Button Men: Beat People Up

In the summer of 1998, a new Seattle gaming restaurant asked James Ernest to design a suite of games with rules short enough to fit on business cards, coasters, placemats, and menus. Along with several other lightweight games, many of which can be found in the Chief Herman collections, Ernest created a strategy dice game codenamed Killer, using coasters as characters. Each character had a different assortment of polyhedral dice, which the restaurant conveniently sold in its adjoining game shop.

Sadly, the restaurant gave Killer a hard pass.

Unlikely ever to need such a game for his own gaming-themed restaurant, James converted the coasters into pin-back buttons, and changed the working title to Button Men. The game was a fast hit, winning two Origins Awards for Best Abstract Board Game and Best Graphic Presentation of a Board Game, and forcing the awards to rethink their categories.

Today Button Men has more than 200 characters, including a dozen official sets from Cheapass Games, and dozens more licensed and unofficial sets from our publishing partners. The latest edition from Cheapass Games, Beat People Up, was kickstarted in 2017. It features 48 new characters from Fight City, printed on trading cards instead of buttons, and packaged with a starter set of polyhedral dice.

This is the information page for Button Men, and we have only just started to fill it up. If there’s anything you’d like to see here, please let us know.

Links:

• Buy Button Men (Beat People Up) in our shop

• Buy the little brother of the same set (more cards, no dice) from DriveThruCards, in January 2027

• Download the freshest Rules for Button Men (From Beat People Up)

• Watch the 2017 How to Play Video

• Read the list of expansions (it’s short, but we’re working on it)

• Read the collected rules and strategy articles (coming soon)

• See the glorious Button Men Kickstarter Campaign (from 2017)

• Watch our Game Preview from the GAMA Trade Show (with BoardGameGeek)

For more information about Button Men, you can do exactly what we’re doing to flesh out this page: Search the Wayback Machine for beatpeopleup.com, anytime between 2000 and 2004.