Reiver Games was started by Jackson Pope in July 2006, to publish his first board game: Border Reivers. He made 100 copies in his spare time around a full-time job as an IT Project Manager, each entirely by hand (each copy took 3 hours to assemble). The print run sold out in eleven months and during this time he was approached by Yehuda Berlinger, who was looking for a publisher for his card game: The Menorah Game. Jackson really liked the game, but felt the theme wasn't that saleable, so he released a hand-made print run of 300 copies at the UK Games Expo in Birmingham, UK in 2007, rethemed as It's Alive! - a game about building Frankenstein's monster from assorted body parts.

Based on the success of these two small runs (It's Alive! had also sold out in under a year), Jackson quit his job to run Reiver Games as a full-time concern.

In 2008, Reiver Games released their first two professionally manufactured games, a re-print of It's Alive! and Carpe Astra, by Ted Cheatham and Jackson. With professional manufacturing, the games were cheap enough for Jackson to sell to shops via distributors, with Reiver's games reaching widespread distribution in Europe and the US in late 2008/early 2009.

2009 has seen the company go from strength to strength, picking up more new distributors and releasing a third game: Sumeria.