DeBonis and Mikros have a habit of making games that are hard to play. They're not overly difficult or poorly designed; they're just impractical.

"It's our curse and our blessing," says Mikros. "I'm sure we could do a conventional game just fine together, but we'd rather do something really fun and different."

To play Pigeon Piñata Pummel, their first collaborative effort, you need 20 piñatas stuffed with candy, poker chips and bouncy balls. Unsurprisingly, it's been played a grand total of three times.

For PPP's 2008 premiere at Come Out & Play New York, a festival of street games, DeBonis and Mikros made all 20 piñatas themselves — a reportedly hellish experience. The next two times they ran the game (at Come Out & Play San Francisco and IndieCade 2011), they smartened up and crowdsourced the piñata production. Still, it's not really feasible outside of a festival setting.

Apparently unfazed by their earlier experience, DeBonis and Mikros doubled down for their second game, Pitfall! Live at the Tank, a live-action adaptation of the classic Atari 2600 game. To generate a dynamic play space, the creators require an even more specialized setup.

"You need a theater, you need a projector, you need somewhere to hang a rope from, and you need a guy to come and install the rope so that people don't kill themselves," lists Mikros, ticking off each item with his fingers. "Oh, and a stage large enough that people can run, jump and swing."

Pitfall! Live premiered at Come Out & Play 2009 in New York. It hasn't been played since.

In 2010, DeBonis and Mikros took a break from Come Out & Play, but decided to return the following year with another entry. They began work on a physical sport for 20 players inspired by real-time strategy games.

They called it Killer Queen.

"If you give somebody a foam sword, they just have fun playing with it."

"In the beginning, Killer Queen [the field game] was inspired by ants," recalls DeBonis. "The initial idea was that you'd create scent trails by leaving these trails of string as you moved. Unsurprisingly, the string didn't work. The moment we started playing, everyone just dropped their string and completely ignored it."

DeBonis and Mikros quickly abandoned the ants concept, but kept the parts that worked: the caste system (workers, soldiers, queen) and the other props.

"If you give somebody a foam sword, they just have fun playing with it, even if they're not playing the game," continues DeBonis. "Props are just inherently playful, and people immediately know what to do with them and want to run around with them."

The original Killer Queen closely resembles the later arcade version. Like the video game, there are three ways to win: return a certain number of food pellets to your base, kill the opposing queen three times or bomb the other team's base (instead of riding a gastropod to your side, the third victory condition in the digital game).

Come Out & Play attendees loved it — and so did the festival's judges, who doled out "Most Strategic" and "Best in Fest" awards to Killer Queen.

"I really like the physical experience of Killer Queen," says Nick Fortugno, co-founder of Come Out & Play. "We give those awards to games that are exemplars of what Come Out & Play is all about, and what we really rewarded that game for was the quality of the game design. We just thought it was such a well-balanced game, and street games rarely have that kind of careful balance. It's really tight; it just works every single time."