Hi, I’m Nika. Physicist. SnowBoardGames co-founder. Kickstarter creator. An advocate for efficiency. Climber. And since recently, a mom.
The SnowBoardGames story started in 2021, in the midst of covid lockdown, with a physicist, who had a fulfilling job in aviation, but who came to understand that if I want to be successful in life, ‘just’ physics won’t be enough, because it will never give me the independence I realised I wanted from life.
I needed another set of skills, which would help me navigate the changing world, and give me the ability to create something.
So together with Blaž, my awesome life partner, a fellow board-gamer, climbing partner, and a civil engineer, we founded SnowBoardGames and decided to launch a husky-themed board game on Kickstarter, to learn about crowdfunding.
The campaign took off way better than we dared to hope – 3451 backers helped us raise almost €120,000. We knew right away that we wanted to publish more games, but we were conflicted, because we did not want to leave our professional fields, physics and engineering, which we are passionate about too. And we wanted to still have free time, to climb, be in the mountains, snowboard, and play board games with friends and family.
We decided to do all 3. And if things weren’t complicated enough, I enrolled on a PhD in 2022, because I wanted to deepen my knowledge of numerical simulations.
So for the past few years, we have been working in physics & engineering from Monday to Thursday, and running SnowBoardGames – theoretically on Fridays, but usually on week afternoons and rainy weekends – and enjoying 3-day weekends filled with travelling and being outdoors.
It has been a crazy journey. We’ve met amazing people. We’ve learned so much about business and crowdfunding, and about game design. We’ve had periods with a lot of free time and ones where we were pulling all-nighters. We’ve had the ups. We’ve had the crashes. But most of all, it’s been an exciting journey of personal growth.
I enjoy writing, so I’ve been documenting parts of our journey. If you are interested, I warmly invite you to join us. This blog is my personal outlet, where you will find posts about personal growth (this is a major one), intertwined with reflections about business (written from the perspective of someone from a tech career, who is learning about business and balancing it on the side), and crowdfunding (from someone who’s launched and fulfilled successful campaigns). And, of course, sprinkled with board games.
The first cycle of posts is from 2021/2022, when we were launching our first Kickstarter campaign. Then, there was a long gap, because I started my PhD journey, was probably on a road to burnout, took a break from SnowBoardGames, turned 30, got married, had a crisis, and, it seems, finally found balance between physics, SnowBoardGames and free time in 2025, when the new posts start.
Some highlights:
‘You got the Facebook page set up? Congratulations,’ he said. ‘But beware — it’s addictive.’ And he was right! It is a special feeling when you click that ‘post’ button and the page starts beeping with notifications of people liking what you shared. Especially the first few times, when you are still a bit unsure of what you are actually doing with posts, and when you’re still finding both your voice and getting acquainted with the technical stuff. It’s like […]
As someone who used to be against sharing information on the internet, tackling social media was something I dreaded most. But it was something we had to do. Here’s the process from the standpoint of a really reluctant newbie. (Or if I can do it, so can you!) I used to avoid social media. For the longest time, I only had Facebook, and I only used it to stay in touch with people. I never commented, rarely liked, and god
Navigating social media Read More »
Today, we received a 7 kg package with a prototype series of 20 games! It’s been much-anticipated and we were counting down the days since the manufacturer notified us they’re shipping it. My first thought when I saw it was that it is small. I never did any calculations about what size it should be, but I was expecting something bigger. I really hoped they’d sent everything, not just the cards! I had half a thought that I should maybe
Prototypes are here! Read More »
Or how we chose the name for our board game publishing studio. This was one of the first tasks we had to tackle once we decided we will launch our board game on Kickstarter. The game’s name — Hike! — came organically along with the theme and game mechanics, but we were pretty sure we didn’t want to use it to describe who we are. We knew that Hike! would be our first game, but it could potentially be one
A game by any other name would play as sweet Read More »
In my experience, situations where you have to choose between two options are rarely true EITHER — OR scenarios. One can usually get away with choosing both if one is prepared to invest a bit more. But sometimes, choosing both makes you stuck in the middle, not really progressing in either of the options, and the best thing to do is realise it and let one of them go. This is what happened to me a while ago, when I
About EITHER — OR questions and AND decisions Read More »
Or how I pushed the limits of what seemed possible and discovered they are further away than I thought. Sports climbing has been a part of my life for more than a decade. It is a hobby that feels a bit more than just that, and an activity that allows me to focus on nothing but a piece of rock and my movement, and to challenge myself. For a better part of those 10 years, I was okay at it.
I’ve had my share of situations where I stepped out of my comfort zone and into the area where I have little-to-non prior knowledge. From alpinism to this little endeavour. And although the areas vary substantially, the anatomy of a process is similar for all of them. Shift in perception It all starts with our subjective perception. It determines how we interpret the world, it’s our own personal subjective truth, and it’s, in my opinion, a key enabler for motivation
The process of taking the first step Read More »
It’s been a while since my last post — more than two and a half months. At first, I thought I’d only skip one post, but then I skipped another one, and another one, and here we are. So what happened? The 3 dilemmas I didn’t experience a series of bad days as my last post might have hinted — I’ve actually had a very productive period with some very interesting stuff going on. So that was not the reason
You know those days when you are working hard and doing everything right, but the results are not reflecting it, and you are just getting one fail after another? Sometimes you may think that you’re doing everything right, but you’re actually making mistakes, other times, you are doing the best with the knowledge you have, and sometimes, things are just out of your control and happen in spite of what you do. I’ve had a bad day or two in
Taking an idea and turning it into a prototype. And then a prototype number 2. And a prototype number 3. Now this is a topic where I feel right at home! I’ve been involved in creating quite a few prototypes — from the experimental work for my Master’s thesis, to working in the development department. And the idea part has never been a problem, they seem to come very naturally to me. This was also the case with the idea
Ideating, prototyping and testing Read More »
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