‘Gnome Hollow’: How one Utahn overcame a painful accident by creating a successful board game

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — A new board game may soon be making its way to your table, ready to take you on a whimsical fantasy adventure.

It’s called “Gnome Hollow”, created by Cedar Hills resident Ammon Anderson, and has been making waves in the board game industry. It was nominated as Barnes & Noble’s Game of the Month this August and sold out not once, but twice at Gen Con earlier this month.

“Gnome Hollow”, released Aug. 1, is a tile-placement game where players work to grow a garden of mushrooms and flowers, competing amongst each other, and earning awards along the way. The game in itself is gorgeous, with beautiful watercolors across its board.

Just like it can offer an enchanting escape for players, the game was an escape for Anderson during a difficult time in his life. In 2019, on Christmas Eve, Anderson was driving home from an art gallery he had at the Provo mall when another driver was texting and rear-ended his car, pushing him through an intersection.

What followed would be an extremely long period of recovery, a serious concussion continuing into post-concussion syndrome, causing Anderson to live with frequent migraines.

Anderson told ABC4 that for the first eight months, he often would lie in bed with the lights turned off, all noise turned off, to be able to help with the pain.

“You hit depression, you hit anxiety — the frustration of not being able to do things like not working, seeing bills piling up, all those things, they sort of compound. Finally, one day I just said to my wife, ‘Would you please bring me my watercolors? I just need to do something.’ So I started painting a cheerful place, this little happy meadow,” Anderson said.

Painting became a way to make the pain he was going through tolerable. Having built a game called “T.A.C.O.” a year prior, Anderson said he could recognize there may be a game within these paintings. He continued to focus on the game for a few hours at a time, working within what he could handle while continuing to recover.

Anderson said the game is warm and bright and carries parts of him, which can be seen through its humor.

“There’s a feeling of capturing almost like this safe space that I needed at a time when I was in my own mind in a very dark place,” he said.

Once Anderson was well enough to return to work, he returned to his job as a handyman and “Gnome Hollow” was shelved for about nine months, until he felt the urge that he needed to get it back out and finish the game.

Anderson submitted the unpublished game to Ion Award and the Cardboard Edison Award, becoming a finalist in both. It didn’t place for either, but brought quite a bit of publicity. As the game became more well-known and started to take off, Anderson received offers from multiple major publishers, deciding The Op was the best fit.

“It was actually really difficult to sell the game to a publisher, to license it to them. I was going to take it to Kickstarter and I was going to keep my game,” explained Anderson. “Luckily, the publisher that I ended up with really wanted to retain what I had built in the way that I had formed it and built it, so it’s one of the reasons I gave it to them.”

The reception for the game has been incredible, Anderson said, with many reaching out and congratulating him. He said that sometimes it feels like this experience hasn’t totally hit yet, and maybe one day he’ll wake up and it will be a dream.

“I get messages from strangers like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love your game.’ … Someone sent me messages last night, they said, ‘We play this with my son and my husband, and my son was so inspired that he got out of his sculpey and he sculpted a gnome from the cover and she sent me pictures. I was like, ‘Wow, your son’s really talented. Give him as much clay as you can give him.’… So it’s just been like all these unique one-off experiences. They’re so fun to have and to see people so excited,” Anderson said.

He said he enjoys being able to go to events to share the game and play it with others, seeing how they react to the game in real time.

“This is such a remarkable moment in my life — to be sitting at this table with these people, and this whole experience happened because one day I sat at the table and I started painting a meadow. There’s not really words.”

If you find yourself wanting to give “Gnome Hollow” a try, you’re in luck. There’s an event at the Game Haven in Sandy this weekend where you can do just that. It kicks off at 5 p.m. and will also have treats, swag, and other goodies you can pick up.

Anderson said he enjoys playing board games with his own family, and being able to enjoy that interactive and smile-filled time together. He hopes to bring some of that joy to this weekend’s event and is looking forward to continuing to share “Gnome Hollow” with others.

“Board games represent really some of the best interactions we can have today,” he said. We live in a world where most people sit around the dinner table with their family on their phones and they’re not even paying attention to the people that they love the most. When you’re sitting around a table and you’re playing a game together, what you’re really doing is you’re having a shared experience.”

Anderson said people are really able to connect on a different level through board games. Through his experience, Anderson said strangers can sit down to play a game at a convention, and by the end of the game, they are all friends.

To learn more about “Gnome Hollow” and follow Anderson in his projects, follow Levity Games on Instagram.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC4 Utah.