A debut board game with a remarkable backstory has picked up one of the biggest retail honors of the holiday season. Sky Lion Games announced on October 19 that Making Monsters has been named the 2026 Barnes & Noble Family Game of the Year, and the bookseller confirmed the pick in its own post the same day.
Making Monsters is a family strategy game built around a Monster Maker Science Fair. Players compete to create the most impressive creatures, secretly choosing how many monster parts to order each round before diving into their ingredient collections to assemble their creations. Build too cautiously and rivals race ahead; get too ambitious and the experiment can collapse. Completed monsters earn prestige and unlock upgrades, a robotic assistant named L.E.S.T.E.R. adds another layer to the lab, and a final showdown gives everyone one last chance to prove their monster-making mastery. The game plays with 2 to 4 players in 45 to 60 minutes, is suited to ages 10 and up, and offers hundreds of monster-part combinations.
The design team brings serious credentials. Making Monsters was created by Jonathan Gilmour-Long, whose credits include Dead of Winter and Dinosaur Island, together with David Gordon, designer of Finspan and Monkey Palace. The game’s 72 monster cards are hand-illustrated by artist Brett Bean, and the monster pun names were dreamed up with help from founder Joe Welsh’s daughters and nieces.
That family angle is the heart of the story. Welsh, a former diplomat and robotics tech entrepreneur, was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer in late 2022. During his recovery, family game nights became a source of comfort and laughter, and he founded Sky Lion Games in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to bring Making Monsters to market as the studio’s debut title. “After all this hard work, seeing Barnes & Noble name it Family Game of the Year feels especially meaningful,” Welsh said in the announcement.
The award caps a strong crowdfunding run. In 2025, Making Monsters raised over $94,000 on Kickstarter, more than ten times its $9,000 goal. It is now on sale at Barnes & Noble for $59, heading into the holiday season with the retailer’s Family Game of the Year title behind it. Family game shelves have been competitive this year, with titles like Plants vs. Zombies: The Board Game also chasing the same table, but a Barnes & Noble game of the year nod is the kind of placement that puts a small publisher’s first game in front of a lot of holiday shoppers.
Source: Barnes & Noble and Sky Lion Games announcement via GlobeNewswire
Image: Barnes & Noble / Sky Lion Games
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