In 2018, Lucas Vagner redesigned Liar’s Dice into a story-driven game for a Halloween party. It flopped at the table. The fix did not come at the party. It came weeks later, on the edge of sleep, as an alternative mechanic that is still the foundation of Lying Pirates today. Eight years and 16,000 players later, this is what actually happened in between.
Key takeaways
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| When did it really start? | 2018, at a Halloween party that went wrong |
| Who founded Nordic Pirates? | Lucas Vagner and Mikaela Hård, Stockholm |
| Kickstarter 2022 result | 4.4M SEK on a 330k SEK goal (13× target) |
| Gamefound 2025 result | 30,000 EUR goal hit in under 20 minutes |
| Total scale today | 16,000+ games sold, 7.3 on BoardGameGeek, 500+ reviews |
| What is next | Three to four new games per year |
Table of contents
- The Halloween party that went wrong
- Pizza cartons and popcorn: the prototype years
- The trio that started it: Lucas, Mikaela, and Max
- Why there was never a should I quit moment
- Kickstarter 2022: thirteen times the goal
- Gamefound 2025: from instinct to data
- The moment it became a company
- What is next: three to four games a year
- Our take
The Halloween party that went wrong
Most founder stories start with a market analysis. This one starts with a costume party.
In October 2018, Lucas was prepping for a Halloween night with friends in Stockholm. He wanted a centerpiece game. Something that fit the table the way Liar’s Dice fits a pirate scene in a film, but with a real arc instead of one round of bidding and a call. He spent the week before the party redesigning Liar’s Dice into a story-driven version, layered in a narrative wrapper and a few new mechanics, and brought it to the table.
It flopped. The story layer did not land. The mechanics did not snap. The night moved on.
What Lucas did next is the part that matters. He did not throw the design away. He also did not fix it that weekend. He let it sit. Several weeks later, on the edge of sleep, he came up with an alternative mechanic that was not story-driven at all. It was a hidden-dice bidding race, with a modular map and Action cards layered on top.
That mechanic, found while sleeping on a flopped party game, is still the foundation Lying Pirates is built on today.
Pizza cartons and popcorn: the prototype years
Version zero was not premium. It was a pizza carton.
The first playable boards were paper. The tiles were cut from cardboard boxes left over after dinner. The markers were popcorn, because popcorn was on the table and tokens were not. Some pieces were borrowed from other games sitting on the same shelf. A modular map made of pizza grease and scribbled corners.
The Nordic Pirates Instagram has a thread that walks through the evolution from those first paper boards to the production game on shelves now. It is worth looking at not because the prototypes are beautiful, but because they are not. They are a real record of what early game design actually looks like before money, manufacturing, or a brand.
Four years passed between that 2018 Halloween night and the 2022 Kickstarter launch. That is not the story most founder posts tell. Most founder posts tell a version where the idea arrives, the campaign runs, and the games ship. The truth is four years of prototypes, weekly playtests, designs that did not work, designs that almost worked, and a slow accumulation of confidence that the core mechanic was strong enough to carry the rest.
🦜 Eight years from popcorn markers to premium bamboo cups. That is how brands actually get built.
The trio that started it: Lucas, Mikaela, and Max
Lying Pirates was never a solo project.
Mikaela Hård has been involved from day one. Her name does not show up in most of the press coverage because she does not run the public-facing accounts, but the design has her fingerprints on every layer that matters. The studio is founded by both of them, on paper and in practice.
In the early prototype years, the team was three people. Lucas, Mikaela, and Max Tideman Ström. Max was the third in the founding trio. The base-game design that shipped is credited to all three, plus Misha Ahmadi, who joined later during the prototype-to-launch phase as the rulebook designer and design collaborator.
After the 2022 Kickstarter, Max chose not to continue making games with the company. Misha later also left. Neither departure was dramatic. People reach the end of a chapter and pick a different next one, and that is fine. The base-game credits remain accurate. The current team is Lucas and Mikaela, with Srdjan Vidakovic as the artist (the namesake of the Captain Srdjan coaster on the merch shelf) and Boda Games as the long-term manufacturer.
The honest version of the team story is that the founding trio shipped the first game, and the founding duo is shipping everything after it.
Why there was never a should I quit moment
When founder stories are honest, there is usually a near-quit moment.
We asked Lucas. The answer was short.
There is only forward. There is only up.
That is the brand-tone moment. Not a struggle narrative. Not a tough-times reel. Lucas is a serial founder, this is not his first company, and he has the discipline that comes from having built things before. He knew what the four-year prototype phase was for, he knew what the campaign was going to cost in marketing spend, and he had built the community through Instagram updates and demo sessions across those four years. There was no near-quit because there was no surprise.
That does not mean it was easy. It means the doubts that hit most founders did not get a seat at this table. The work was the work.
We are leaving the story honest here on purpose. Aspirational founder copy makes premium products feel cheaper than they are. Lying Pirates is a Tier 3 V3 brand, and the founder voice should match it. Quietly confident, forward only.
Kickstarter 2022: thirteen times the goal
The public goal for the 2022 Kickstarter was 330,000 SEK. The number was set so that the campaign would unambiguously succeed and trigger production. It was not the real number anyone on the team cared about.
Privately, Lucas thought 1.5 million SEK would be a strong result. Enough to fund the Deluxe Edition production at a comfortable margin, ship to backers on time, and build a small inventory buffer.
The campaign raised 4.4 million SEK. Roughly 380,000 EUR. Thirteen times the public goal, and almost three times Lucas’s private stretch number.
The reason it was not luck: four years of prototypes had built four years of audience. Every demo session, every playtest, every Instagram post had grown the community. By the time the campaign opened, the audience was already there. The Kickstarter was the place they finally got to buy.
If you ever wonder why we say “16,000+ games sold” and “500+ BGG reviews” instead of “community of fans” in our copy, this is why. The fans are not a marketing claim. They are receipts for the four years of work that came before they could click pledge.
Gamefound 2025: from instinct to data
The 2022 Kickstarter was an instinct campaign. Strong instincts, real community, four years of build-up. But the marketing spend leading into it was based on gut feel.
By 2025, the team was ready to run the campaign data-first.
The Gamefound launch for Cities of Greed leaned harder on pre-launch marketing than the team had ever leaned before. The uncomfortable part was that you spend real money in the weeks before the campaign opens, and you do not get to see direct conversions back. You are not selling anything yet. You are accumulating intent.
It is a bit scary to spend money that you do not see convert directly. But it converted very fast when we launched.
The campaign hit its 30,000 EUR funding goal in under 20 minutes.
The lesson from Gamefound 2025 is not “we got better at design.” The lesson is that the team learned how to operate. Pre-warm an audience deliberately. Trust the data. Move spend forward in the funnel. The math on the back end works if you are willing to be uncomfortable on the front end.
The moment it became a company
There is a question every founder gets asked eventually. When did this stop being a side project?
Lucas’s answer is specific. It was not the first Kickstarter. It was not 1,000 games sold, and it was not 10,000.
It was the Cities of Greed Gamefound success in 2025.
The first campaign could have been an outlier. One good idea, one strong run, one community that showed up for a single moment. The Gamefound campaign was the test of whether the community wanted more, or whether they had bought Lying Pirates and moved on. Twenty minutes to goal answered that question.
After Gamefound 2025, the studio’s allocation conversation changed. This was no longer one game with a long tail. It was the foundation of an IP that the community was actively asking to grow. That is the moment a side project becomes a company. Not a revenue threshold. Not a sales count. A clear signal that what you built is not a one-off.
What is next: three to four games a year
The first game took four years. The next ones will not.
With the knowledge we have now, things move much faster. The first game took four years. We are aiming for three to four games per year going forward.
That is not a marketing promise. It is a system promise. The work that took four years the first time was not the design. It was building the system: prototype iteration loop, community channels, manufacturing relationships, distribution. The next games inherit all of it.
Lying Pirates is the foundation, not the destination. The roadmap is built around the same craft standard that produced the BIG BOX. Real components. Real testing. Real designers, not licensed shovelware. If three to four games a year sounds aggressive, it is. We think it is the right kind of aggressive when the system has been earned.
Our take
We sell premium board games. We sell them well. The brand stands on real numbers, 16,000+ games sold worldwide, 7.3 on BoardGameGeek, 500+ reviews. None of that is hype, and we cite it on every product page for a reason.
But the brand also stands on a story that is honest about what it took to get here. Eight years from a flopped Halloween party to a 16,000-player premium studio is not the speed-run version. It is the slow version, with pizza-carton prototypes, four years of unsexy iteration, and a founding trio that became a founding duo along the way. That is the version that earned the right to ship 3 to 4 games per year going forward.
If you have followed Nordic Pirates from KS22, you already know. If you found us on a shelf or in a Shopping ad, this is the part you might not have heard yet. Either way, the next game is being designed right now, with the same team, the same standard, and the same forward-only voice.
Bring the V3 home
Recommended next reads
- Lying Pirates vs Sheriff of Nottingham: how Lying Pirates compares to one of its closest mechanical cousins
- The 7 Best Bluffing Board Games: where Lying Pirates sits in the modern bluffing canon
- Base Game vs BIG BOX vs Cities of Greed: which edition belongs on your shelf
- How to Play Lying Pirates with 8 Players: the upsell guide for groups
- Browse the Lying Pirates Base Game and Deluxe BIG BOX directly
External references:
- Lying Pirates on BoardGameGeek: 7.3 rating, 500+ reviews
- Liar’s Dice on Wikipedia: the historical lineage the 2018 Halloween experiment was riffing on