About
The story of BoxOff
From a shift-worker's notebook in Cincinnati to a boxed game on the shelf — with a few mathematicians along the way.
An idea in its strictest form
BoxOff was invented in January 2013 by Steve Meyers, a warehouse worker in Cincinnati, Ohio. He conceived of it as a remove-a-pair game in which the requirement would be maximally stringent — the entire spatial relationship between two pieces must be free of other pieces. Although the idea generalises to any number of dimensions, it was quickly clear that a 2D format gave the best combination of depth and playability.
The people who took it seriously
The first two people Steven notified were Cameron Browne, a computer scientist, and R. Wayne Schmittberger, the editor of GAMES magazine. Cameron suggested the name BoxOff, and Wayne offered to feature it in the magazine, where it appeared in the August 2013 issue. Cameron soon co-authored a paper on BoxOff with Frédéric Maire, detailing some mathematical and sampling results — “Monte Carlo Analysis of a Puzzle Game,” presented at a conference on artificial intelligence.
An iOS app for BoxOff was created by Michael Gilbert, published in 2014 but no longer available. An Android app followed in 2016, a combined effort by Damian Walker, Greg Schmidt and some of the programmers at Lampros Labs, a Cincinnati-area IT firm. The Android app is still available for all but the most recent devices.
In 2020 BoxOff appeared in Abstract Games magazine, in an article by editor Kerry Handscomb. In 2021 the paper “BoxOff is NP-complete” was published by Ryan Hayward, Mahya Jamshidian and Robert A. Hearn, detailing computational-complexity results for the game. That same year the BoardGameGeek entry for BoxOff was created by Karen Robinson.
Finding a publisher
Over several years Steven contacted a dozen or so board-game publishers hoping to get BoxOff manufactured. He met with no luck and set it aside for a while.
In late 2022 he came across the website of NewVenture Games, a small manufacturer in Michigan, and liked how they presented their line. He sent the founder, David McCord, a small set to try. David liked it, and in October 2023 he ran a BoxOff Kickstarter with his business partner, Scott Bultman of Red Hen Toys. The game became available two months later.