It began with a birthday party and a very small tower game

One of the directors had twins, a party looming, and a garden about to fill with adults and children who all needed entertaining at once. He looked at the little wooden tower game the children liked and had the thought that occurs to almost nobody: this would be better if it were enormous. He built one. It was finished just in time for the party, which was of some relief to his wife.

That tower became Hi-Tower, and Hi-Tower became Garden Games, a manufacturer in the Oxfordshire countryside. Big Game Hunters is its retail side, opened in 2006, and twenty years on the two of them design and make garden games of the sort that end a summer afternoon rather than filling five minutes of it. Giant chess, croquet, boules, rounders, towers built up until it takes two people to reset them. Properly heavy wooden things, made to be left out on the lawn and dragged back in when somebody remembers.

They call themselves the play experts, which sounds like something a marketing department invents and is in this case simply what happens when a company spends decades doing one thing. There is school playground equipment, sports kit and playhouses alongside the games now, all built on the same principle: it has to survive being played with by children, which is a considerably higher standard than surviving being looked at by adults.

They sit among our other British brands, and the games sit happily in Baby + Kids. Have a browse.