We live in a golden age of tabletop games. More people than ever are eager to roll dice and paint minis with their friends in real life. Crowdfunding platforms, 3D printing, and widespread enthusiasm for off-screen entertainment are making the industry boom. Unfortunately, reaching new players and keeping them around is a real uphill battle for most indie creators. Only large companies have the resources, expertise, and scale to actually reach and retain this growing audience. This sucks!

The goal of Indie Tabletop Club is to build a connected, cooperative platform that gives indie creators the same reach & retention tools that larger organisations build for themselves. With the cost shared across many games and creators, we can make it possible for even small or up-and-coming projects to benefit from this shared ecosystem (and improve their bottom line!).

The focus for 2026 is all increasing the reach of indie games. You can read more about this in the Games Discovery section below. If you like what you read — reach out!

Player Retention

Since 2023 we've been trying to validate the first part of the puzzle: retention. Working with well-known indie creators like Mike Hutchinson from Planet Smasher Games (designer of Space Gits, Hobgoblin, and Gaslands among others), Malev Da Shinobi (creator of Greathelm and the One Box Wargame concept), and Greg Horton from Electi Studio (publisher of Hobgoblin, the Blaster magazine, and many others), we've built four premium companion apps that are all getting people to stick around and keep playing amazing indie games, without a huge marketing budget or social media presence.

Since launch, these apps have accumulated over 700,000 views and 60,000 unique visitors that are sticking around: Hobgoblin, almost three years after release, still draws 15,000–20,000 views and around 1,000 unique visitors every month.

This feels like a strong signal that high-quality apps do translate to engagement (and sales) once they reach their audience. The second part of our mission is therefore critical: make that audience bigger!

In our eyes, this can be best achieved by building a place where enthusiastic players can organically discover new and interesting games.

Games Discovery

Our discovery work is all about building a comprehensive library of indie games (and related materials like miniatures, painting tutorials, and similar!) that is well structured and easy to navigate by our visitors. This is our main roadmap item for 2026 and — if you are a creator — we would love to hear from you!

The vision is to create a central hub of indie projects related to tabletop gamers, where anyone can organically find projects they want to support and immediately buy them, in a single effortless step.

For creators, we hope to make this particularly interesting by building a system where collaboration is rewarded. Instead of the typical 'every-man-for-themselves' approach, we want to reflect the diverse nature of the hobby and build a system where related and friendly projects have clear incentives to support each other. For example, a miniature maker should be able to sell their own take on a starter set for a particular game (with the game creator's permission, of course!) — and a portion of those sales would then flow back to the game creator who did the hard work of creating an excuse a good reason for people to buy more miniatures. A rising tide lifts all boats!

Money

In today's world of privacy-infringing ad tech, VC-funded enshittification, and rampant crypto scams, we think it is important for a tech project to be transparent about how it plans to make money. Without that transparency, it should rightly be viewed with suspicion — especially by potential partners!

ITC is still at the beginning of its journey, so we don't pretend to have everything figured out, and we might change our approach as we learn more about our partner creators and the indie audience. That said, currently the project makes money in two distinct ways:

1. Similar to other platforms, ITC takes a percentage of sales made in our apps. This is likely going to be the main revenue stream for the near future.
2. We charge a kick-off fee from our partner creator when taking on significant new projects (like new apps, or major features within existing apps). This is usually tied to a Kickstarter campaign, and works as a kind of a handshake between the two parties: we now both have skin in the game! Importantly, this fee is usually tied to the KS campaign's success (with a maximum cap), and is only a small fraction of the full development cost of the app/feature. Additionally, it also comes with important perks, like handling the entire digital distribution of the given project within our system.

Other paths we are exploring:

• Building paid, premium rules reference apps for games with free core rules.
• An indie tabletop sub, for advanced features in our apps.

In addition, there are several avenues that, on principle, we are certain never to pursue:

• No privacy-infringing ad tech like Google Ads.
• No data resale for AI training or otherwise.
• No cryptocurrency of any kind.

There are also several paths that we think don't make sense given what we're trying to build:

• Charging game creators the full development cost of game apps. We are not building an agency, and the cost for a high quality app is simply too high for most projects.
• Charging creators a subscription fee for the maintenance of game apps.

Fundamentally, indie creators are the people we are trying to support — not someone who's budget we want to stretch even further.

How do I get involved?

If you would like to sell an indie game or miniatures on ITC, we would love to hear from you! Get in touch at art@indietabletop.club and we'll take things from there.

Anything else?

Get in touch!