Well, that was an extraordinary year. Probably the most efficient way to lay out this year-in-review blog post is by illustrating where we started, listing all the intervening events, and then giving a snapshot of where we ended up. Let’s go!

January

We started the year with 15 employees, machines operating in seven countries, and a production capacity of (on average) around 10 units per month. Importantly, we had just one Dan.

February

We sent a delegation to GAMA in Louisville, Kentucky – our second time exhibiting at this event. For our monthly company fun day, we played Formula D, a tabletop game that simulates formula racing.

March

We brought on three new staff members, and the team got together to draft the ridiculous Unfinity set of Magic: The Gathering.

April

We added one more to our team, and we had a trivia game day, hosted by Nathan.

May

We hired another employee (bringing our total Dans up to two), and enjoyed not one, but two compulsory company enjoyment days! We played the tremendously fun Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes and held a double-feature movie viewing in the Shedpoint basement. Additionally, TCG Machines was featured on Global News and I ran the Calgary Half Marathon, much of which I detailed in a previous blogpost.

June

Another new hire, Dan and I won a pitch competition (also detailed in the above-linked blog post), we had our patent issued in Japan, we were awarded a Provincial grant, and the whole company went and hurled various weapons against a wall at AXE Throwing Calgary.

July

We had our multi-year federal grant application approved, and had our patent issued in the USA.

August

We had another smaller – but still significant – federal grant application approved. And we didn’t have a mandatory company good times event, so I’m kind of at a loss as to what to put for a photo here. I have this whole pattern going. Feels bad not to have a photo. OK, here’s one of Ram watching Dan C. and Joe load a PhyzBatch-9000 into a shipping crate. Carrying on!

September

We had a delightful company BBQ at Bowness Park, and our fleet of machines surpassed a collective total of 500 million trading cards sorted, which is 1,000 tons of cardboard – that’s equivalent to roughly 10 blue whales!

October

The crew all rolled down to PinBar to play pinball and enjoy a beer or two. Then Dan, myself, and our families, flew to Europe for three weeks of family / business travel and adventure! Highlights included: Dan and I enjoying a romantic day trip to Paris, France, for a business meeting, which I’m sure our wives were slightly nonplussed to be left out of; Elke (Dan’s wife) and I running the Amsterdam Marathon; and our first time exhibiting at an overseas industry convention: SPIEL Essen in Germany.

There was one particularly ridiculous week, in which I ran a marathon in Amsterdam on October 19th (official time 3:17:08, unofficial time, as per my Garmin watch, 3:15:55. Very, very happy with that result), we travelled to Essen, Germany to attend SPIEL from October 22nd through the 25th, and our team back home in Calgary attended the Small Business Awards Gala on October 24th and were honoured to receive the Innovation Award! It was especially thematic, as KPop Demon Hunters was having a moment and had come up in discussion a number of times. On October 24th, Nathan, who had not seen the movie, insisted that we watch it so he could understand what the heck everyone was talking about. The following morning, we received news from back home that we had won the Innovation Award, and the song that was played as our team took the stage was “Golden” from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack. That same day, the final day of SPIEL, someone cosplaying as Rumi (the movie’s main character) came by our booth.

I could easily, and should, dedicate an entire blog post to SPIEL Essen, as it was a fantastic experience for our delegation. But, there are only so many hours in a day, so hopefully one of us will do a proper write-up after our next attendance later this year.

November

Five new staff members were hired on, including our third Dan, our patent application was accepted by the European Patent Office (EPO), and we took the company out to the LaunchPad driving range. LaunchPad was super fun, and also rather breathtakingly beautiful, as we had just had a dump of snow. Something about hitting golf balls into scenic, snowy hills while wearing a T-shirt – despite it being a -20°C day in late November – was pretty magical.

December

We brought on one more person to our team, we were featured on CBC News, and we had a kick-ass year-end holiday party at Best of Kin Social. Ah, and at the Christmas party, everyone was gifted a pair of orange Crocs, so we are all now readily identifiable as TCG Machiners as we mosey about Shedpoint in our neon-coloured footwear. Probably people think we are part of a cult. But man, we really do have a fantastic team, and we have a lot to celebrate! Here’s the year-end numbers as of December:

We ended the year with 25 employees (nearly doubled), machines operating in 14 countries (exactly doubled), a production capacity of 30 units per month (tripled), and a record-breaking three Dans (tripled)!

Now, here we are in the new year: 2026! Already, we’ve hired an additional two employees (up to 27 full-time staff), we’ve sorted through more than 620 million cards, and we have our year-end financials in hand. I’m a bit of an optimist, so when we started off 2025 forecasting our financials for the year, I – of course – predicted another year of doubling our revenue, while Dan and Kirill suggested more conservative targets. Well, we did it again, more than doubling our revenues and exceeding even my most optimistic projections. This marks the sixth consecutive year of us doing this. That is insane. What’s more insane, is that I have every expectation that we will do it again this year.

So, what is in store for us this year? Well, a lot. We are negotiating on a new building, which will house the future operations of TCG Machines and our rapidly expanding team. We will be attending a number of events, both at home and abroad, including: Face To Face Games’ F2F Tour in Toronto, Ontario in February; the GAMA Expo in Louisville, Kentucky in March; and SPIEL Essen in Essen, Germany in October. Additionally, we’re spooling up a multi seven-figure project which we have applied for matching government funding on, and we have a number of exciting potential partnerships which we hope to be able to announce in the coming months.
The future for TCG Machines is very bright indeed. Take that, various Redditors who didn’t believe in me during our commercial launch five years ago!

As always, I am eternally grateful to, and thankful for, our wonderful team that is making all of this possible, and our most-excellent customers who believe in us, our product, and what we are all about.

PS

Last year, in April, I had the pleasure of returning to my alma mater, the University of Victoria, to be interviewed by Emma Ulvenland, the host of UVic’s Co-op and Career Services’ Work It Podcast. It was a great conversation covering topics such as entrepreneurship, changing career paths, and the transferrable skills one gains through their education. I really enjoyed the experience, and the episode itself now serves as a wonderful time capsule for where TCG Machines was at at that point in time. Here we are less than a year later, and we have already grown so much. What a ride.