Hoyt Games

David L. Hoyt lives in Washington State. Colin Morgan lives in Karlsruhe, Germany.

You’d think that the distance would pose a challenge for these two co-founders, but for David and Colin, it’s just another Tuesday.

They talk all the time. If you were to eavesdrop, you’d hear David joking on the line from Washington. Then Colin deadpans from Germany.

It’s the soundtrack to an age-old friendship, equal parts business meeting and friendship routine. David brings his big personality to the table; Colin brings his understated wit; and in the space between, a business has managed to flourish.

“I love working with Colin,” David would exclaim over and over. “Seriously.”

To learn how this odd couple partnership of theirs came about, you’d have to go back to Chicago, long before there were apps, before there was any kind of company letterhead, in fact, before there was even a Colin.

In the beginning, it was just David, working as an options trader on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, when one day a colleague brought in a board game, and then mentioned the company behind it.

“I was like, you mean you can make money inventing games? Are you kidding me?”

It was the spark David needed. He quit his day job, moved into a studio apartment, and gave himself four years to make it as a game inventor.

And he hasn’t looked back since.

David was able to stake out an entirely new career for himself in games: he sold ideas to major toy companies and started to build a reputation as something of a puzzle savant.

Enter Colin.

An architect by trade, Colin was a fellow game-lover. He and David met at a company gathering where David’s wife worked, then became close friends over racquetball, pub visits and, obviously, board games.

Colin admittedly loved German-style games himself, fitting since he was going to be moving to Germany to be closer to his wife’s family.

At first, the move seemed like it might mark the end of their friendship, but it turned out to be just the beginning.

“David said to me, ‘Hey Colin, you can be an architect, or you can work with me making games, and we’ll make a fortune,’” Colin remembers. “And I said, ‘I hate job hunting, so that sounds pretty good.’”

And so began their long-distance working relationship: making puzzle books and page-a-day calendars one day, pitching physical games the next.

But, over time, both grew weary of waiting for other people to approve and produce their ideas. They wanted more control over the full experience- “soup to nuts” as they said.

“That was when I started learning computer programming,” Colin says, because they had decided that the solution to the gatekeeper problem was to develop mobile games themselves. That was how they’d own the whole process.

Then David gave Colin’s self-taught programming crash course a friendly little shove: in a meeting with a potential partner, he announced that Colin could build them all a prototype— in two months, no less.

And Colin, to his credit, answered the call: he got to work, learned from YouTube videos, and eventually became the only person David trusts to turn his puzzle visions into actual living, breathing apps.

And that’s how, in 2018, Hoyt Games officially arrived onto the scene, with Word Search World Traveler as its flagship game, then following it up with such titles as Word Search World Hollywood and See and Solve Trivia Game Show.

And while their games are built all around word searches and trivia, David likes to refer to them as “sneaky educational.”

That’s because David gets that people don’t really go looking for games to play because they want to learn something; they just want to play.

So Hoyt Games designs puzzles that most importantly feel fun; they get players to solve a puzzle, get them to smile and to come back for more.

Then, before they know what’s happening, they’ve learned a little something or two about geography, language, history, current events, whatever else David has tucked into the puzzle that day.