About us
At the start there’s a round of drinks.In 2015, in Corso Como.
Two of us were talking about a play-by-chat game set in Celtic Britain, and by the end of that round of drinks there were the foundations of a prototype. Dawn Town Games is the brand of Dice Tower Games S.r.l.s., a company founded in February 2017. We publish few titles, and we publish them when they’re ready.
In between there are six steps.The three of us do them.
01 The idea
The three of us got together around a table. We set up the company in February 2017, in Milan, and the first game reached the shops in 2021.
Six years passed between the idea and the first box.
02 The prototype
A game starts from a piece of cut-out card and pawns borrowed from another box. Verrix was designed by Tommaso Ceglia and Riccardo Corti; Yatai also bears Alfonso Bonfanti’s name. Not Sub‑Zero: the idea isn’t ours, and we say so because that’s how it is.
Verrix was born from a play-by-chat game among friends.
03 The playtests
Then we play, for a couple of years per title. It’s not a boast: it’s the average in our line of work. We play, change a rule, play again. And when the rulebook isn’t clear at the table, the rulebook gets rewritten. Several times.
About two years of playtesting for each of the three titles.
04 The artwork
The three games don’t look alike, and that’s not an oversight. Verrix is historical, Yatai is manga, Sub‑Zero is cartoon: they don’t share a single typeface. But the art direction is always Alfonso Bonfanti’s.
The consistency lies in the publisher, not in a shared visual style.
Three separate identities, one soul.
05 The box
We keep our boxes small. It’s not just about cost: we’re players before we’re publishers, and we know how much room there is on a bookshelf at home. The space one game takes is space taken from the next, and inside goes only what you need to play.
Between the shop and the person at the table, for now the person at the table wins.
06 The conflict
All three have a way to interact directly with your opponents: raids in Verrix, awkward customers sent to other players’ queues in Yatai, the Polar Bear on the hunt and captures in Sub‑Zero.
We don’t sand down the edges to make the games look friendlier. It’s what makes a match a real match, and not just a pastime.
Whoever gets up from the table should have a story to tell.
The mean streak is our trademark.
The three partners
Tommaso Ceglia
Administration, sales, communications
He’s the public voice of Dawn Town Games — interviews, shops, distributors — and also the partner who handles invoices and paperwork. Those drinks in 2015 were his idea, but the seed is much older: at sixteen he organised a treasure hunt for almost four hundred people.
He repeats one word so often he admits it’s become boring: quality. He uses it as a yardstick, not a slogan — it’s how he turns down market demands that don’t live up to it.
“What you don’t always see, but feel when it’s missing.”
Riccardo Corti
Design and testing, accounts, warehouse
With Tommaso he turned that play-by-chat game into a prototype, and in 2017 into a publishing house. He keeps the accounts and the warehouse, sets limits and fixes bugs: he always starts from reality rather than wishful thinking.
On principle, he never compliments his own games, because the verdict belongs to whoever sits down at the table. Before being a designer and a publisher, he considers himself a player.
“Every single satisfied player is a joy to us.”
Alfonso Bonfanti
Technical side, production, logistics
He looks after the part you see least: prototypes, quotes from factories, printing, shipping. He joined the company by invitation and didn’t realise straight away that the job suited him. He is also the art director of all three titles.
He’s the least keen of the three on self-promotion: when he says a game has been tested to exhaustion, he’s simply stating a fact.
“Play knowing the game is well tested and well themed.”
And in the end there’s a table.It’s the only thing that matters.
The playtests, the boxes, the two years per title serve one purpose only: that whoever sits down at the table has fun! If people get up laughing, we’ve hit the target and the job is done.
See our games