(machine whirring) - LL Wooden Creations is a company that creates wooden artifacts.

We focus mostly on games and we sell at craft shows and art shows around Michigan.

- [Narrator] Larry has always had a passion for woodworking.

After spending a career teaching fifth grade, he and his wife were ready for a simpler life.

- I can enjoy my retirement and I have a full-time job.

When I get up in the morning, I walk 30 feet from my back door to the wood shop here.

And we are able to work all day and do something we like.

I tell my wife all the time, one of the benefits of what we've chosen to do is, if for some reason I want to eat lunch at 9:30, I can eat lunch at 9:30.

There's no reason to tell me no, lunch isn't until 12 o'clock.

So I have the freedom to live my life in a more casual way and we're doing something that we really like doing.

- [Narrator] These days, they've become a familiar sight at art and craft shows across the state, but they didn't always specialize in handmade wooden games.

- When we first started, I made mostly cutting board, charcuterie boards, which honestly is where most woodworkers start.

I like the process, but if you're making a quality cutting board or a quality charcuterie board, assuming the customer takes care of it, it's not really a lot of repeat customers because they last forever.

One day, I said to my wife, I was like, you know what, I think we just make games now.

And it's grown from there.

We have currently 26 different games in our inventory.

So I take existing games, classic games mostly, or I like to try to find games that are from around the world.

We have a Viking game, we have a game from Africa.

So I like trying to add a little more unusual games as well.

But mainly we'll take existing classic games and give them a little design twist, a little tweak so it looks a little different, so it looks unique for us.

- [Narrator] From cribbage to Chinese checkers, the games Larry creates practically invite you to sit down and play.

And one board in particular looked very familiar.

- There's a game called Dice Baseball.

Now again, I didn't invent the game, but I did come up with my own kind of design for it.

The gist of the game is you roll the dice and the combination of two dice tell you what your at bat has been, maybe an out or a hit or a walk or whatever it might be.

So you're going to keep track of runs, you're going to keep track of outs, you're going to keep track of the score.

You've got little cribbage pegs for game pieces.

They run around bases and all the fun of baseball with none of the sweating.

You know, a lot of people spend a lot of time playing games on their phones nowadays, but I found that people wanted to have a little more connection with the humans around them.

And there started to be a lot of game night revivals among friends and families.

These are they're nice, quality, solid games.

They give you a way to spend time with people around you at the table.

A lot of times, as a matter of fact, people will come up to the booth and maybe they have a young kid.

Kid's grabbing the dice, grabbing the marbles and the adults like, "Oh, no, don't touch that."

That's absolutely the opposite of what we want you to do.

When you see us at a show, we want you to come up.

We want you to play with the game.

We want you to touch the pieces.

Marbles are meant to be touched.

A lot of the games people will tell us, you know, we bought this, we keep it on the coffee table.

It never gets put up.

It's always laying there.

It is a display piece, but they do play it as well.

- [Narrator] For Larry and his wife, the work doesn't stop when they leave the wood shop.

They're constantly refining their designs, finding new ways to make their games even more user friendly.

They've added QR codes to each board, making it easy to pull up the rules without needing paper instructions.

And recently, they've even rethought how the boards are stored, completely redesigning them with convenience in mind.

- The big development this past year has been we are making the games all self-containing.

In the past, we had a flat game board.

We'd have the pieces.

We'd put it all in a little box and present it that way.

Well, now we've got the game itself that will fold up in half with cutouts.

So the pieces store inside, a little magnetic clasp to keep it together.

And that's been the big upgrade this last year, which has gone over really well.