Hi, Derrick Niederman here. I know that these “About Us” pieces are usually written in the third person, but right now I’m the only employee at Wordsmith Games and I didn’t want to pretend otherwise, so here goes:
I’ve been involved with puzzles and games for some time. I sold my first crossword puzzle to the Sunday New York Times back in 1981 (yes, you read that right), and I’m still going at it, umpteen years later. In the games arena, I’ve made a bunch of prototypes over the years, including two games below that I sold to ThinkFun, the fabulous Virginia-based company that is now part of Ravensburger.

As much as I enjoyed working with the likes of ThinkFun, I started Wordsmith Games because a few of my concepts catered to seasoned wordsmiths rather than the mass market. First off is TOSSWORDS, a game that sort of invented itself in about 45 seconds as I was making a crossword puzzle. The rules are simple – as in one page worth of simple, and I hope you’ll check it out and give it a try.