He raised $631,000 on Kickstarter in under a month, far exceeding his $25,000 goal. Robot Turtles has more backers than any other tabletop game in Kickstarter’s history, with 13,765 people pitching in money for the project, and Mr. Shapiro had more than 20,000 presales on the site.

He then found a manufacturer in Michigan by doing a Google search, and paid it to make 25,000 copies of the game from over 36 tons of cardboard and paper, shipping most of them in three semi trucks directly to a warehouse for Amazon. Amazon then delivered them to customers.

“It felt like technological advancement had anticipated my needs almost perfectly,” said Mr. Shapiro, who sold all 25,000 copies.

Some of the new games from independent makers have even started to outsell games by major toy companies. Three years ago, a group of eight men in their 20s — middle school friends from Highland Park, Ill. — came up with an idea for a game that resembles a profane version of Apples to Apples, the game that involves creating humorous combinations by pairing noun and adjective cards.

The result was Cards Against Humanity, billed as a “party game for horrible people.” During each round, one player draws a card with a question or sentence with a missing word while the other players compete to come up with the funniest, most outrageous answer from their own selection of cards.

A typical question: “What are my parents hiding from me?”

“The placenta,” reads one of the tamer answers.

Cards Against Humanity and four expansion card packs for the game are currently the top five best-selling items in Amazon’s toys and games category. While the game’s co-creators continue to work at other jobs or attend graduate school, Max Temkin, 27, one of Cards Against Humanity’s creators, said none of them needed to work since they all had “pretty substantial savings” from sales of the game.