By Joseph Nichols, Staff Writer

Since graduating in the class of 2020, Xavier alumnus Cameron Ring has taken an unconventional approach to post-college life by founding a board game company.

“My company is called Lost Boy Entertainment and we make games. We design games that are for people who grew up playing board games and want it to be something to do with friends and family,” Ring said.

Ring graduated from Xavier with a business analytics degree. 

“I was in the very first class that was four years of (the business analytics major),” Ring said.

Although current students are unable to graduate with a business analytics major, Ring credits the former department head and current professor Lauren Laker with keeping him invested at Xavier. 

“She made numbers exciting. While business analytics isn’t inherently creative, every business has data and numbers. Being able to take a bunch of boring numbers and tell a story is an impressive skill that she was hammering into us,” Ring said.

Additionally, Ring ascribes his current financial steadiness and ability to survive the post-Xavier life to the classes he took. 

“Board games aside, I am self-employed in a sense, so it’s not the cushy nine-to-five. I need to know how to do things on my own, and a lot of the courses I took and the major were crucial for that,” Ring said.

After graduating, Ring formed Lost Boy Entertainment with a pair of family members that he grew up playing board games with: “There’s three of us currently, it’s me and my two cousins, KC and Corey,” he said. 

The triumvirate tackles the board game industry head-on, from coming up with ideas for new games to communicating with distributors across the country. With over 2,000 sales this past month on Amazon for their flagship game and a stellar five star rating on each of their products, Lost Boy Entertainment is getting its name out in the market.

However, Ring also stated the initial period of transition is the most difficult. 

“The biggest jump is when I decided to do it full-time…it became very quickly clear that if you don’t work at this and you’re not self-motivated, you cannot run a business,” he said.

The company’s flagship game, Plunder: A Pirate’s Life, is a “competitive, strategy-based getaway game played on a modular ocean map” that allows players to privateer one another across the world. Plunder is the company’s most successful product and was their entrance into the market. Although there is much more in store for Lost Boy Entertainment, Plunder is what Ring envisioned from the company. 

“Plunder is by far and away our most ambitious product…making a slightly more expensive and heavier board game is not only risky on the financial side, it’s more risky for the consumer to purchase as well,” Ring said.

Before the release of Plunder, Ring and his partners considered cutting sections of the game to make it a less risky product. 

“We’ve been trying our best to shave weight here and there, but we refuse to sacrifice quality. So we understand we could make a little bit more money per unit, but we don’t care. We would rather make less money and put out a quality product,” Ring stated.

After the success of Plunder, Lost Boy Entertainment diversified their products to reach a much larger target audience. The company has three other products that vary from drinking games for parties to speed and memory games for friends and family. 

As for what’s next for Ring and the company, they have a series of games to release in the coming months as they get ready for the Christmas season.

“We’re not done, you know. Sure, we don’t have enough money to live like kings, but we started something that allows us to pay our bills and not have to work for some corporate conglomerate,” Ring said. 

Ring’s catalogue of games can be found on his website: lostboyentertain.com.