’re doing:
“GTG is a tabletop gaming company that focuses on games that bring a tight knit community together. We have a lot of passion not just for the products that we make, but also for the people who play our games.”
“The last few years have been a real struggle, not just for GTG but for the tabletop game industry as a whole. This feels like a chance to get back to our roots and get back to what really matters: building and supporting a community.”
She is quiet in the way that gets mistaken for introversion, but she’ll tell you herself: she loves being social, loves big groups, loves watching the room and being part of it even without being the loudest person there. She also knits, crochets, crafts, plays cozy games on her Switch, and has strong opinions about cooperative game mechanics. (She hates “take that” games. She is at the right company.)
SaRae Henderson — Art Director
What’s striking about this team, when you look at it all together, is how many of us found GTG and immediately knew it was where we were supposed to be. SaRae Henderson is the clearest example of that.
In May of 2016, she graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in art and graphic design, applied for a job at a tabletop game company she’d never heard of, brought in her portfolio, mentioned she’d made game box art and cards in college, and was hired immediately. GTG is her first and only career job, and one of the first projects she was handed was a not-so-little game called Spirit Island. You may have heard of it.
She still points to Spirit Island as the project she’s most proud of, because everything she learned there is embedded in everything she’s done since. She did the card design, the rulebook layout, the panels, all of it. And she will tell you — with complete sincerity — that her favorite part of any production process is the rulebook. Most people make a face when they hear that. She means it. She loves the time a rulebook gives her to get completely in the zone, to sit with the text and the font choice and the layout and get every single part as right as it can possibly be. That’s the level of care you’re looking at when you open a GTG product.
As our Art Director, SaRae’s day-to-day work spans graphic design and marketing assets, communicating with manufacturers and artists and the team on every visual aspect of every project. One of the most underrated skills in tabletop design, she’ll tell you, is being able to fluently move between different programs — Photoshop, ClipStudio, Animate, whatever the artist you’re working with happens to use — because accommodating the creatives you collaborate with is the job. When she plays games, she’s paying attention to the visuals and the layout, noticing what’s clear and what isn’t, evaluating from the point of view of someone who doesn’t play a ton of tabletop games. It makes everything she touches better.
Rae is quite enthusiastic about getting Greater Than Games back together:
“I’m excited to be working with some of the most creative and supportive people in the industry. Personally, I’m excited to have so much control over the art direction — to push our art and graphics to a level greater than we’ve ever reached before.”
“GTG is a piece of an overall idea. An idea that people from all backgrounds can come together and play and enjoy games that give them a voice, that cater to their interests, and engage them with a community of people who share the same passions.”
SaRae is also, by her own description, a thrill seeker — she loves rollercoasters, bungee jumping, and zip lines. Skydiving is on her bucket list. This will not come up in her daily responsibilities, we hope.
Matthew Kroll — Creative Director
And then there’s Matt.
Matt Kroll attended PAX East 2012 — GTG’s first PAX East. He played Sentinels of the Multiverse at that show and got completely hooked. The following year, at PAX East 2013, he showed up to the GTG booth and just... started helping. Unpaid. Because he couldn’t think of anything he’d rather do with his time there. Paul and I noticed this, told him to stop, and said we’d actually pay him if he wanted to work for us.
A few years (of Matt being incredibly helpful at conventions) later, in 2017, we posted a job opening for a warehouse position. Matt, then living in New Jersey and working in pharmaceutical materials management, submitted what I can only describe as an extremely thorough resume. Paul and I called him and spent approximately an hour on the phone trying to talk him out of taking it. We explained: it’s a warehouse job for a board game company, it’s a big life disruption, you should really think hard about this. He listened to every objection. He found none of them compelling. A few months later, he moved from New Jersey to Saint Louis, walked into our warehouse, and became one of the most indispensable people at Greater Than Games. His wife Katie — now our COO — came too. GTG has a way of doing that to people.
He didn’t stay in the warehouse long. We moved him into the office for project management and product development, and we’ve never looked back. His title is now Creative Director, which he’ll tell you covers a lot of things he was already doing, now formally and actually his job. It’s about overall vision for projects at the earliest stages — art style, setting, the decisions that shape everything downstream. He’s the kind of person who championed Compile around the office before it had a champion, pushed for it, helped shape its final design, and watched it become exactly what he’d believed it could be. He has very particular tastes, doesn’t like games that waste his time, and is, according to his own BGG bio, “fun at parties and terrible on the dance floor.” We can confirm the former.
Matt doesn’t like to mince words when talking about things that are important to him:
“GTG is more than a family — it’s an extension of my home.”
“The thing I want people to know is that we’re doing this for the right reasons. We’re doing this because we can’t stand the idea of doing anything else. We couldn’t bring ourselves to NOT do it. This is who we are.”
At Gen Con 2025, Matt was there without a GTG booth to work for the first time in years. Throughout the convention, GTG fans came up to him just to talk about his work, to thank him, to check on him as a person. It meant a lot to him. It means a lot to all of us. That’s the kind of community GTG has built. And that community is why, when Paul and I started talking about coming back, Matt was one of the first calls we made.
That’s the team. Five people who’ve spent years building something that clearly matters to a lot of people, including ourselves.
We’ve got games to make, stories to tell, and a community to reconnect with. Come find us at Gen Con this summer in Indianapolis. We’ll be the ones who are a little too excited about all of this.
We cannot wait.
Play Greater.