Ryan Laukat

Ryan Laukat is an American author, and illustrator from Salt Lake City, Utah. He started in 2008, and has worked on a dozen boardgames and illustrations. He founded Red Raven Games in 2011 He is known for the unique art in his boardgames. Many of his games are played using a campaign system and have a story as part of the game mechanism. Ryan Laukat regularly uses the platform Kickstarter to fund the games he published.

Career Ryan Laukat attended the 2007 Game Night Games in Salt Lake City, noting that he had spent several months working on a pirate-themed game called "Keys", and hand-painted the game board. Laukat had already been the artist and designer for some games published by Rio Grande Games by 2008, and had designed a game called "Radio Active Cities" where players build cities and convince people to live in them. Laukat was a member of the Board Game Designers Guild of Utah, and helped with the design on the 2008 game Dominion from Rio Grande Games. Laukat was hired by Z-Man Games to illustrate the game Bridge Troll, which was published in 2009.

Laukat founded Red Raven Games in 2011, and produced and illustrated all of its games including City of Iron, the Eight-Minute Empire series, and Artifacts, Inc.. Laukat and his wife Malorie worked on games in their basement and they launched their first Kickstarter in 2011 to publish Empires of the Void. He designed the Eight-Minute Empire game series, published by Red Raven Games. He designed and illustrated the game The Ancient World. Laukat designed the 2015 European strategy game Above and Below for which he made use of the "Book of Tales" concept. He designed and illustrated the 2017 campaign-driven storytelling board game Near and Far, a sequel to Above and Below.

Paul Booth in his 2021 book Board Games as Media called Laukat a "créateur, or a board game designer with an identifiable style", noting that Laukat "is aware that he has a particular style in his game mechanics and how much that can change his reputation among board game players". Booth concluded that

Games published

Eight-minute Empire (2012). Empires of the Void (2012). The Ancient World (2014). Above and Below (2015). Islebound (2016). Near and Far (2017). Sleeping Gods (2021). Knightfall (2022). Now or Never (2022).