Sales at hobby stores in the United States rose 15 to 20 percent in each of the last three years, according to ICv2, a trade publication that tracks the business. Amazon says board game sales increased by a double-digit percentage from 2012 to 2013.

“It has been this amazing boon for the average game designer to come in, put up an idea, get it funded and get to press,” said Peter Adkison, founder and former chief executive of Wizards of the Coast, a tabletop game publisher he sold to Hasbro in 2001.

Mr. Shapiro’s experience with his creation Robot Turtles, a game meant to stealthily teach children basic computer programming concepts, illustrates how the new model works.

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.

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.

Somewhat ironically, perhaps, video game players are often among the biggest devotees of tabletop games. Some in the business believe that is no accident, theorizing that the abundance of opportunities to connect electronically with people through games and social media has also created a hunger — sated by tabletop games — for face-to-face contact.

“It turns out that being together is very addictive,” said Jerry Holkins, a creator of Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX, a series of video game conferences that dedicate about a third of their exhibition space to tabletop gaming.