Big Potato Games: the London publisher of games that make the table laugh
Founded in London in 2014 by three friends, Big Potato Games publishes The Chameleon, Herd Mentality and some sixty other board and party games, played in more than forty countries.
Big Potato Games owes its name to a visit to Spud-U-Like: that is how the brand tells the origin of its name. Three friends, Tris, Ben and Dean, left their jobs in 2014 to found a publisher of board games and party games in London. The brand now says its games sell in more than fifty countries, from The Chameleon to Herd Mentality, and that the team numbers more than fifty people.
Three friends in London
The founders are Dean Tempest, Ben Drummond and Tris Williams, according to BoardGameWire. Before the brand, they had made their start with a general-knowledge game, Linkee!, Wikipedia says. Dean Tempest now runs the company with Adam Wright, who joined Big Potato in 2020.
The brand charts its own journey. In 2015, it moves into a small Victorian space in Shoreditch and hires a first person, on condition that they build their own chair. In 2016, the team numbers eight people and teams up with Bananagrams to launch its games in the United States; BoardGameWire speaks of an arrival in Target stores. In 2018, the company has fourteen people, thirty-two games sold in more than twenty countries, and a van. In 2020, it moves to a four-day week: more than five million games have by then been sold worldwide, according to the brand and to BoardGameWire alike.
Table games
The range is made up of games that are quickly understood and played in a group. The Chameleon asks you to blend into the crowd without being found out. Herd Mentality rewards the person who thinks like everyone else: according to the brand, more than a million copies have been sold. Cards vs Gravity is played with cards that must not be allowed to fall, Ok Play lines up five tiles, Tilt n Shout tips a seesaw before you shout your answer, Noodle Flip throws an object into rings and Whirly Derby stages a marble race. Sounds Fishy slips a single true answer in among false leads.
Several games also exist on the big screen: the brand offers TV versions of Herd Mentality, Scrawl and The Chameleon, which extend the box without replacing it.
What the brand stands for
The mission Big Potato sets itself is to lighten the moments that friends and families spend together. It adds three commitments: to look after its teams, its retailers and its customers; to make games without harming the planet; and to design games that are easy to learn, quick to play and hard to put down.
According to the brand, these principles show up in several decisions: being one of the first British companies to adopt the four-day week, B Corp certification in 2024, and a patented technology, MOOP, which turns plastic recovered from the ocean into playing cards. It also organises game nights for companies and an invention competition in schools, The Big Inventor Challenge, and states that it launched the world’s first board game vending machine. Replacement parts are free for life for games bought directly from it.
Right now
BoardGameWire reported in August 2025 that the fund Mobeus Equity Partners was taking a minority stake in Big Potato Games, for sixteen million two hundred thousand pounds sterling. According to that outlet, the brand then had more than sixty-four titles sold in forty-four countries, and planned to use the funds to speed up the research and launch of new titles, invest in digital distribution and expand internationally. Dean Tempest said he wanted to continue the adventure as a company majority-owned by its managers.
Wikipedia, which draws on the Sunday Times, adds that the brand’s games have been translated into twenty languages and that two thirds of its turnover comes from exports, mainly to the United States. The shop’s catalogue grew in 2026 with several titles, including Stomp Stomp Chomp, Noodle Flip and Pounce, and, at the end of September, a TV version of The Chameleon.
For readers in Switzerland
The brand’s shop offers the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and the United States as delivery countries. Herd Mentality exists in German under the title Herdentier: the brand shows its box in its gallery, with the line “4-20 Spieler”, and the German outlet Spielpunkt reviews this game for four to twenty people from the age of ten, with a game lasting about twenty minutes.
Why we like it
We like the ambition the brand states: games that are easy to learn, that make people laugh around a table without leaving anyone out. We also like its humour, from the potato that gives it its name to the little pink cow of Herd Mentality, and the care taken so that its games work as well with family as with friends.
Exactly the kind of brand we’d love to come across on O!deal one day.
Big Potato Games products we’ve spotted
O!radar hasn’t spotted any product from this brand yet.