About Us

The 3-Fold Mission of Tasty Minstrel Games

To Build Up And Support Families

Some of the beliefs of founder Michael Mindes:

• The family unit is the fundamental building block of society and civilization.
• Values that promote families as good and essential are consistently under attack in our modern world.
• Degradation of society stems from the degradation of the family.

Tasty Minstrel Games was started to support families through wholesome and fun physical game play.  We at Tasty Minstrel also believe that the rise of video games is keeping people from interacting with their family or even their life.

Michael has a personal knowledge that video games can keep people from interacting with their family or even life.  He wasted over 2 years of his life by playing video games for 10-14 hours per day, every day.  There were occasional breaks to play physical games with friends or work part time delivering pizzas.

Hopefully, this does not sound like your loved ones, but if it does, then they want to play board games with you…

To Provide Intellectual Stimulation Through Games

Some additional beliefs of founder Michael Mindes:

• Institutionalized education is failing in numerous respects.
• Innovation requires creativity, action, and various skills.
• Games help people build and gain skills in a fun and exciting way.

Lots of people are smart. Most of the people that are friends of Tasty Minstrel Games are smart. Many of them will credit playing games as helping to develop their intelligence.

Why Start Tasty Minstrel Games?

Michael and Erin have four wonderful children, seeing how much they love games reminds us how much we love games. We also realize that many parents do not share our love for games. We feel it is a question of playing the right games.

Roll and move games which entail 3 decisions in half an hour cannot be entertaining for adults.  It is fun to play with your children, but the activity should be fun also.  As children get older, they have the capability to make the more difficult choices associated with advanced board and card games.  We strive to make the games that you will both want to play.

If families come together to play games before children irrevocably grow up, then bonds and lines of communication will be forged that a family will cherish forever. There are enough forces in the world aiming to destroy families; we hope to be one force keeping families together. 

Michael Mindes, Founder

Early in 2005, as Michael prepared to graduate from college, he also prepared to publish board games. As graduation neared, he and his wife Erin found that their pregnancy efforts were successful. They were going to have a baby. Feeling the call of responsibility and adulthood, Michael temporarily shelved the publishing effort, and went to work as a financial adviser at A.G. Edwards.

He never forgot his dream of publishing games. With the goal of bringing families together in an era of video games, cell phones, and instant messaging; Tasty Minstrel Games was founded in early 2009.

Seth Jaffee, Head of Development

Seth Jaffee is head of development for Tasty Minstrel Games. he has been playing games ever since he can remember- from Rummy-Q and Monopoly with his family, to Magic: the Gathering, to a host of Euro-strategy games.  In 2004 he stumbled upon the Board Game Designers Forum, and has been fascinated with game design ever since.

Seth has a number of designs on the back burner at any moment, but one of his strengths has proven to be game development. Seth really likes identifying an idea that has potential and then revising it to be as good as he feels it can be. Part of that strength comes from simply playing lots and lots and lots of games, which over time has really given Seth a feel for what works and what doesn’t. Seth has been working on game designs, both his own and those of friends, for 5 years and lately has been concentrating on getting something published…

Enter Tasty Minstrel. When longtime friend Michael told Seth he’d decided to start a publishing company to publish Terra Prime and Homesteaders, well you can imagine Seth's excitement! Due to the economy Seth's engineering job went on hiatus, so this endeavor couldn’t have come at a better time for him; he decided to do what he could to help ensure Tasty Minstrel’s success. If someone had asked Seth last year what his dream job would be he probably would have said “working for a game company finding games worth publishing and developing them to be ready for publication.” Well here at Tasty Minstrel that’s exactly what his job is going to be!