Gabriel turns passions into success

When he’s not filming content for his social media feed - whether it be comedic reviews of restaurants in or around Kahnawake or marketing for his game Kanata: The First Sacrament, Iorahkwano Gabriel works for Kahnawake Animal Protection while training to become a Kahnawake Peacekeeper.

Gabriel, who will turn 23 in July, said he has many passions in life, but board games, horror movies, and making videos have been what he has been best known for recently.

That has manifested itself in his creation of the board game Kanata: The First Sacrament with his father, Brad.

The horror-themed game is meant as a cooperative experience for up to four players, where everyone must escape a possessed town, Kanata, fighting monsters and collecting items to destroy the roadblock that prevents them from leaving.

“It just started as me and my dad writing stuff down on paper, tossing ideas around for years before we ever did anything,” said Gabriel.

“Growing up, I always loved games. I was always fascinated by the idea of going into different worlds.”

That includes horror movies, which Gabriel has watched with his father since he was a little kid - he remembers watching Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses when he was four years old.

“That doesn’t get more hardcore as a horror movie than that,” said Gabriel.

When he was young, the pair searched for a game that would be both easy to learn and immersive to play together.

Going to different game stores, they found that most board games were one or the other. That gave the pair the idea to try and figure out something of their own that would fit their tastes.

In 2022, they decided to actually start working on the project concretely. Gabriel was at LaSalle College in game design at the time, and with help from his father, he constructed a protoype of the game, complete with a board and game objects.

“Everybody else had minimal things, but I came with a full board game made out of all these different crazy assets,” said Gabriel.

He received a perfect grade for his prototype, and after years of playtesting and refinement, the two hired freelance artists and produced a real game.

After its official launch in 2025, the game has recently started its second print run after having raised more than $130,000 for the project on crowdfunding website Kickstarter in 2024, from an initial goal of $7,000.

“Seeing strangers believing in something that started from my father and gluing stuff to paper and cardboard on the kitchen table, it was insane,” said Gabriel.

Now, the game is carried by board game retailers all over the world in stores and online.

Turning a passion project into a business has not always been easy, Gabriel said, particularly because they have self-published the game by creating their own studio - Kanata Studios - instead of working with an existing distributor.

“You’re learning everything as you go, and you mess up a lot, you make a lot of mistakes, you forget things or you put something off, and it catches up to you. There are just so many things that you learn as you’re doing it, and if you mess up, you’re messing up because you don’t know these things,” said Gabriel.

The project has had its fair share of costs as well - money, but also time and energy.

There have been times where they have thought about stopping, that it was too much to handle, but Gabriel said the short-term pain was worth the fulfillment of their goal.

“This is the dream that we want to put out there. We wanted to do everything we could to make it happen; not only our fans, but for my father and I,” said Gabriel.

“This has been something that we’ve dreamed about for years. To see it not come to life would be a lot more devastating than if we just to go through that pain.”

Seeing hundreds of people online share their positive experiences with the game as well as in-person comments from players at game stores and trade shows has been a heartwarming experience for Gabriel.

He has particularly cherished in-person feedback from those who have played the game with him.

“The feedback when I had play tests with a lot of my friends, a lot of strangers at hobby shops, and family members, it was never faked, because the engagement was there with the gameplay,” said Gabriel.

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