Eric Lounsbery has a knack for board game creation, and he uses that skill to help spread the gospel. His latest game is called Tetrad, and Lounsbery feels it’s a game that both believers and non-believers can enjoy, and learn from. (Photo provided by Eric Lounsbery)
By Gaye Bunderson
Have a conversation with Eric Lounsbery and you’ll be convinced of the veracity of statements like this: “I’m kind of a high-energy guy. I wouldn’t go to bed if I didn’t have to.”
Lounsbery uses his energy for good – for God, for believers, and for non-believers as well. And he does it through board games that he’s created himself and worked on in conjunction with artificial intelligence.
“I’m on a mission to take the gospel to the world,” he said. If that seems like a tall order, know that he’s working in tandem with the very highest intelligence: God. For Lounsbery, creating games is an act of service and love.
“When you love somebody, what is important to them is important to you,” he explained. “Get on board and go take the gospel to the world. His priorities should be ours too.”
To do that, he uses what he’s good at: creating games. “I’m a very limited man, but creating games is one of my gifts,” he said.
Many of his limitations have to do with his multiple sclerosis, a condition he was diagnosed with in his early 30s. He’s now 62. A former resident of Boise from 2004 to 2009, he worked in sales for a siding company. Later, he worked at Lowe’s and Home Depot. He’s proud of his sales records during those years and said he was consistently in the highest sales brackets in the companies.
But memory issues related to his MS sidelined him. Such issues still plague him. “I am drastically losing my memory, and losing memory of Bible verses. With MS, your brain [can be] so much like Alzheimer’s – you’re not able to learn new material. By the grace of God I can create in my brain but can’t learn and memorize. I can have ideas, and can think that way.”
He created his first board game in 1991, a Bible trivia game called Inklings because “it only takes an Inkling to win.” Of this game, Lounsbery said: “It reached 2 million in sales. But you have to know about the Bible to play it.”
However, he launched a new game (his fourth) this past June that, while it has significant appeal to believers, it also by design offers components that appeal to non-believers as well. It’s called Tetrad.
“It’s complexity wrapped in simplicity,” Lounsbery said of his latest invention.
He utilizes AI, so he does all he does, he said, “not because I know stuff but because AI knows stuff.”
He stated: “The No. 1 thing that I use AI for is to assemble things that create projects to take the gospel into the world and strengthen Christians in their faith.”
He also uses AI in his theology. He loves to engage with and debate willing non-believers. “I use AI as the means to present evidence in overcoming the strongest objections from non-believers. I’ve debated some of the most famous atheists.”
At a Freedom Summit in Arizona, where he now resides, he debated the late George H. Smith, author of “Atheism: The Case Against God,” whose views align with the late, famous atheist, Madalyn Murray O’Hare. Lounsbery also debated Daniel Edwin Barker, who is both a New Testament scholar and the founder of the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
“I also had debated him twice before that on the ‘The Infidel Guy Show’ years before. After my last debate, Dan told the attorney Marc Victor, who organized the Freedom Summit debate, that he would never debate me again. That was because I told the audience they couldn’t believe anything Dan said to them because he had personally gone on record saying that atheists are obligated to lie if necessary to turn a Christian from the faith because that is ‘the moral thing to do’.
“When he said I was lying about what I had claimed, I played the recording of Dan saying exactly what I had testified that he’d said, and I played it out loud for the entire audience to hear. Clearly caught in another lie, he was proven completely untrustworthy regarding any claims he would make about God.”
Lounsbery contended that, “Every leading AI model, all of them, are saying God is real; 100% of them say Christianity is true.” While many may remain skeptical, no one is bolder than Lounsbery when it comes to defending his faith; and while some critique AI as a tool with the potential for dangerous misuse, it nonetheless serves a valuable purpose in his hands, aiding him in bringing biblical board games to the masses. Tetrad especially holds appeal for people who might otherwise dismiss a Bible-based game.
One of his friends, Trace, is an atheist. Even though the two men have a good relationship, Lounsbery admits, “Trace loves money.”
After Trace played Tetrad and was asked what he thought of it, he gave it a 10.
Said Lounsbery, “You either love God or you love money. But if you play the Bible version of Tetrad and you love it, what does that tell you? Tetrad is a true Bible game, yet it is possibly the first Bible game non-Christians love to play.”
Lounsbery and his son Josiah used AI to create ultra realistic images of Bible scenes for the game cards, for instance the image of David as a shepherd boy as he slays a bear attacking the sheep and Job covered with boils as he sits in silence with his three friends.
With Tetrad, people buy the base board, and then going forward, all they have to purchase is a new deck of cards, with topics that can include everything from Bible images to the periodic table to U.S. presidents, and more.
Tetrad is for ages 9 and up. “But 7-year-olds are able to win,” Lounsbery said, continuing, “It’s a great way to teach the Bible.”
One of the biggest pluses about the game is, according to Lounsbery, “We try to remove the feeling of, ‘Oh, I’m not going to win’.”
Lounsbery is not alone in his efforts to spread the gospel message. Of his family, he said: “We now total a Jesus-loving group of 22. The Lord has been so merciful and gracious to our family there are no words to express the impact it has had upon all of us. We are a small army intent on taking the gospel to the world and are working diligently using any and every means possible to pursue souls.”
Lounsbery has had a lifelong love of board games. “I’m the game guy,” he said. “Since I was young, I was always the guy who comes up with the games.”
God is using “the game guy” to bring people to Him – or closer to Him. For Lounsbery, it is, at the same time, a way to overcome the challenges of MS, mentally, physically, and financially. “Between the fact that my MS has gotten so bad and I have been out of work for the past five years … and therefore in order to be able to secure some kind of income, I scraped together enough to get a small run of games done myself and am working with Amazon to sell them. But until I sell more games, I am living on an insane budget.”
Does it get him down? No.
“My joy is in the Lord, and His goodness to my family has me dancing day after day,” he said.
No wonder he created a game that removes the feeling of, ‘Oh, I’m not going to win’!
For more information, go to Tetrad-Games.com.
