Welcome toSound of Drums!
We publish board games with historical backgrounds.
Who we are!
We are a small team of long time industry veterans. Since 2021 we are dedicated to bring a new historical boardgame experience to the table. Lorem ipsum und so weiter…
You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter / X, Youtube and last but certainly not least Boardgamegeek!
Our mission!
For thousands of years soldiers all over the world followed the sound of drums marching into battle following a leadership. The macedonian fighters followed Alexander the Great to India, the french grognards marched into battle following the “pas de charge” up the hills at the battle of Waterloo. Military drums have been used for martial music, communication, drill, honors music and military ceremonies.
We publish strategy board games with historical backgrounds. The challenge is to find the right spot in between a game and a simulation. The better the game the worse the simulation and the better the simulation the worse the game. We don’t pretend to simulate history. We want to give players the same background to rewrite history without forcing them to repeat history.
The design of our games have one thing in common: decision taking! We us only few charts and tables and as little as possible we use dice in our designs. Tables and dice often replace mechanics where a designer would have a hard time representing something he had in mind for his game. In our wargames we will avoid the extensive use of markers and the number of tables. In all our games we avoid huge numbers of play aids that need to be placed around the map or in front of the players. We want to prioritize the action on the map and the gamers focused at the action on the map.
We are dedicated to top notch quality components with a matching material mix. Wrapped edge game boards, no play aid cards on flimsy paper, no standard of the shelf meeples.
Our team!
Uwe Walentin – Owner, designer, rules wizard and producer
Uwe is a passionate board gamer since his earliest youth. Before founding his own company (Pro Ludo) in 1996, he worked for various French publishers (Eurogames, Jeux Descartes) for many years and learned the publishing business from the ground up. He had a great success story with Pro Ludo, which culminated in 2004 with the distribution of Ticket to Ride, the Game Of The Year in Germany. After the sale of Pro Ludo in 2008 and a 10-year creative break, during which he worked in other areas as an entrepreneur and soccer coach in Switzerland, he realized an old dream in 2021 with the founding of Sound of Drums: Designing and publishing unique strategy games. He brings all his experience from the professional “eurogame boardgame” to the ambitious visions of the Sound of Drums publishing house. He pays special attention to writing near-perfect rules, with a fresh didactic approach and breaking old editorial traditions.
Marc von Martial – Graphic designer, illustrator and Uwe’s sidekick
Marc works freelance here at Sound of Drums (and for many other boardgame publishers). His journey begins in the late 90s with the german fan page dedicated to the infamous “Close Combat” series. It all started with modding the artwork of this series and illustrating custom maps. Soon a US based growing PC game publisher gave him a chance he could not push aside. He helped bringing Matrix Games to glory during the first decade of the new century. After Matrix Games merging into Slitherine Games, he waved illustrating and designing for digital games good bye and dived into the world of illustrating and designing for boardgame publishers. Marc stumbled over Uwe in 2020 and since then is working on the majority of Sound of Drums growing product palette.
Marcel Torz – Marcel has been a true board game maniac ever since. He has been playing and collecting everything boardgame related he can get his hands on for decades: dungeon crawlers, deck-building games, strategy and war games. Even Tabletop Games and RPGs. His love for board games goes so far that he has turned his hobby into a (part-time) job and supports Sound of Drums in marketing and public relations.