Some games seek to just absolutely wow your senses, while others, they just strive to be something casually enjoyed with someone else: no drama, no blood, no explosions.
Yargies Games sits squarely in that second camp.
Born out of the imagination of Kenji Wellman, whose goal with his mobile games was rather straightforward: Not to churn out blockbuster hits. Not to jump onto the latest mobile gaming fad. No, it was simply to understand the logic behind the games themselves.
How players weigh risk versus reward.
How chance and decision-making interact.
How players decide when to push their luck, and when to back down.
He inherited that curiosity from his time studying bioinformatics, where thinking in systems is (pardon the pun) the name of the game. So it made sense that he sought to pick up coding on the side too, even though it wasn’t necessarily useful for his career. But what it did do was help him to finally scratch that itch for exploring game mechanics.
And it also stands to reason that he picked dice games to focus on first. They're straightforward. What you see is what you get. Roll, then deal with whatever happens.
Kenji’s musings (and coding) eventually came to a head in September of 2023 when he launched a mobile version of the classic dice game Farkle, where players roll six dice to accumulate points. Kenji had carefully designed it to be experienced on any smartphone.
The first version was bare bones, just enough for any Farkle fan to enjoy. You could play. You could chat. You could invite a friend.
And Kenji figured that things should be simple to start. “Honestly, I didn't think it would make any money at all,” he admits.
But then it actually did make money, and what got him was more than the revenue itself, it was realizing that people were finding the game, inviting others to play, even sticking around.
