Finbar Games Brings the "Big Dance" to the Dining Room Table

Like so many of us, Matthew Denton ’24 passed the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic with seemingly endless hours of board games. With nothing but time on their hands, he and his father churned through games that boasted interesting gameplay mechanics, he says, but themes that carried little personal resonance. 

That experience sparked Denton to begin developing his own games. Through a research grant provided by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for Arts and Humanities, and later a small startup grant from Haverford Innovations, he created Insurgent: Algeria, a card-based game for one to two players based on real events and people involved in Algeria’s war for independence. It was quickly scooped up by distributor Catastrophe Games and is available for preorder online. 

“Part of my ethos as a designer,” says Denton, who majored in English, “is making games about topics that are either understudied or underappreciated in the current hobby.” Insurgent: Algeria, for instance, is focused on the midcentury war but also touches on the effects of more than a century of French colonialism in the North African nation. 

With a hefty dose of game design under his belt, Denton emerged from Visiting Assistant Professor of Visual Studies Ronah Harris’ “Game Design for Education” class at Haverford last fall with a new idea: a board game based on the celebrated annual NCAA basketball tournament called Road to March. He found an eager collaborator in his friend and men’s track and field teammate Luca Ponticello ’24, and the duo, united under the company name Finbar Games, sought out the Haverford Innovations Program’s (HIP) summer incubator to make their vision a reality. 

“It turns out there aren’t a lot of board games about sports, especially those that put you in the shoes of a coach,” says Denton. “Most of them just have you playing a single game of whatever sport is featured. That’s what inspired the idea behind Road to March.” 

HIP supports two to three teams of students or recent alums each year and provides the necessary financial backing, resources, and mentorship required to tackle a problem or need of their choosing. Denton and Ponticello were paired with Harris as a mentor and received additional support from agile coach Amber Magee, who helped the duo organize their goals and manage their project efficiently. 

Thanks to the incubator, Denton and Ponticello’s close collaboration has evolved the game from a 20-minute affair to one with a much deeper experience that takes the would-be coaches through four to six seasons of collegiate basketball. Players are tasked with recruiting players of different calibers, represented by the number of pips on a six-sided die. The stronger a player’s roster, the better seeding they’ll receive in the tabletop version of the tournament. Scoring is based on victory points, which each player earns by creating a stronger reputation and winning NCAA tournament games. 

Ponticello, a fine arts major who admits to having a background that’s less informed by professional sports, was tasked with developing Road to March’s look and feel. He says he took his cues from the NBA’s golden era in the 1980s and ’90s to inform his illustration for the game. To develop logos for the fictional universities and basketball conferences featured in Road to March, he turned to their real-world counterparts and took, he says, a more colorful, text-focused approach. Overall, Ponticello says, he merged representationalism and a sense of cartoonishness to create an aesthetic that makes the game more accessible. 

“When it came to creating the illustrations for Road to March, it was definitely new territory for me,” says Ponticello, who can now add game design to an artistic repertoire that includes painting, drawing, sculpture, and 3D design. “For stylistic inspiration, I pulled from old sports magazines and film photography. I took a lot of the visual cues from those and incorporated them into my full illustrations.”

For now, Finbar Games, which reflects Denton’s middle name and is represented by a logo of Ponticello’s design, continues to develop Road to March while gathering feedback from the hundred or so readers of its Substack newsletter. As the gameplay is finalized, Ponticello says he’s continuing design for the game board and the graphic elements of Road to March’s eventual packaging. 

Working in close partnership throughout the eight-week incubator, they say, has led to ideas for new games Denton and Ponticello hope to release in the future. As they settle into their post-Haverford lives, which for Denton is graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University and Ponticello a gallery or museum internship in New York, they’re both focused on making Finbar a thriving company and are considering adding new games that players can purchase online, download, and print at their own homes. 

“There’s no shipping or manufacturing involved, and you don’t need a huge marketing budget, which is part of the appeal as we really get our feet wet,” Denton says. 

Among the first of their offerings will be another card game focused on something they’re both quite familiar with: the excitement and rhythms of competing in a middle-distance running race.