The Beginning of a Success Story
as reported in Games Games Games magazine in November 1999
This new company is the brainchild of Frank DiLorenzo, who started designing games and treasure hunts at the age of 12. (He’s grown up now.) Before he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, he became one of the founders of the celebrated CMU gaming club. After seven years learning about what he calls “the wonders of black coal and cold steel”, he decided to draw on the passions of his youth and the talents of his schooling to design a board game that simulated treasure hunts. The game, Riddles & Riches, launched R&R Games, Inc., in 1996. Riddles & Riches, by the way, uses beautiful photographs of rooms in a house, along with cards riddled with clues to objects located in the photographs. The photos were actually pictures made of miniature sets! The first Riddles & Riches expansion set is slated to be released soon.
The success of his first game led to SOLD! and his newest venture, Overthrone, both card games (though Frank likes to call SOLD! “a boardless board game).” Complex in nature, they are definitely not for the casual game player. Both SOLD! and Overthrone made the GAMES 100 list this year (for 2000) in Games magazine.
Find out more about R&R at www.RnRGames.com, or you can reach Frank at fd@rnrgames.com.
Sold, with cards picturing old games from The Big Game Hunter collection
In Frank’s words:
Whenever I was bored and wanted a new game about some topic ( usually war) I sat down and whipped one together. And over the years, my treasure hunts got more and more elaborate . (At) Carnegie Mellon … I had the dubious distinction of being one of the five cofounders of the celebrated CMU gaming club. I then worked as a Mech. Engineer for seven long years… and how much I hated that. Travel they said, see the world they said, which translated meant Ohio and Pennsylvania in the winter and their exciting grimy smelly coke plants. Anyhew I digress, I decided to finally merge my passions and make a board game that simulated treasure hunts. So was born Riddles & Riches. Enough of my friends (yeah, both of them… just kidding) were excited about it that I decided to produce and market it. So was planted the seed that led me to establishing ( one year later) R&R Games, Inc. in 1996. Quite the learning curve, let me tell you. Gotta thank all the people in the industry who helped teach me the basics.
After getting established with Riddles & Riches, we ( the backers and I) decided why not put out some of my other designs and start growing the company. We decided that R&R would publish under a theme of good quality and artistically aesthetic games revolving around the core of fun original gameplay. (There was also another key decision that we never EVER let the public know the true hidden meaning of R&R… but hey, that’s another story) I decided to concentrate on developing some new stuff. After a couple of lengthy road trips (second only to the shower for good game ideas) I had designed two new games, SOLD! and Overthrone. Both grew out of suggestions from people around me who said ” Hey, why doncha make a game about blabbity blah. ” and I said ” Geez what the hell are they thinking…”
Overthrone was supposed to come out before SOLD! but wasn’t ready for the 1998 Toy fair so we showed a rudimentary prototype of SOLD! instead. As luck would have it, we generated plenty of interest and pre-orders in SOLD!; enough to push it into production 6 months earlier than scheduled. Overthrone went through a very rigorous playtesting in comparison (special thanks to Richard Borg and the Day O’ Games group for his key ideas and their playtesting) and we actually had time to properly edit the rules. It debuted at Origins in June and has sold briskly right off the bat.
…Overall, we hope to continue publishing 1-2 new games per year including some from other designers beside myself.
