Races are run in stages and on various courses, and everyone’s ends at a different time.
For Kim and Ryan McDaniel, they snagged one of the dreams they chased when they started Across The Board, a company that manufactures board games.
In their first nine years of marriage, as she worked in marketing and he toiled in construction, the south St. Louis County couple would sit on their patio and talk about being their own bosses.
They were not, however, exactly sure what they would be the boss of, until 2008.
That’s when Ryan’s mother introduced them to a board game with a horse-racing theme at a family game night.
Ryan, a well-known perfectionist and woodworking hobbyist, immediately disliked the game.
“He didn’t like that it didn’t take into account the odds of rolling certain dice; he didn’t like the way it was built; and there were other things he didn’t like,” she said with a smile.
So some days later, he went into the garage, found some good wood and created his own game. Then he made a few copies for family and friends.
“I saw how much everyone enjoyed it, so I had him make some more and we took about 50 games to a craft fair in Kimmswick.
“Ryan thought it was the dumbest idea ever,” she said, “until we sold all 50.”
And they were off to the races: website created (acrosstheboardgame.com), woodworking equipment bought, catalogs contacted, sales completed, day jobs surrendered and, by 2012, space rented in a Crestwood industrial park.
They added a baseball game and a hockey game to their sports-games lineup. Then in mid-2013, their games became available through the Uncommon Goods catalog.
“Our next step was getting licensing agreements so we could put sports logos on the games,” said Kim, who studied business at Southwest Missouri State and earned an MBA from Fontbonne.
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But so often, the course twists without warning.
“Ryan felt a lump in his lower abdomen. He thought it was a hernia from lifting a heavy board in the workshop,” Kim said. “It was Stage 4 colon cancer.”
“There were no other symptoms, there’s no history of it in his family,” she said and shrugged. “The doctor said it was just bad luck.”
Leave it to family to fall in beside you at times like these, showing up at the warehouse to fill the large number of orders for the 2013 holidays.
And Ryan kept running. He weathered an emergency surgery and 31 chemotherapy treatments, and came to work almost every day.
But on May 28, 2015, Ryan’s race ended at age 44, leaving behind a wife, a business and three young children: Ayden, Mallory and Jake.
So Kim runs harder. “It was never a ‘quit’ type of thing,” she said. “There’s three kids to take care of and a business to run. You can’t stop.”
Kim and her brother-in-law, Bill Wilson, now run the company, which employs five other people.
“My Aunt Jeannie (Dobrynski) is still here. She still hand paints all the holes on the Chinese checkerboards we make,” Kim said.
But one more goal needed to be run down, one that had been lost in the whirlpool of Ryan’s cancer: sports licensing.
So in January, Kim traveled to Las Vegas and met with the people who license Kentucky Derby items. She got permission to sell the horse-race game, which had been redesigned by Ryan to be on an oval board.
“So this is his legacy, this game,” she said, pointing to a small “RMM” symbol that graces the lower left corner of each game box.
As for this Kentucky Derby on May 7, which is Mother’s Day weekend, Kim will give herself the gift of taking it all to the tape.
“I’m going to be there,” Kim said. “They’ll be selling the games in the gift shop, and I want to see them there.”
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