After being catapulted into the board game industry limelight following the success of Pandemic in 2008, Matt Leacock has scored ongoing success through titles such as the Forbidden series, Ticket to Ride and Pandemic legacy titles and his Kennerspiel-winning climate-change co-design Daybreak. In this in-depth interview he spoke with BoardGameWire about how the industry has changed for designers over the last quarter of a century, how working with developers can best help a design to sing, and why fighting for designer rights is among his most important jobs in 2026.

BoardGameWire: It’s almost 20 years since Pandemic was first published. What do you think have been the biggest changes for board game designers, specifically, within that time?

Matt Leacock: Oh, let’s see. So a few things. There’s just so much more competition out there, so much more product. I think when I started it was a lot easier to get noticed. I mean, when I think back to 2000 when I really got started, and went to Spiel [Essen] and sold my little racing game, I didn’t need to have a whole lot, and the production value didn’t have to be that great. And it was just easier to get noticed, people would stop by.

And now, if I were to do the same thing, I’d get laughed out of the hall because, you know, I’d be competing with thousands of other products. But on the flip side I think there’s a lot more support for new designers, up and coming designers. I look at all the cons that have Protospiel events, and Unpub, and see a network of a lot of people who are helping each other out and kind of helping to pull each other up and share best practices and so on. So yeah, I guess I see some easier things and some harder things at the same time.

Do you think you were fortunate in terms of when you happened to start pitching designs, and began going to places like Spiel and shopping designs around?

Well, I do think it was easier to get noticed – but that said, the product still needed to be really good. So it took a long time: many, many years, before I had something that was, I think, worthy of being published. Like, I don’t even know how many years. I started working on my first design in college, and I spent, like ten years on it, and then it came out in 2000 and it was fine. And then it took another eight years before Pandemic came out. So yeah, it was perhaps easier to get noticed, but you still needed to have a something worth being played, and I think that’s still true.

How do you think Pandemic’s success changed your career path and choices – and is there anything you think didn’t change about how you were approaching being a game designer?

I mean, it changed everything. I was a hobbyist, and then I was somebody kind of doing it as a side gig a bit. And then Pandemic took off, and it just allowed me to step away from my day job and change careers completely – and that was not something I had planned on doing. It was just this wonderful opportunity. It did take a while, though. The game came out in 2008 and I started working full time 2014, so it took about six years before I was comfortable enough to switch.

And is that a factor of having to wait until it’s financially viable? What was it that persuaded you it was okay to take the jump?

Yeah. So I’m living in the San Francisco Bay area, like, in the heart of Silicon Valley, so the cost of living here is not low – and I’ve got two kids to put through college. And you’re basically getting paid a paycheck four times a year, and you don’t know what it’s going to be. So it took many quarters, years of seeing that this title was an evergreen and was going to be able to help meet the bills and so on. And once we saw that, then we were able to kind of shift.

How much of your design work in recent years is you going out and pitching to publishers, and how much is publishers coming to you?

Oh, yeah, the last few years, it’s been much more… I’m just really lucky in that I’m able to kind of pick and choose projects, and most of them are publishers coming to me and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea for something’. A lot of the work that I’m doing is expanding existing worlds that I’ve already built, whether it’s the Forbidden stuff or the Pandemic stuff.

So I’m lucky in that I’ve kind of got those two different playgrounds to play in already, but there’s very little of me, like, inventing from a totally blank sheet of paper. It’s generally someone pitching an idea – occasionally, like with Daybreak, I did have an idea, but then I also ran into another colleague, or someone who would become a colleague, and we worked on it together. And we had a publisher lined up maybe halfway through the process – much earlier than typical.

So I do like to have a relationship with a publisher fairly early on, and often it’s through a pitch. So I’m not doing a whole lot of cold calls or cold pitches.

You’ve worked with quite a few major and smaller publishers over the years. How consistent is what publishers ask of you, in terms of initial design and development and final production, and do you think any of those approaches work better than others?

Yeah, I would say that it is all over the board. So a case in point: I worked with Studio Big Games, Z-Man – part of Asmodee – on Fate of the Fellowship. And that was just a really tight collaboration, with in-house development, creative direction, art direction, sculpting, you name it, down the line – a really great, expanded professional team. I worked with Kevin Ellenburg on development there, and he devoted almost a year to internal development, really working with me to refine the systems in that game, so it was really polished by the time we were done.

Other companies, it’s like one person, and they’re going to hire out and build a virtual team for any given project, and so you’ve got a collection of people that are kind of thrown together. And that’s not to say that people aren’t excellent, it’s just that it’s a very different experience and much more hands on. Although I would say that whether it’s a really big publisher with an internal team, or a smaller one with a virtual team that’s kind of brought together in real time, I’m pretty involved all the way down – like specifying when, you know, an apostrophe isn’t curly [laughs] – I’m looking at all the details there.

But it is a very different experience working with the bigger ones, the more established ones, and the smaller ones, which are scrappy – you have a little bit more control, I would say, in the smaller ones sometimes, because there’s just nobody else: someone’s got to step up and do the work. But I do really love working with teams of people who are far, far better than me. And sometimes that’s not always the case.

Are there ever any challenges where you’ve got your vision for how the game should be, but a developer comes in and says, ‘Well, that’s fine, but maybe we should tweak this and that’. Are there ever any hard lines from you: ‘no, this must stay the same’?

I can only point to one where I was frustrated, and it was probably my least successful game, where my vision for the way the components would work was very different from the way the publisher approached things. They were coming at it from a pure cost perspective, and I was looking at it and going: ‘This is going to go nowhere with this kind of level of quality’. I think they were just trying to market it based on the idea that it was inexpensive. And I’m like, ‘Well, this is just not gonna work’.

That was the only time really – I think I’ve been really happy across the board, very lucky across the board that the teams I’ve worked with have been really professional and brought a lot of value to it.

Well flipping that around then, I guess, what makes a developer especially effective to work with? When you sit down with a developer, when do you find yourself going: ‘Oh, yeah, that’s great. That’s really helpful’.

Yeah, I respond really well when things are data driven, like when they can point to playtests and say, ‘hey, you know what – these people are having these experiences’. It’s not just solutions. So I like to see data, sort of in context of play, from real humans. And then I like to see a tremendous amount of attention to detail tracking things down. I love it when people are brutally honest, but I also like things when they’re packaged up with, you know, soft communication – so it’s a little easier to swallow the pill [laughs].

That kind of package: really great insights, really good attention to detail, all founded on facts from real world play tests that are communicated well and tracked down – that’s what I’m looking for.

Can you think of anything specific in terms of, say, Fate of the Fellowship, that got changed through development that you hadn’t considered? Where you were suddenly like, ‘No, this is, this is a really good idea, actually, this does make sense’?

Yeah, I would say that there’s just thousands of micro decisions. When you’re looking at 13 characters, and 14 events, and 24 different objective cards, there’s just a tremendous amount of interactions. And you don’t want to be dealt the character and go like, ‘Oh, darn, I got that character’. You know? That they’re either less interesting, or perceived to be less powerful. So around the edges a lot of the characters got minor tweaks, or they might get a third, tertiary ability that doesn’t even get played sometimes in the game, but is a nice thing to have, and it has a little thematic twist. Some of the things Kevin cooked up really added a little roundness to characters and made them more interesting.

What does your own design slate look like in 2026? I think flickering stars is on BGG, but I haven’t seen anything else. Are we just getting the one this year?

[Laughs] I mean, like, knock [on] wood! That product’s been delayed a lot, so I needed to check with the publisher and find out what’s going on. My greatest hope is that it comes out this year. There are – let’s see, I’m looking over the whiteboard right now – at least one other product coming out in the Fall. I’ll set expectations for maybe two, and then I’ve got others in the pipeline.

I’m slowing down a little bit. The kids are out of the house, I’m enjoying travel more. So the whiteboard was full of games the past few years, and I’m just kind of letting that shrink a bit. But I will say I’m working on at least one legacy game with Rob Daviau. That’s been a lot of fun.

Flickering Stars looks to me like a bit of a departure from a lot of the stuff you’ve designed elsewise – and I do apologise, I don’t know much about it. So is this one that’s been bubbling around for a while now?

Oh, like eight to ten years. I’m not kidding! And [co-designer Josh Cappel] worked on this before I did for like, a couple of years. So it is, I think, easily the longest development time of any product I’ve ever worked on. This is also my kids’ favorite game. It’s a dexterity game where you’re flicking little spaceships across the table, and it plays a little bit like a miniatures game without the fiddly bits. Where you put your tokens on the table: position really matters, there’s a lot of strategy, but it comes off and looks like a pretty lightweight, easy to learn thing.

The challenge with these things is that it requires a lot of specification around the plastic components. There’s actually spaceships in here that will launch a projectile, another one that rolls a large steel ball across the table – really fun stuff. And you look at it, and you’re like, ‘I know how to play that’! [laughs] And it plays pretty fast, so it’s a really great package. It’s all done, as far as I can tell, they just need to print it and get it into distribution.

Why has it taken so long, do you think? Was this something that you showed to multiple different publishers over time?

It’s been a combination of all sorts of factors. I mean, I don’t know where to begin. It did see different publishers, and sort of went on a journey there. It found a home with Friendly Skeleton, formerly Deep Water, where they just adored the game – really saw the vision, were all in, and were great partners to do the product design etc. But then we had Covid in there, we had the tariffs, there was some restructuring with that company – it’s just a whole string of things. So we’ll see how it plays out.

You’re currently secretary of the Tabletop Game Designers Association – why is an organisation like that important within the modern board game profession?

Oh my gosh, it’s so important! If it did nothing other than contract review, it would still be very important. Game designers are vulnerable folks, right? We work with much larger publishers who have a lot more power in the relationship in many cases, a lot more leverage. I think, like for book authors or any creatives, musicians, etc, it helps if we can band together and look out for each other.

And so this organization provides all sorts of services for its members. I think one of the most important is contract review, where you can you can send in contracts, get them reviewed and make sure that you’re agreeing to terms that are fair and the industry standards: you’re not stepping on landmines and so on. But we also have a really active Discord community where you can talk with each other, you can share playtesting tips, network. It’s just a great place to connect with other people in the field.

So I was a member of SAZ – I’m not even going to pretend to say I know how to pronounce it – the German equivalent of the TTGDA, for probably about 10 years now, and joined them just for very similar reasons. But TTGDA is here in the States. It’s very present. We’re trying to meet up with people in various conferences and to provide lesson services for people within the field. I think it’s a really good bargain too! I mean, you’re paying about 100 bucks for a year, and legal fees just alone would be much higher than that.

So I jumped on it – when Geoff [Engelstein] announced that he was putting it together, I’m like, ‘That’s such a great idea’. And then he invited me to serve on the board, so I leapt on that.

Geoff is obviously a heavyweight within the board games industry. [TTGDA co-founder] Elizabeth Hargrave too, as well yourself. How important is having that kind of heft in the association, in terms of being able to talk to publishers on behalf of new designers, perhaps who don’t have that track record within the industry?

Yeah, I think it does matter to have some bigger names on there. I know that SAZ in Germany was actually headed by Alan Moon for a while, which is odd, him living in the States, but his name caught my attention for that. And similarly, I know Geoff has done just great work in the industry here, and I really wanted to help support him.

If you could change one standard practice in, for example, designer/publisher contracts or workflows, what do you think it would be?

Honestly? I kind of wish they were just a little bit more Lego-like, so you could just run through a checklist and go: ‘covered, covered, covered’. You can do it right now. It’s just the language across all the different contracts is presented differently. One of the contracts I had was a modified comic book contract that had been modified and modified, modified and modified over years and years, to suit the requirements for game designers. But it was just so weird – it was this weird Frankenstein’s monster that I had to go through and really kind of try to suss out the language in. And it’s difficult to know what’s missing, so you really do have to run through a checklist. So this is something we’re working on at TTGDA, just having a more standardized contract.

I have seen some that actually pull the terms out to the front so you get, like, a summary sheet, and then you see the boilerplate in the back, and it’s a lot easier to understand.

Here’s a very personal annoyance that I have: it’s really hard for me to get designer copies a lot of the time. I don’t know why this is with companies, but, like, I would like to get the product at least as soon as the public does. And sometimes it’s months before I get my stuff [laughs] It’s really rough. I would like to see it and play it and have it!

Matt, what you need to do is become an influencer, start a YouTube channel, and you can get those games immediately.

[Laughs] I guess so, maybe I could talk about it more that way: I’d like to support the game, but I need a copy first.

That is crazy, isn’t it? You’d think they’d be all about giving you a copy, because you’re in a prime position to promote the game and be excited about it, right?

And it’s not due to any kind of ill will or anything like that. It’s just, like, internal processes are sometimes screwy. And yeah, it’s not always the case. It’s just it’s especially jarring when it happens.

The sort of contract work you’re doing with TTGDA must be useful to some publishers as well, right, for similar reasons? I’m sure some publishers come to the contract side of things and they’re like, ‘man, we don’t know what we’re doing – I guess we just repurpose this comics contract?’, or try and come up with something that has a lot of legalese in, which feels like it covers them?

I would think it would be very, very useful. I think awareness needs to be higher, though – I’m not sure enough publishers are doing that. Because it’s there, you can take an off-the-shelf contract that we’ve got and then modify and suit your needs. And the way it’s set up is, like I said, very Lego-like – you can put together the different sections together and assemble one if you want to.

But, yeah, I think too many are just very green and just take a shot in the dark and hope for the best, and we see some really, really incredibly bad contracts. I can’t speak to this nearly as well as, say, Geoff and Elizabeth, who head up that side of the house. I’m sure they could tell you some really, really great stories.

I’ve been trying to get something lined up with both of them for a while now – I will absolutely try and make that happen this year. I wanted to ask: what’s something publishers should stop expecting designers to do, or to do for free?

I think you see this more with smaller ones, where I’m just asked to wear lots and lots of hats, whether it’s doing the final edit on the rule books or… I think we see this less now, but I was aghast in the past, when my prototype art was used, actually in the final product. Like, I’m responsible for the game design!

I would like there to be some sort of development support. Like, with Pandemic I had zero development support – it was published basically as I handed it over. [Z-Man Games founder Zev Shlasinger] was a one-person shop, and he did give one request, which was to have a few more roles in the box. But it was basically just like, you had to wear a lot of hats: creative director, art director, final proofer, all these different things. And I think it’s important for publishers to realize that we have a certain limited amount of time, and our role is game design. We still want the product to be as good as it can be. We’re probably the strongest advocates for that, and so we’ll step up and fill in gaps, because we want the final product to be really, really good, and it’s our name on the front of the box. So we need to do that, but there’s a certain limit.

So I guess one of my pet peeves is when I’m essentially asked to be the creative director, and I would like there to be someone else, even if it’s just a graphic designer who’s keeping an eye out and taking on that role. Maybe they have that formal role of creative director, but someone who’s, like, really responsible for the product at the publisher and not expecting the game designer to take on that role.

Do you think that’s improved, generally? Or do you think it’s improved for Pandemic designer Matt Leacock, more perhaps than for other people?

[Laughs] I don’t know, I really don’t know. I’ve got my own limited, narrow, viewpoint of the relationships I’ve got with the publishers I have, and I gotta say for the most part it’s been really, really good. And so I think it just stands out sometimes when you’re like, ‘oh, wow, it’s not always like that’, right? And I think the reality of it is, it’s a tough business, and if you’re a small company it’s difficult to hire a creative director, and you’ve got this game designer here who can take on that role. And I care about this stuff, so I’m gonna step up! I don’t want to blow this out of proportion, but it’s an annoyance sometimes. I think the products are so much better when you get someone looking within the company, ensuring that you know this thing’s gonna be really, really great.

So: if you were starting out as a first time designer today, what pieces of advice would you give yourself in order to sort of stand out and, like, build it up to a professional career?

I think a lot of it is the stuff that I’ve I had to learn on my own, and I’m not sure hearing it would really help. I would just have to do it. I fall into a lot of traps where I spend too much time trying to make the prototypes look good rather than play well, and I continue to do that [laughs]. So again, I could tell myself not to do that, but it’s something I just have to continually work at, because just many, many iterations with lots and lots of people are where you kind of get to quality.

And really, the play is the thing, that’s what matters in the long run. You can have a big hit that does well once and then goes out of print, but if you want that longevity, the play has really got to be in the game, and you’re only going to get that if you’re really iterating and working really hard and showing it to lots of people.

So I would probably just reinforce those lessons that I’ve learned myself, and I would hear them and agree with them, and then I wouldn’t do them [laughs].

You’re not the first person that I’ve talked to about this, and I’ve heard that before. You have people saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what it looks like. You just got to get it on the table…’

I mean that’s not true – it does matter what looks like! [laughs] But there is a limit. I have a tendency to pull out the laser cutter – because it’s fun to make stuff look really good! And it’s also a great way to procrastinate on the hard work of making difficult decisions and trade offs and, like, killing your darlings and all that kind of stuff, which is just not fun a lot of times. Or killing the project, you know! I’d rather make it look better and see if it plays again [laughs].

There must be some positive element beyond procrastinating to it as well, though, because otherwise you wouldn’t keep doing it! There must be some element of: it’s time with the game, crafting it and thinking about the vision. And perhaps by sitting with it and crafting it in this way, maybe that gives you the brain space to put it in different directions?

That is 100% true. And so I’m understating: investing too much time in making it look good is obviously a problem, but it does mean that you’re spending a lot of time with the components and the game on the table. It’s just you’re not, like, running the engine: you’re waxing the car. You’re not in it test driving it, you know, and banging it into other things to see if the roll bars are going to hold up, right? But that’s painful work sometimes. And it’s, you know – it’s more fun to polish the car [laughs].

2025 was obviously really volatile for many publishers, and presumably for designers too, given tariff changes and general worries about the economy, and how much money people have to spend on things like games. How much of that filtered through to you as a designer, or to other designers that you were speaking to last year?

Yeah, from what I hear it’s been pretty rough. You hear about the different companies going out of business, sometimes you hear about designers not being paid on time. Delays, and just the length of time seems to just be longer in general – so development times have kind of stretched out on my end. Games that have been promised to release in a certain year, that year slips more often than not now. So that’s a thing.

It was difficult to keep, specifically, Fate of the Fellowship, in stock. It’s been nice that there’s been so much demand, but it would be better if we could have them on the store shelves. I think more than anything it’s been the delays. And I would think that – and this is speculating on my part – I would think that publishers are gonna be less likely to want to take certain risks given how volatile things are, so maybe relying on lines that are more well established, rather than swinging for the fences with something really risky.

Presumably you’ve been speaking to publishers towards the end of the last year and already this year – do you get a sense of how are they approaching things for 2026? Like, are there different strategies at play and desires for particular types of game, or ‘size of box’ game – are you seeing those sort of discussions happening?

Most of what I could share would be second-hand, just reading online how people are more open to card games and so on that have a lower cost of goods, just because of the tariffs and so on. But I haven’t really had those conversations myself so much, with the projects I’m working on.

You talk about riskier games, and publishers maybe battening down the hatches and sticking to their knitting in terms of what’s been successful previously. Where would something like Daybreak sit? Because I think if you if you’d asked a couple of years ago ‘will this game be hugely successful?’, I think there’d be plenty of people who would have said, ‘well, possibly not’ – it’s a strong issues-focused, cooperative game, and perhaps doesn’t fit in the traditional mould of a modern eurogame. Obviously it was very good, and hugely successful! Do you think it would be more difficult to “pitch a Daybreak”, something a bit left-field, today?

Yeah, hard to say. I mean, [co-designer Matteo Menapace] and I were thinking it would be a tough thing to find a publisher, to some extent from the beginning, just given that it’s, you know, ‘let’s play a fun game about climate change’. It’s not necessarily something people are gonna want to sign up for, but at the same time there are a lot of eco-focused games, games about nature and ecology and so on. Wingspan really showed everyone that there’s a market for this kind of thing.

I think of [Daybreak] as a kind of a special case. We had the game, and they were looking for that game, and we just met up, and everything was great. So it’s difficult to know how that would have done back then, if we hadn’t found that relationship. And that’s as it was, much less with what we’re seeing now. Hard to say.

What design trends do you think are being overused right now, and which areas do you think are perhaps a little under explored?

Well, I don’t like to chase trends, so I think if your hot new idea is maybe a trick taker, you might be a little late to the party [laughs] There are so many of those. That said, there’s a huge built-in audience for those, and they’re really inexpensive to make. So, you know – I don’t want to dissuade anybody from chasing their dream, but I also don’t think you want to be chasing a trend that we’re actually seeing in the marketplace, given that it takes one to three years to get something out on the on the market.

Under-explored? Oh, God, I don’t know. That’s always the question, right?

Is it space-based flicking games?

[Laughs] 100% yeah, you really need to fill in your portfolio there. So many publishers don’t have a dexterity game. Here’s this wonderful game! Yeah. I’m not really sure. I’ll pretend that I know exactly what it is, and I’m not going to share it with you. [laughs]

Very wise, very sage! I do think more publishers should do dexterity games. I know perhaps it’s a difficult fit for their existing portfolio or style, but I play loads of dexterity games, they’re great, and it’s always fun, even if you’re bad at it.

Exactly, you can always blame your skill at flicking, not your strategy.

Are there any games in the past year or so that you’ve been particularly impressed with from a design point of view, where you’ve played it and thought, ‘oh yeah, that’s really craftily done’?

I’m perennially impressed and just blown away by [Reiner] Knizia’s work. The reworking of Beowulf that he did – and didn’t seem to go over well in the market – into Ego has been really amazing. He’s got three games with… I think it’s Bitewing: Ego, Silos and Orbit, and they’re all good, but I think Ego’s really something special. It’s got this great exploration into risk, and pushing your luck, and sunk cost and all this kind of thing – with really fun bits. Plays pretty snappily, and I think it’s just stellar design work.

And then I shelled out for the version of Quest for El Dorado, the international version with that art, and still adore that game. So those two just stand out in my mind. And a lot of the work by John D Clair, I think has been really fantastic. Those are the standouts for me.

Are there any mechanics you now actively avoid because of lessons learned from earlier titles?

[Laughs] No, I think mechanics are just, like, the tools you have in the shop. For me, it’s just all about: what is the game trying to do? And those are just the nuts and bolts that that you use to create those exciting changes in the game, to light up people’s brains. So I can’t think of anything specifically.

Well let me rephrase it then: is there any game you made previously where you thought: ‘I will never do that again’, for whatever reason?

Yeah, I would say that some of the dice games that I did, like Roll Through the Ages and Chariot Race, I think were fine for the time – but the downtime in those is just too high. I don’t think people have the patience for that sort of thing. So that would be something I would avoid. I think I would avoid games that just have a tremendous amount of plastic in them, for environmental reasons. So like, I’m looking at Era going, ‘Wow, that is a lot of plastic’. I have a follow up for that game that’s unpublished right now, and I don’t know what I’d ever do with it, because it just requires a metric ton of plastic. So I’m like ‘I don’t want to do that’ [laughs]. So those are considerations, not really mechanisms, so much.

Is there a structural issue in the board game industry now that you think needs fixing, but just isn’t getting discussed, or rarely gets discussed?

Oh, you’ve given me such a great platform for this, and I don’t really have a specific bone to pick right now [laughs]. There probably is. I mean, I’m concerned about the way that creatives are compensated, whether they’re illustrators in the wake of AI, or game designers just not knowing better and signing up for really bad contracts with exploitative publishers – or publishers that are just trying to make ends meet, and finding ways to whittle around the edges.

Has that been a big thing with within TTGDA? Members bringing you concerns about AI, especially on the art side of things?

I think there have been some discussions. I try not to get too heavily involved in them, because they tend to devolve into… it’s hard to change people’s minds online. I would say that the consensus is pretty much that it’s okay to use AI stuff for prototyping, but never in a final product, – at least our collective seems to have that mindset, I think? And even if you’re doing it in a prototype, there… I think I would just say some embarrassment about it. I’ve used AI in prototype art, and I don’t feel great about it, because I know it’s operating on the work of other people that’s been uncompensated. So I will probably think pretty heavily about whether it’s worth the squeeze there. If I can find other ways to do it, I think [it] would be do better.

It does seem to be creeping into more and more games. I don’t think many of the really big publishers have committed to using it yet, but we’re seeing it creeping in with some of the smaller publishers and individual creators. Is there some sort of inevitability about this?

I don’t think anything is inevitable here. I think as consumers we can say, ‘hey, we don’t stand for that sort of thing’. I’ve been kind of disappointed looking at the Terraforming Mars product line, and that publisher Fryx Games has just kind of embraced it unapologetically. And I’m like – I’m not gonna work with that publisher.

I feel like maybe there’s a certain justice element there that just really rubs me the wrong way. And if, as consumers and designers and media, we try to stand up for creators rights, then we can steer things a certain way. I still hold out a lot of hope for that, and I don’t think anything about it is inevitable.

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European board game distributor and fulfillment company Meeples Group is continuing its rapid expansion since its launch operating out of attic five years ago, with a move to a huge new warehouse in the wake of soaring numbers of orders last year.

Meeples’ new warehouse has five-times more capacity than the 1,400 sq m building it moved into towards the end of 2024 – itself a significant upgrade from the 300 sq m warehouse it had worked from before.

Company co-founder Floris Toorenburg told BoardGameWire the company handled 14-times the number of orders in December 2025 that it did 12 months earlier, and estimated the business will ship about 118,000 packages and pallets this year across e-commerce fulfillment, crowdfunding fulfillment and its own sales channels.

Toorenburg said the business had “exploded in a positive way” since the summer of 2024, bolstering its clientele by signing deals with publishers including Steamforged Games, Academy Games, Magpie Games, Arcane Wonders and IV Studio.

He said, “I think in 2025 we managed to get our company out of the start-up phase and into the scale-up phase. We still have many things to improve, and we keep expanding our team with valuable members that add value to both our clients and our company.

“We feel we are now a settled company within the board game industry, and people know how to find us. For me personally, the most exciting thing in 2025 was the release of our own distribution platform. On this platform we have connected publishers with retailers, while we still take charge of the infrastructure, shipping, and payments. Our publishers can upload their own products on the platform, track their sales live, and decide on their own how to market them and how to price them.

“All retailers can see the products of the publishers and the contact details of the publishers. This way, they can order from all our partner publishers in smaller quantities, while if they would like to buy in bigger quantities, they can still reach out to the publisher to make a purchase directly at the publisher instead of through us. When this happens, we just ship it out and all parties win.

“What makes the platform even more special is that we give a referral code to all our publishers. If they share this with retailers and the retailers order with that code, the publisher gets rewarded with a 5% cashback on the total order value for as long as the retailer uses this code.

“With this concept, our local publishers from, for example, Latvia can promote brands of all other small publishers and big publishers next to selling their own products and earn a little bit on the side. The reward is then given from our commission on the sale as a thank you.”

Toorenburg added that the Netherlands-based business was currently looking into a ‘test case’ operation in Canada, beginning with Terraria from recent new client Paper Fort Games, and was also exploring setting up a consolidation warehouse in China together with an unnamed partner from the industry and long-time partner Maersk, the Denmark-based shipping giant.

He said the China-based space would allow the company to consolidate all freight for its publishers, “which will create a lot of extra value and lower freight prices”.

Toorenburg added, “Our biggest challenge is keeping up with the scaling that is needed for our growth. We started our company without any external investments and are still doing it on our own. Because of this, we need to be careful while building our team and be smart when hiring and expanding it.

“From our warehouse department, the scaling is going very well, but in our office department this has been a bit more of a struggle to find the right personnel that fit our company’s standards. We are really happy that our team is forming a more stable base now, but this has definitely been a challenge and will continue to be a challenge as long as we grow the way we are growing.

“The positive thing is that we feel our office and operations team will be fully thriving by April 2026, with some really good new people on board. This, in combination with some new innovations that we will be launching soon, will create the base where we can speed up our growth and create stability at the same time.”

Toorenburg told BoardGameWire that volatility around last year’s US tariff war with China saw rising publisher attention focused on the EU market, and “somewhat less” of a focus on the US.

But he added, “Now, after a year, we see that the market has cooled down and that publishers are planning ahead again.

“Based on our understanding, tariffs are currently around 30% on the production price. When comparing this to the VAT system in, for example, The Netherlands, which applies 21% on the total order value, it remains a relatively manageable cost.

“With proper planning, including thoughtful pricing strategies, this can be effectively incorporated into the overall business model and still result in a healthy and sustainable business case.”

Toorenburg said, “There are two risks that can happen and that we are cautious about. One of them is that we need to keep up with the scaling. If we can’t keep up the pace, both on our systems side and on the personnel side, it will be a very challenging year. This is the biggest focus that both my co-founder, Rients-Auke [Rienstra], and I have.

“Next to that, we do have some concerns regarding the geopolitical situation in the world. We feel that tensions are increasing quickly and that economic instability is growing. We already saw this reflected in the difference between the dollar and the euro in 2025.

“If these tensions continue to increase, it is difficult to predict what the impact will be on a hobby-driven market such as the board game industry. Unfortunately, this is not something we have under our control, and we hope that the global situation will stabilize again in the near future.”

The post “Our business has exploded in a positive way”: board game distribution, fulfillment specialist Meeples Group moves from start-up to scale-up with huge warehouse expansion first appeared on .

Less is more for French board game publisher Super Meeple, which says its strategy of keeping a tight rein on the number of complex titles it releases each year is paying off in an industry rife with overproduction.

Super Meeple, which releases its own designs as well as localising major titles such as Ark Nova and Gaia Project, says it is planning a “downward trend” for the number of games it releases each year in order to help each title stand out in an increasingly competitive market.

The publisher said that of the nine games it released last year, excluding expansions and sequels, only one was a “failure” – civilization builder Beyond the Horizon, the follow-up to Dennis K Chan’s highly regarded 2020 release Beyond the Sun.

It added that its biggest success of 2025 was “undoubtedly” fantasy animal reserve game Wondrous Creatures, while the rest of its releases were “in line with our overall expectations”.

The company said in an annual review post on Facebook, “Everything mentioned here is obviously based on our experience, and perhaps others have a different perspective, but the observation is pretty much the same everywhere, namely that overproduction automatically leads to a decrease in the percentage of successful games.

“We are mostly responsible for overproduction: from authors who want to be signed to buyers who want something new, not to mention publishers who need to produce and shops/distributors who need to meet buyer demand.

“Some can afford to be less involved in this overproduction, with a few games in their catalogue that are huge successes. Of course, they are more relaxed and can afford to slow down their releases.

“However, this foundation is generally, if not always, supported by family games; games with ‘infinite’ sales potential. Unfortunately, this is not the case for us, except perhaps for Kronologic and Expeditions.

“But the pool of buyers for big games is very limited, and even if it were to grow each year (which we hope it will!), it would still be insufficient to keep a company running. Nevertheless, we are aware of this overproduction and try to limit the number of releases as much as possible.

“Excluding expansions, we released seven games in 2024 and nine in 2025. We plan to release nine in 2026, as we do not want to exceed ten per year, two in edition and seven or eight in localisation.

“The trend will be downward as much as possible, working as hard as we can on each game and crossing our fingers that they will be successful.”

Super Meeple added that while it was fortunate to have games that always sell well, such as its lighter range of Kronologic murder mystery titles and zoo-building heavyweight Ark Nova, it was seeing a slight slowdown in what it called ‘long sellers’, big sellers such as Gaia Project, Trickerion and Obsession which it described as “pillars” of its catalogue.

It said, “We still intend to keep them available in our catalogue, as new players of slightly heavier games like these need to know about them!”

Early last year Super Meeple said it planned to step up its own direct sales after struggling to get individual retailers to stock more than a handful of copies of each of its heavier games through 2024.

The new system for some of Super Meeple’s expert titles involves running more pre-orders on its own site for those games, which it says could increase its margin to up to €20 per game.

It also hoped to “strengthen engagement” with retailers by allowing them to pre-order during a commitment period defined by the distributor, with any remaining games sold through its own online store or other online marketplaces and unavailable for restocking by shops.

Super Meeple said that Galactic Cruise, the first and only game to go through that system last year, sold out of all 3,000 copies – 300 through web pre-orders, 600 to partners outside France and the remaining 2,100 to stores.

It said, “This is obviously excellent news and proves that the vast majority of shops have understood our philosophy and made a greater commitment, so… thank you!

“This scenario will undoubtedly not be repeated for every game, but this initial success shows that the solution can work.”

The publisher said it planned to repeat the process this year for its localisation of World Order, the follow up to multi-award-winning economic class warfare simulator Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory.

Super Meeple’s other releases this year are set to include Tikal Legend, Mythologies, Revenant, Life of Amazonia and Ayar, and the third instalment of Kronologic, Babylon 2500.

The post “We released nine games in 2025 and only one was a flop”: French publisher Super Meeple on how avoiding overproduction is proving a recipe for success first appeared on .

Sam Healey, the veteran Dice Tower reviewer who has contributed to the channel for much of the last 20 years, has resigned after comments he made blaming Alex Pretti and Renee Good for their deaths at the hands of ICE agents began to impact the company’s annual crowdfunding pledge drive.

Healey posted on Facebook and in the comments section of the Dice Tower’s Gamefound campaign yesterday to say he was stepping down from his paid, part-time role at the business, adding that site founder Tom Vasel was “not putting me up to this”.

He said, “I do not want my friends to suffer any longer. Those of you who have cancelled your support because of my presence can feel free to back them once again. They deserve it, and you know it.

“They provide so much content, and they do a great job with everything from daily content creation to putting on no less than three conventions and a cruise each year.

“They deserve your support and with me now out of the way, you should absolutely give it to them without reservation.”

Healey made his comments about Good and Pretti on his Facebook page on January 26, the day after the latter was killed by federal agents during a protest in Minneapolis against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the city.

After sharing a post from American political commentator Armstrong Williams which questioned the judgement of Pretti carrying a concealed firearm at the protest, even though he was legally allowed to do so, Healey began responding to multiple commenters who disagreed with that view.

Replying to one comment which read, “The real issue is ICE executing American citizens on the streets”, Healey responded, “Frankly, the real issue is American citizens being told that it’s okay to illegally impede and/or obstruct legal law enforcement operations because the federal agents aren’t law enforcement officers. That’s the real problem.”

He continued, “We agree that they were needlessly shot. We disagree with where the blame and guilt lie.
These two people should not have put themselves into these situations. They are tragic deaths, make no mistake about that. They could have been prevented by better choices.”

Responding to a separate comment accusing him of victim blaming, Healey wrote, “This isn’t victim blaming. I’m simply stating [Pretti] shouldn’t have been there in the first place, nor should the lady have been that he felt the need to protect.

“He made the choice to go into a volatile situation while carrying, posturing himself against law enforcement officers. From a basic conceal-carry course point of view, he screwed up. That’s not victim blaming, that’s the honest truth. We are ultimately responsible for what we choose to do.”

Two days after that Facebook post negative comments about Healey’s views began appearing on the Dice Tower’s 2026 Pledge Drive on Gamefound, which has been running since January 7 targeting $275,000.

Many of those comments threatened to cancel or hold back support for the pledge drive until the Dice Tower took action over Healey’s public statements, which led to a pushback from other commenters supporting the Dice Tower in not addressing the situation.

The Dice Tower has not made a public statement about Healey’s views, or his resignation. When BoardGameWire contacted Tom Vasel for comment on the situation, a statement on Healey’s time with the Dice Tower, and his decision to leave, he responded, “I don’t give statements about how I deal with my employees. The situation has been dealt with.”

Long-time Contributor

Healey first appeared on the Dice Tower podcast almost exactly 20 years ago, becoming a co-host for about 100 episodes before stepping back from that role in 2009.

He began working full time at the Dice Tower in 2015 across reviews, live-plays and top ten list creation, before leaving four years later for personal reasons which required him to relocate.

Healey joined Darkest Dungeon board game publisher Mythic Games in 2020 as US community director, but left that role two years later amid the company disclosing growing financial problems which ultimately led to the liquidation of the business.

He rejoined the Dice Tower part time in 2024 after the company’s pledge drive that year included his return as a late-announcement $380,000 stretch goal, which the crowdfund managed to beat by $767.

This year’s pledge drive has just passed $281,000 with about 12 hours of the campaign left to run, having cleared its $275,000 goal overnight.

The Dice Tower uses proceeds from its annual crowdfunding drive to pay its ten full-time employees and five part-time staff, saying it gets the majority of its funding each year from the campaign. It also brings in some money from its Patreon, and is currently sponsored by companies including Allplay and Board Game Bliss.

The reviews giant, which has more than 350,000 subscribers on YouTube and has published over 26,000 videos on the site, has been running an annual crowdfund since 2013 – with its debut campaign bringing in just over $69,000 from about 1,400 backers.

Dollars raised through the annual campaign grew steadily for a decade to reach a high of $410,000 in 2023, but fell to about $380,000 the following year and $350,000 in 2025.

Backer numbers have also been falling since a high of nearly 8,500 in 2021, and last year had dropped to more than 40% from that peak to 4,880.

Just over 3,640 backers have supported the campaign so far this year, with 12 hours of the crowdfund remaining. The company is using Gamefound for the crowdfund for the second year in a row, having previously run all of its campaigns on Kickstarter barring a single year on Indiegogo in 2017.

Update 31/1/26: The 2026 pledge drive closed on just over $305,000, down 13% on last year and its lowest level since 2019, while supporter numbers fell 18% to 3,999 – the smallest number of backers in more than a decade.

The Dice Tower has said it plans to use some of the proceeds from this year’s pledge drive to give its employees a cost-of-living raise and improve the lighting and audio across its three studios.

Writing in a community note on the Dice Tower’s YouTube channel on January 28, company founder Tom Vasel listed the goals of the site as being to promote board games, to entertain, to inform and to support the team’s families.

He said, “We are a gaming channel, and my goal is to keep it that way. We aren’t a political, religious, philosophical, or any other type of channel.

“Talk to me in person, and I have thoughts and opinions on many subjects. But that’s not what we want on the Dice Tower channel – we want it to be singularly about gaming.

“Each year when we run our campaign, there is a lot of negative comments that levied at us. This isn’t a “real job”/we were unfair to a game/we are in the pocket of publishers, etc. Despite I feel that our work stands on its own.

“I am proud of what we’ve done, and while we are indeed imperfect people, I believe we’ve created a YouTube channel, podcast, and conventions that are fun and safe for the entire family.

“I look back at where we started twenty years ago, and I hope you can see more improvements and ways we get better.”

The post Veteran Dice Tower reviewer Sam Healey resigns in wake of saying Alex Pretti, Renee Good were to blame for ICE killing them, after comments began impacting review giant’s annual pledge drive first appeared on .

France’s highest-profile board game prize, the As d’Or, has updated its rules for 2026 to ensure that artist names must appear on a game box in order for designs to be eligible for the award.

The award, which traces its history back to 1988, has required entries to show designer names on their game boxes for several years, in addition to requirements for the game to be published in French and available in the French market during the preceding year.

Board game designers and artists are frequently namechecked on box covers in the current hobby – a far cry from the time of the “coaster proclamation” in 1988, when 13 designers – including El Grande and Tikal creator Wolfgang Kramer – signed a beer mat at the Nuremberg toy fair vowing that none of them would give their games to a company without their names being written on the box.

Exceptions to that have long existed at the mass-market end of the hobby – but further cases have begun to appear in recent years, some due to the use of AI generated images in titles, and others due to stylistic choices by publishers.

Last September Alex Hague, the chief executive of Monikers and Daybreak publisher CMYK, defended the company’s decision not to credit artist Angela Kirkwood on the box for its new edition of Magical Athlete, saying that her credit was “clearly visible in the rulebook, on our site, and in the YouTube video for anyone interested”.

Several months earlier the company had made the decision not to include the name of Quacks of Quedlinburg designer Wolfgang Warsch or artist Ryogo Toyoda on the cover of its new version of the game, while its Magenta line of reimagined card games only features the name of one designer, Reiner Knizia, in tiny writing on the front of its box.

This year’s As d’Or sees Flip 7, Rebirth and Toy Battle fighting it out for the main prize, with Arcs, Civolution and Ants competing for the expert game award.

First Rat, Take Time and Zenith have been nominated for the intermediate award, while the children’s category winner will be one of Mooki Island, Archeo or The Twisted Spooky Night.

Viking-themed card shedding game Odin won last year’s As d’Or, while city-building eurogame Kutná Hora triumphed in the Expert Game category at the 2025 awards, Operation Noisettes won the children’s game prize, and Behind scooped the “Initié” award – which targets regular board game players ready for more challenging mechanisms.

The 2024 winner was also a small-box card game, Trio, potentially giving Flip 7 a boost in this year’s contest.

French board game website Ludovox noted that a long-held belief around the As d’Or was that two-player games could not be nominated – a premise which crumbled this year with the nomination of three such games.

It added, “It also reflects the current trend: playing games as a couple, and smaller-format games are appealing to the public, and publishers are offering more and more of them.”

The As d’Or traces its history back to 1988, when it was launched to highlight the best games available at France’s Festival International des Jeux in Cannes. The award was merged with the Jeu de l’Année in 2005.

This year’s winners are due to be announced on February 26 during the annual Festival International des Jeux in Cannes.

Last year’s FIJ had a record 110,000 admissions across the five-day event, with 60,000 sq m of exhibition space – up a third compared to 2024.

The post France’s biggest board game award changes rules for 2026, requires entries to name artists on box for first time first appeared on .

Ravensburger said sales of its flagship trading card game Disney Lorcana fell last year, “settling at a high level” following an explosive start which quickly made the title a ‘long-term pillar’ of the company’s products.

The company said demand for the TCG had “normalised” in the wake of “initial hype” for the game after its August 2023 release, which saw it power to more than a billion cards sold by the beginning of 2025 – making it the most successful product launch in Ravensburger’s history.

Ravensburger said game buyers whose primary interest was in its investment prospects “have withdrawn”, adding that the game “continues to enjoy growing popularity among its core target group of players and collectors”.

It added that card sets released in the second half of 2025 were “sell-outs” and that the number of players continues to grow, aided by organised play events offered in specialist hobby and game stores.

Ravensburger said, “From its debut in 2023, Disney Lorcana has developed into a sustainable business segment and therefore a long-term pillar of the Ravensburger product portfolio.

“The company continues to expand the realm with new products such as puzzles and books. Beginning with Set 12, which will launch in May 2026, fans can also look forward to the first Pixar characters, including those from the animated film ‘Toy Story’.”

Ravensburger’s overall sales fell for the first time since 2022 last year, dropping 5.9% to €744m – but the company said its core business of games, puzzles and books grew by 3%.

The company said that international toy markets were showing “positive developments” despite global challenges, driven particularly by a growth in purchases for families and adults – with card games among products which “benefited significantly” from the trend.

Ravensburger chief sales officer Susanne Knoche added that she was particularly pleased with the development of the core business in two regions, saying, “Despite adverse trading conditions, such as numerous new customs regulations, we were able to achieve above-average growth of 11% in the USA and Canada.

“We also saw strong results in Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia) with an increase of 12%.”

A statement from Ravensburger accompanying its 2025 results said, “The international market environment is currently undergoing fundamental changes: trade barriers, technological upheavals, changing consumer behavior, and increasing global competition are key factors.

“This is accompanied by rising cost pressure for the company across the entire value chain. In addressing these developments, Ravensburger is adapting its structures and cost base.

Alongside these operational changes, the company is investing more heavily in experiential concepts that go beyond the product and bring fans and communities together.”

That includes the company’s event portfolio, including retailer and trade-fair events as well as tournaments and community formats around Disney Lorcana, which it said were often booked out within a short time.

Lorcana’s next set, Winterspell, is due for prerelease at local game stores and Disney stores on February 13, and for wider release on February 20.

Two months ago Ravensburger demanded trading card company Upper Deck pay $3.8m in legal fees it ran up in its successful two-year legal battle against the latter’s claims it stole the design Lorcana.

Upper Deck had begun its unsuccessful lawsuit against Ravensburger and Lorcana lead designer Ryan Miller in the summer of 2023, alleging the designer took his work on Upper Deck’s previously unannounced game Rush of Ikorr with him when he left the company in 2020 – and transported it to his new employer Ravensburger to create Lorcana.

The post Disney Lorcana sales fell in 2025, settle at high level after ‘initial hype’ powered explosive growth first appeared on .

The German branch of high IQ society Mensa has changed up its long-running board game award to focus entirely on complex, expert-level titles, scrapping its prizes for shorter family games and two-player designs.

Mensa in Deutschland has awarded the MinD Spielepreis since 2009, and has operated a ‘shorter games’ category for more than a decade and lighter two-player games prize since 2019.

But this year’s award will return to just a single category, pitting six expert-level games against each other in order to fill what the organisers see as a gap in the industry.

Jochen Tierbach, who has been organising the MinD Game Award for 16 years, said, “There are already various awards and prizes for family and connoisseur games.

“But for expert games, the really tough ones, there is no such thing in Germany yet. And we feel that the industry wants it.”

A long list of more than 20 titles has been whittled down to six challengers for this year: Galactic Cruise, Luthier, Shackleton Base, Speakeasy, Thebai and Thesauros, all of which have been released in Germany since Spiel Essen last October.

The organisers will now take the next ten months to persuade as many Mensans as possible to play the titles and rate them out of 10 for ‘challenge factor’ and ‘replayability’. The winner is set to be announced on November 10.

Last year’s MinD award for complex games saw Tomáš Holek’s space exploration eurogame SETI add to its array of prizes, while Simone Luciani and Dávid Turczi’s Nucleum triumphed in 2024.

The last holder of the MinD shorter game award is 2025 Spiel des Jahres winner Bomb Busters, while 2024 SdJ champion Sky Team was the final winner of the best two-player game prize.

Other board game awards focusing specifically on heavier titles include France’s Diamant d’Or, which was launched more than a decade ago to champion complex eurogames the organisers felt were being overlooked by more mainstream board game awards.

The US branch of Mensa also runs an annual board game award, Mensa Select, which is voted on by members following a now traditional four-day gaming marathon.

MinD Spielepreis finalists 2026

Galactic Cruise, by TK King, Dennis Northcott and Koltin Thompson (published in Germany by PD Verlag)
MinD committee notes: “In Galactic Cruise, players build a luxurious cruise company for space travel and organise ships, staff and wealthy customers.

“The game impresses with its strong thematic interconnection, a hidden deployment mechanism to determine the order of actions, and challenging resource planning.”

Luthier, by Dave Back and Abe Burson (Funtails)
“Luthier puts players in the role of instrument makers who, thanks to generous patrons, equip famous musicians throughout the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods and compete for the chair of various instrument groups in the orchestra.

Shackleton Base, by Fabio Lopiano and Nestore Mangone (Giant Roc)
“In Shackleton Base, players build a permanent base at the south pole of the moon, using executives who bring a slight asymmetry to the game.

“Three of seven selectable corporations with special abilities and several interlocking scoring options provide strategic depth and high variety.”

Speakeasy, by Vital Lacerda (Skellig Games)
“Speakeasy is set during Prohibition in Manhattan, where players open illegal bars, nightclubs and casinos in different districts and supply them with stolen or moonshine alcohol.

“The appeal of the game lies in the indirect interaction through territory control, competition for lucrative locations and the constant risk of attracting too much attention.”

Thebai, by Dávid Turczi (Pegasus Spiele)
“Thebai is a tightly interwoven optimisation game in which population or hoplite cubes are placed on your own estate or on the shared game board to rebuild the Kadmeia of Thebai.

“Resources must be gathered for assignments while trying to promote population to the council or promote hoplites to army commanders in order to successfully repel attacks on the city.”

Thesauros, by Cedric Millet (Elznir Games)
“In Thesauros, players first search for and then recover sunken treasures in order to ultimately sell them to a museum at a profit.

“Budget planning several rounds in advance requires strategic foresight and a carefully balanced mix of long-term exploration plans, short-term financing requirements, and disruptive manoeuvres against or by the competition.”

The post “We feel that the industry wants it”: German Mensa switches long-running board game award away from lighter titles to focus on expert games first appeared on .

Board game crowdfunding major CMON says it is exploring further IP sales and licensing opportunities in its ongoing push to fulfil over $14m of undelivered campaigns, as it continues its attempt to recover from massive losses racked up over the past two years.

The publisher – one of the most successful board game crowdfunders of all time with over $110m raised – posted losses of nearly $7m for the first half of last year and another $3m across 2024, figures which dwarf the overall $4.2m profit it had managed to make over the previous nine years combined.

The company has been scrambling to stem the losses since the start of last year, laying off staff and halting new game development and campaign launches in March, and selling off a string of its IPs -including Blood Rage, Rising Sun and its most famous and profitable title, Zombicide – in the summer.

It followed that by selling the IP for former Mythic Games titles Anastyr and Hel: The Last Saga to Don’t Panic Games in September, and parting with the lucrative Cthulhu: Death May Die IP to Asmodee a month later – the latter a series which has raised almost $10m from backers to date.

CMON has now announced more IP sales could be on the way alongside making an apology for the delays to its outstanding crowdfunds – some of which are now running almost two years beyond initial delivery estimates.

The company’s remaining significant IP includes the Massive Darkness series, with the most recent instalment, Massive Darkness: Dungeons of Shadowreach, completing a $2.85m crowdfund on Gamefound early last year – a figure which rose to more than $3.7m including late pledges.

That was CMON’s final crowdfunding campaign before it put all future game development and crowdfunding plans on hold a month later, citing the rising unpredictability of the US tariffs situation.

CMON’s new announcement said its priority remains to deliver all of its unfulfilled crowdfunding campaigns, saying that it is also undertaking ‘batch delivery’ of games to allow retail sales to help fund the manufacturing of remaining products in the line.

The eight undelivered campaigns include DC Super Heroes United, which raised more than $4.4m, and DCeased, which brought in over $2.5m. Both campaigns were initially due to be delivered last year.

Game	Amount raised	Number of backers	Fundraise completed	Initial delivery estimate	Latest delivery estimate (as of January 21, 2026)
Mordred	$669,976	5,687	July 2023	August 2024	Q2 2026
Masters of the Universe: The Board Game – Clash for Eternia	$719,664	4,182	January 2024	November 2024	Q3 2026
DCeased	$2,564,789	12,787	December 2023	April 2025	Q4 2026
DC Super Heroes United	$4,478,989	14,040	August 2024	August 2025	Q4 2026
God of War	$832,945	4,388	May 2024	June 2025	Q4 2026
Massive Darkness: Dungeons of Shadowreach	$2,854,553	9,842	February 2025	March 2026	Q2 2027
A Song of Ice & Fire: Tactics	$1,886,509	6,406	February 2024	February 2025	Q3 2027
Degenesis: Clan Wars	$339,742	1,232	June 2024	July 2025	n/a
Total Dollars	$14,347,167

CMON said, “We want to be absolutely clear: we are not asking backers for additional money for manufacturing. The responsibility to fulfill these campaigns rests entirely with us.”

The status of one outstanding crowdfunding campaign – Degenesis: Clan Wars – remains in limbo after CMON cancelled the project last July, claiming German design studio SixMoreVodka had terminated its contract with the publisher.

SMV founder Marko Djurdjevic told BoardGameWire at the time that his company disagreed with CMON’s account “in the strongest possible terms”, adding that it was not informed about the publisher’s announcement in advance and “certainly did not expect this attempt to shift the blame for the project’s failure onto our plate”.

The latest CMON announcement does not mention whether the publisher will ask any of its campaign backers for extra contributions to cover shipping costs or further volatility in US tariffs.

Last October the publisher added extra charges for backers of its Marvel United: Witching Hour and Cthulhu: Dark Providence pre-orders, asking them to pay an extra $0.69 and $2.30 respectively to cover tariff costs it said it “cannot absorb given our current financial position”.

CMON also has five undelivered pre-order campaigns on its books, including Dune Desert War and the Assassin’s Creed Role Playing Game.

Communication Frustration

The company’s new announcement its first significant update for its campaign backers since the start of October last year, and only its third since summer 2025 – a situation which has drawn ire from many backers frustrated with what they see as poor communication from the publisher.

CMON acknowledged in its October 2025 update that “rumors and panic” had been spreading given its lack of communication to crowdfunding backers, which it said had “resulted in us experiencing the highest number of refund requests in CMON’s history”.

It said, “This has created a vicious cycle: The slower fulfillment is, the more refund requests we receive. The more refunds we process, the fewer resources we have to accelerate fulfillment.

“With more resources funnelled into refunds over fulfillment, fulfillment slows down even further. This cycle has snowballed and grown into one of the toughest challenges we have ever faced.”

CMON added last October that the staffing cuts it made earlier in the year had pushed its remaining team “to its limits”.

It said, “With a fraction of employees remaining, every day has been a balancing act between managing production, logistics, customer service, and financial obligations. We have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of day-to-day tasks.”

CMON’s other attempts to bolster its bottom line over the past year have included selling off the global headquarters it bought in Singapore in 2017 to claw back about $2.4m – although that total is still a drop in the ocean for a business which saw its revenue slump by more than $12m in the first half of this year.

The company has also suffered two failed attempts to bring in new shareholders to provide much-needed working capital.

It began 2025 with two new shareholders due to invest about $1.39m into the business by picking up a combined 16.66% stake in the company – but those shareholders ultimately failed to hand over the money for their stakes, and the arrangement was scrapped.

Two months ago a push to bring in at least six new shareholders also fell through, with CMON only saying that the conditions for the share sale had “not been fully satisfied”.

The Hong Kong-listed company had hoped to sell more than 360 million newly-created shares in a process which would have valued the company at just over $5m, with the money raised going towards developing new games, marketing and events, and general working capital.

CMON said at the time that it believed the lapsed agreement would have “no material adverse impact on the business” and added that it would continue to seek fundraising opportunities, although it did not provide specific details.

More details about CMON’s current financial situation are set to be unveiled by the end of March, with the publisher required by Hong Kong stock exchange rules to submit its annual results by that date.

Last year CMON missed the stock exchange deadline for publishing its financial results, blaming an understaffed finance department – a situation which saw its shares suspended from trading for several weeks.

The company announced last July that rather than focusing on large scale, miniatures heavy crowdfunding campaigns, it had pivoted to releasing several small-box games direct to retail, which it showed off at the Spiel Essen game fair last October.

Those titles include Collect!, Peanuts Talent Show, Fairy Perfume, Rocket Punch and Yokai Carnival.

The post CMON exploring more IP sales after heavy losses, as it pushes to get $14m of undelivered crowdfunding campaigns to backers first appeared on .

Upper Deck, the publisher of the Legendary series of deck-building board games, has been urged not to create a Harry Potter-based tabletop title amid ongoing anti-trans campaigning from the character’s creator, JK Rowling.

Professional organisation The Tabletop Game Designers Association made the plea in the wake of Upper Deck announcing a deal for the “coveted” Harry Potter licence earlier this month, calling on the publisher to “help keep gaming a welcoming environment”.

Rowling – a dollar billionaire thanks to Harry Potter – has used financial proceeds from her creation to directly fund organisations attempting to strip trans people of their rights, and has spent the last several years making anti-trans statements.

Upper Deck said on January 7 that it would begin creating collectibles for the Harry Potter franchise, starting with two sets of trading cards due for release later this year, adding that it was “excited to bring its iconic brands and flagship products to the world of Harry Potter”.

The company’s previous collaboration with Warner Bros Discovery Global Consumer Products saw it launch a DC trading card set in March last year, which was followed in October with the announcement of Legendary: A DC Deckbuilding Game.

Following the TTGDA plea and rising numbers of comments across Upper Deck’s social media calling out the decision, the publisher yesterday made a single-sentence response on BlueSky and a BGG thread saying “Upper Deck has no plans to produce Harry Potter games at this time”.

But that response has not allayed the fears of board game designer Marceline Leiman, a TTGDA board member and founder of the Block collective – a group of board gamers she says “share the goal of sharing resources and information, disrupting bigoted spaces, and engaging in serious conversations on the topic of trans rights”.

Leiman said on BlueSky, “Precisely the problem. You can and likely will in the future. WE DON’T WANT THIS. And this isn’t just about concerns of a game coming out from you. Please cancel any and all products that use JKR’s blood money.

“Please respond directly to the issues your community are flagging for you all across your social media that you keep erasing and blocking. It’s undeniable that every company that supports this IP plays an economic function connected to this transphobic death cult machine.

“Making this decision isn’t just a business decision. It’s a value based decision. This could all be connected to ignorance or misunderstanding – and if it is, PLEASE COMMUNICATE AND WORK WITH US. We actively want to work with you and help you learn and grow based on your failure to support us.

“You’re saying you’re transphobic without saying you’re transphobic. You’re telling us to get bent. You’re telling us you don’t care. If you want to be better than your actions have been so far, speak up. Because so far… this non-response has been unacceptable.

“I insist any and all readers following this story continue with the boycott of Upper Deck products. No purchase, promotional video, post, or ANYTHING that can trade them attention for the algorithms. Don’t give them an inch. Not until they give us a proper response and a plan to move forward.”

BoardGameWire contacted Upper Deck several days ago with questions about its plans for the Harry Potter licence and the pushback it had received so far, but no one at the company has responded.

Last year Codenames publisher Czech Games Edition faced a boycott from some of board gaming’s biggest and most influential reviewers, including Shut Up & Sit Down and No Pun Included, after deciding to release a new Harry Potter-themed version of the title.

Immediate online criticism of the move intensified two days later when CGE released a short statement attempting to justify its decision to release the game – which was panned for going out of its way to avoid mentioning Harry Potter or JK Rowling by name.

TTGDA was among the critical voices of CGE’s decision, saying at the time, “Author JK Rowling’s extreme anti-trans rhetoric has caused physical and emotional harm to a particularly vulnerable group, and the licensing fees she receives from the game will be used to support these attacks.

“CGE released a statement about the controversy around their decision, but it fell far short of anything meaningful. 

“TTGDA is dedicated to fostering diversity in designers and diversity in viewpoints. However we do not accept intolerance and demonization of a specific group as an acceptable viewpoint. This is particularly true as anti-trans rhetoric and action has been increasing in many countries around the world, including the United Kingdom and United States.”

In a follow-up response two weeks later CGE apologised “unreservedly” for failing to take into account how “the harmful views of the story’s creator have escalated into harmful actions”.

The publisher committed to donating 100% of the game’s profits to appropriate charities, and said an amount equal to or greater than the fee paid to license the product would go directly to organisations that provide support for the trans community.

It said at the time, “Many of you have expressed your understandable anger, pain, and disappointment through a variety of platforms. Frankly, we were not prepared for the volume of the response. As a result, multiple accounts and comments were blocked or muted that should not have been.

“We would never want anyone experiencing the pain this situation has caused to then feel like they are being silenced. So for that, too, we want to sincerely apologize.

“Like the world we live in, CGE is made up of individuals with various backgrounds, gender identities, sexual orientations, and belief systems. None of us would ever want to take actions that would hurt or restrict the rights of another human being.

“We commit to remaining supportive of an inclusive and welcoming community of gamers. We believe in the rights of all people to have their own identity, and we reject hate and bigotry in all their forms. Trans rights are human rights.”

Last year Upper Deck lost a long-running legal battle with Ravensburger, which it had accused of stealing the design of its trading card game Rush of Ikorr in order to create the hugely successful Disney Lorcana TCG.

The post Tabletop Game Designers Association urges Legendary series publisher Upper Deck not to make a Harry Potter board game after company celebrates licensing deal first appeared on .

When news broke three months ago that board game giant Asmodee had been named manager of the hugely lucrative Middle-earth licence for tabletop games and accessories, questions naturally abounded within the industry about what that would mean for other publishers hoping to create The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings-based titles. Luke Peterschmidt, the tabletop veteran tasked with running the Middle-earth operation at Asmodee, sat down with BoardGameWire at Spiel Essen following the announcement to outline his vision for the IP, what they want from publishers in terms of pitches, and how they hope to prove naysayers of the deal wrong.

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BoardGameWire: Hi Luke! So a good place to start would be: what were you doing prior to becoming Head of Active Category Management at Asmodee?

Luke Peterschmidt: Before this I was the senior vice president of all the tabletop games for Asmodee, which meant that I ran all of the studios in what we call the tabletop vertical. We have lifestyle – that’s our hardcore games. We have our social games, which are like our lighter party games, and then all the stuff most people think of as tabletop games – so that would be Space Cowboys, Rebel, Office Dog, Z-Man, there’s seven or eight others. So my job was to run all those studios.

I guess the major question about this is how will it work, specifically in terms of third parties coming to you guys saying: “I’ve got a lot of the Rings game. How do we progress?”

Yeah, that’s a great question. Can I back up and answer a different question first? Existing Lord of the Rings games – because there’s a lot of Lord of the Rings games that are not Asmodee that are out right now – nothing changes for them. They still work through [former Embracer Group arm Middle-earth Enterprises]. The thing that will change for them is that we, as Asmodee, in this new role are going to start doing activations, marketing activations, where we will include everybody, whether they’re part of the ‘new regime’ after the deal or the regime before. We have no interest in making anybody’s life worse, or cancelling anybody else’s game.

So that’s the past, backwards. Looking, forward – anybody who wants to pitch us a game, who’s a publisher, can come to us and pitch us a game. My team is publisher agnostic. Asmodee gets no points for an Asmodee studio pitching us a game – and on the distribution side, because Asmodee does a lot of distribution as well, if you use Asmodee distribution, you get no extra points. Our job is to make the right number of Middle-earth games at the right pace, so that every game has space to breathe, and there is a Middle-earth game or gaming accessory for every type of game.

That’s the mission, and no part of that mission says, “and Asmodee makes all the games”. So at this show at [Spiel Essen], in fact, the meeting right before this was a game designer pitching us a game which was not an Asmodee pitch. It was a great pitch. That was a designer pitching us. So we told that designer, that was a good idea, we think, but you need to go find a publisher, because we’re going to work with publishers, not individual designers, right? So if you’re a game designer out there: go find a publisher first, and then have the publisher come and pitch to us.

In the case where a good game designer comes to us, we will introduce them to publishers, we will introduce them to our own studios – who may or may not have time or competency for that type of game. Because our studios right now, if they were to add something to their list, they’d have to pull something sort of ‘off the wall’. Our bandwidth isn’t infinite, and they have their own strategies that have been in place a long time.

So a publisher pitches to us, they would show us the games, they’d show us maybe the art style they’re going with – which we can talk about more later – they would show us their ideal release date. The ideal release date will probably never be the date they actually release on. Not because of their schedule, because of our schedule. That thing I said about not having things stack on top of each other, we can’t let everyone say “and I’m releasing at Essen”, or there’ll be four Lord of the Rings games in Essen, right? That’s not fair to any of them. We need every game to have a chance to succeed.

So we will then take our calendar and we’ll start mapping releases on that calendar that we think is the right pace: not too much, nothing’s too close to each other thematically, nothing’s too close to each other visually. You know, we’re never gonna let people run two crowdfunding campaigns at the same time, from two publishers. That would be bad.

So do you anticipate it being, say: one big euro a year, one trick taker, etc?

That’s a great question that I don’t have a good answer for right now. We are in the process of building our calendar, and then we’re going to sit down with [Middle-earth Enterprises], because although we represent Middle-earth as sort of the first group of people to organize what pitches get through, they’re still going to make the final decision, right? But we need a confidence level of like 95% that if something gets past us, and Middle-earth doesn’t say, yes, we’ve failed – or there’s something we didn’t know, like just an old, pre-existing deal that we didn’t know about. That’s our hope.

So the right number of games, we’re still working on, right number of gaming accessories we’re still working on. Some games will be region specific, probably, I don’t know for sure, but someone might come to us with a publisher who says, like, you know, we’re really, really big in Armenia. Great: you can have Armenian rights, this Armenian game, but you have no distribution outside of there. So they would be sort of on their own timeline – they’re not gonna compete with much.

We have some experience recently with the studio internally for releasing a series of Lord of the Rings games. We started with the trick taking game, and then we did the Pandemic game, and then the hobbit game, and those games are very similar to the concept we’re going with now, pacing wise: all those games are different. All those games have been successful, by the way: like, they’ve all had a chance to be successful, which is great. So we’re going to be rational. And one of the reasons Middle-earth picked us for this deal is they trust our experience in the space. My team is not that large, but if I need an opinion about how to do press, I can talk to this guy. If I needed an opinion about some lifestyle game that maybe I’m not an expert in, I can just call someone and go, ‘hey, roleplaying team, help me out here. Is this great? It feels great to me’.

This does give Asmodee a lot of power, obviously. And there is the potential for conflicts, if, for example, a third-party publisher brings a Lord of the Rings trick taking game to you next year, and it’s very, very good.

Well, we wouldn’t say yes to it because we have a successful one – not our successful one – but we have a successful one in the marketplace. If someone brought us a game that was a direct competitor for War of the Ring, and War of the Ring is still doing well, we’d probably say no to that too. I think people are right to… it’s reasonable for them to not trust the things I’m saying. And I hope that in the next couple of months we will prove to the world that we mean what we say, because we’ll be announcing our first group of licensees. And, we have a lot of work on the back end, just ticky tack stuff like getting our contracts ready and making sure all that works, and ironing out some smooth processes that are boring to everybody but required by everybody, that might slow that down [Note: this interview was conducted at the end of October 2025, and those announcements are still yet to be revealed].

But when those announcements come out, I think people are going to be happy to understand that it’s not just that we will work with external people, but we will also work with smaller companies. Middle-earth has a long tradition of working with microscopic licensees – like, they have a licensee that makes honey only from the flowers grown on The Hobbit set. They have a licensee in Minneapolis that makes guitar effects pedals. They make two different effects pedals, and they probably sell a handful – I don’t know what their sales are, I have no idea. And they’re amazing, and they’re handcrafted and built, right? We don’t want to lose that magic. This is a handcrafted brand – a lot of people feel this brand in their bones. I will never not be impressed by the love for this brand. The level of knowledge super fans have is out of this world. It’s just impressive.

It’s good to hear you say that. And obviously there has to be a lot of trust and goodwill on your side if it’s going to work.

We got to build it up! We got to build it up, yeah, we got to – we’ve got to walk the walk.

But the initial reaction from some people within the industry I spoke to was ‘Well, that just means Asmodee are going to call all the shots, we’re not going to get a look in now’. Like, on paper, fine, yeah, there’s a process, but in reality, you’re going to win out if there’s ever any conflict.

It is absolutely fair to have that thought in your head, and it’s our job to prove that thought wrong. And I mean literally nothing I say, I think, could convince anybody other than action. So yeah, it’s got to be the action, we’ve got to follow it up. And look, we’re an industry of tremendous companies. Like, I love Asmodee, it makes amazing games. I spent many, many, years here working on amazing Lord of the Rings games for people. But there’s amazing games in this hall from everybody. Like, they’re amazing.

What does your ideal slate look like then, at the end of 2026?

Oh, games take so many years to make that the first deals we will be announcing, those games won’t come out for two and a half years, like: games take two and a half years to make. So we will be announcing a slate of who we’re signing and maybe what those games are if the publisher chooses to say, you know, in a reasonable number of months, if you didn’t include the holiday months. Because this interview is in October – we’ve got Thanksgiving in the United States, and we’ve got Christmas coming up, and everyone takes vacations in those months, so the back and forth slows down to a crawl. But yeah, I’m hoping to have something fairly soon that we can talk about: but please write off most of November and December, because everyone’s taking all their vacation days that they haven’t taken yet. American companies aren’t like European companies, where you all take a month off in August. We all don’t take any vacation, and at the end of the year, we go, if we don’t take it right now, we’re never getting it [laughs]. And they slam it all into November and December. And I’m talking about myself [laughs].

You’ve touched upon this already, but I get the sense it’s gonna be a real balancing act. To some extent, if you print more Lord of the Rings games, you make more money because they’re very popular, and people want them, and they want different types. But that’s a tough tightrope to walk, in not accidentally making too many, right?

Yes. And I frame this as: Lord of the Rings is the grandfather of all fantasy IPs. We had this term when I used to work decades ago at Wizards of the Coast, called the JOTWA, which was just another Tolkein world, right? And there’s so many. We don’t think, when we look at the games in the hall here and we see medieval fantasy themed games: we’ll never say there’s too many of those, right? There’s a game about a tavern, there’s a game about building a castle, there’s a game about… whatever. In my mind, if all of those medieval games that we don’t see as competing now… they’re all using Middle Earth elements now, they’re all using elves, they’re all using dwarves. They might call their hobbits halflings, but they’re all there.

So I’m not too worried about too many Lord of the Rings games. I’m worried about too many Lord of the Rings games that are too similar. So when you said trick-taking game pitching, that would be such a quick no for me, and it’d be such a quick no because there’s already one of those, and it’s doing well, and that game deserves time to breathe. I come from a game design background and I would be furious if I had a successful game, and then another game got launched that was mechanically close, appeals to the same person. And there are a lot of types of games that don’t exist for Lord of the Rings. Is there a big, heavy, euro Lord of the Rings game somewhere out there? I don’t know of one, right? There’s just space. Is there a kids game? Has anyone taken a funny shot at Lord of the Rings? Like, I don’t know – Hobbit breakfast! I want someone to bring these pitches.

This raises an interesting point, though. So obviously you’re accepting pitches, but when you have ideas such as this, is there license for you to reach out to publishers and say ‘look, we’d actually like this type of Lord of the Rings game made’?

I am so happy you asked that question. So my team is called the active category management team, and the difference is that we are active. When we get to a place – we’re not there yet, because we’re still getting our processes in place – we will actively reach out to partners and say, ‘We need a game like this, and we think you have particular skills in games like that’. Now we might make that reach out, and it’ll take three years before you’ll see a product. And we might take that reach out, and they might just say no. But absolutely: we are actively looking for people for both games and game accessories. Actively is the key word – that’s why we’re here. We’re not waiting. You know, most people that do licensing wouldn’t be at this show accepting pitches. They’d be at home waiting for a phone call from someone who’s interested. My name was on that press release so that people could reach out and contact me and say, I want a meeting. And they did, because turns out, gamers and Lord of rings, that Venn diagram is a bullseye.

And how’s that turned out during this Spiel Essen so far?

We’ve had a lot of pitches – and I can’t talk about the pitches themselves, but there are trends. And it’s so interesting that the trends in games… if you look at games as culture, the culture of today, the stresses of today, are absolutely affecting the styles of game pitches we saw, it’s super interesting. And in a year, I’m gonna write a blog post, and we’ll do another interview, and I’ll explain what I’m talking about. I can’t ruin the confidentiality of the game pitches, but it’s really interesting.

Maybe you can’t talk about this, but I’ll try. So you mentioned heavy euro, which, you know, God yes, that’d be awesome – is there a market for that? I’ve spoken to other publishers in this show who’ve specifically said heavy euros – big, expensive, heavy euros – that the market’s just not really there at the moment. Some will sell, but the market isn’t there. And actually smaller family-plus games, smaller box games, that’s the economic climate we’re in, and that’s really what budgets people have. Is that a concern for you? Or do you just see what turns up?

I think I may be ‘tinted’ by Asmodee’s thought process, which I agree with. I would like to have games at all price points all the time, because at some point the pendulum is going to swing, and we’re never going to guess that right. The odds of us guessing it right are low, and because it takes three years for every euro – probably even longer, right? – I’m not going to say no to that idea, as long as there’s not one in the market. Because in three years, that market may have moved. And look, everyone says low price games sell – until it’s something that people are passionate about. Our recent launch of Fate of the Fellowship, the Pandemic game, sold out almost everywhere – and it’s really expensive. So there’s a market for games. It might not be big, but it’s bigger than honey and guitar pedals [laughs]. Which I love – and I will be buying those guitar pedals.

So what element of this deal just hasn’t been talked about yet?

Oh, great, yes, thank you. Okay, this is a literary license. So if you’re out there and you want to make something that looks like the movie, then we would not be the right people to come people to. But more importantly, that means we are open to alternative art styles, and artists, and we are even okay with people taking little elements of the book – well, Middle-earth is okay with taking little elements of the book – and developing them out further. Like, we don’t want to make five ‘throw the ring in the volcano’ games every year, right?

I would love to see – I’m just going to tell you the kinds of games I’d want to be pitched to me. I would like to have pitched to me games that take small elements of the IP and develop them with focus. A Prancing Pony game. A game about, you know, some spot on the map that if you’re a huge Lord of the Rings fan, you know, but if you’re not, you don’t. Let’s talk about it, let’s get deep into it. Some stuff out of the appendices of the third book – those rights get a little bit weird, but they’re available and we can do really fun stuff. There’s a game that is currently in the works that has done some amazing things with the IP, that real fans will be like, ‘Oh, this is different, this is a thing’. So yeah, I think there’s lots of room for different takes on the IP, and don’t expect visual similarity. I want these studios or these external publishers to be able to create a visual look that… you might walk down an aisle and see six Lord of the Rings games, but you’re going to point at one and go, that’s the one from Kosmos, right? That’s the one from whatever, or that’s my favorite art style, you know? Like, I love the art on Flamecraft. I’d love to see, I don’t know what that looks like for The Lord of the Rings, but that’d be pretty cool!

I think the trick taking game is probably a really good example there, because the art on that is incredible and really makes the game sing. It’s a great game, but I was playing a looking at the cards yesterday and thinking ‘this is fantastic’ – the armour on Gimli the dwarf, for example, where it’s chain mail, but it’s just like swishing circles in that stained glass style?

I love the art on that game. I was working on that game early on when I ran that studio, and we picked that style not just for, like, the style, but we picked it because we knew stained glass was the thing that survives in temples for a long time. And we feel like Lord of the Rings survives like a temple for a long time. So we went deep into it with that one. But it was different: no one confused it with a Fantasy Flight product, right? And that’s the goal, and we want to see that. The original drawings – most people don’t know this – the original drawings of Gandalf, he was like, kind of a pudgy dude. Legolas, you know, he’s, he’s a mix of two types of elves, which means there’s a 50/50 chance he has straight white hair or curly brown hair – it’s just that the movie showed him a straight white hair. Somebody wants to do a Legolas with curly hair, bring it. That’s literally, that’s your interpretation.

I guess we’ve seen this with the Lord of the Rings Magic the Gathering set from a couple of years ago, where there was a hugely diverse set of characters.

Yeah, that art was great, full respect to the Magic artist team.

Asmodee launched its own crowdfunding and miniatures operation last year, and has also brought in an RPG specialist in Mike Mearls. How do those things tie into this new operation?

I haven’t had anything pitched from roleplaying games, and there’s a roleplaying game that exists now from Free League that’s really good. [Crowdfunding and miniatures] pitched us an idea, there’s an idea there. We’ve got a couple of pitches for miniatures and crowdfunding from a couple different places. But, everyone has to earn their spot. And I gotta be fair to that team, that team is pretty new here. Not new in experience level – I mean, it’s David Preti, he’s done tremendous things in crowdfunding – but they’re pretty new in the Asmodee world. And we are a big company, and it usually takes a little while to find your place.

Any publishers interested in pitching a Middle-earth game to Asmodee can do so by emailing METTGlicensing@asmodee.com.

The post “No part of the mission says ‘Asmodee makes all the games'”: Luke Peterschmidt on shaping the future of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings tabletop titles first appeared on .

A trio of comings and goings from the board game industry for the year so far – if you have news of a new role, hire or job change within the industry that you’d like mentioned on BoardGameWire, please send an email with the details to the editor, Mike Didymus-True, on:

mike@boardgamewire.com

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Ross Thompson, Director of Marketing, Atomic Mass Games (Asmodee)

Ross Thompson, the director of marketing for Asmodee miniatures games studio Atomic Mass Games, has announced he is leaving the company after more than two years in the role.

Thompson joined Atomic Mass as senior marketing manager in November 2023, following almost a year as crowdfunding and marketing manager at Gloomhaven publisher Cephalofair Games. He was promoted to director of marketing in March 2024.

The move comes three months after Thompson won a special election to be named a media and events director on the board of directors at tabletop gaming trade organisation GAMA.

Thompson has also spent the past nine years running the Tabletop Game Jobs Facebook group he launched alongside Jessica Fisher, which has grown in that time to almost 26,000 members.

Writing on BlueSky about his decision to move on from Atomic Mass, Thompson said, “With a new year, comes new changes. I’ve enjoyed my time with Atomic Mass Games over the past two years, but I’ve made the decision to start on the next chapter.

“We have accomplished so much, with the relaunch of Star Wars: Legion and all the releases for Marvel: Crisis Protocol and Star Wars: Shatterpoint. The team here at Atomic Mass Games is filled with incredibly passionate people working to bring the power of play & hobby to tabletop miniatures wargaming.

“Getting to work with all of our partners across the Asmodee space, from group, distribution and studio has been an incredible experience. I am very thankful to have been able to work with so many fantastic people around the world and grateful for those relationships.

“Looking forward to seeing where this takes me. Thank you to everyone at Atomic Mass Games and Asmodee and Ill see you around!”

Thompson kicked off his career in the tabletop industry 17 years ago as the founder and organiser of San Diego-based gaming convention Kingdom Con, which operated for a decade before its last event in 2019.

He began working in retail support and development at Privateer Press in 2010, before becoming a marketing manager at CMON in 2011 and switching to a community manager role at Soda Pop Miniatures in 2012.

Thomson’s other previous jobs in the industry have included head of trade marketing at UK-based Steamforged Games and marketing manager at The Op.

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Ilya Ushakov, Director Of Marketing, Druid City Games

Former Incredible Dream marketing director Ilya Ushakov has been named director of marketing at Wonderland’s War publisher Druid City Games.

The hire comes five months after Ushakov left Kinfire Chronicles publisher Incredible Dream amid heavy downsizing at the venture capital-backed studio due to volatile US tariff changes.

Ushakov also runs the board games-focused Kovray YouTube channel, Instagram account and Twitter feed with partner Tylor Murray.

A statement from Druid City confirming Ushakov’s hire said, “We’re incredibly excited to welcome Ilya Ushakov as our new director of marketing.

“From the moment we started talking, it was clear that Ilya brings not only a strong strategic vision, but also a genuine enthusiasm for board gaming and connecting with people in meaningful ways.

“We’re already grateful for his insight, energy, and collaborative spirit!”

Ushakov joined Incredible Dream in 2023 as social media and community manager, before being promoted to marketing manager in early 2024 and marketing director in the summer of that year.

The role was his first in the tabletop gaming industry, following a career which included project management at the Canadian Mental Health Association and project and co-ordination work at the Edmonton Chamber of Voluntary Organizations.

Druid City’s 2026 releases are set to include Wonderland’s War Duel, roll-and-write inspired Wonderland’s War-adjacent title Off With Their Heads! and Wonderland’s War expansion Caterpillar & White Queen.

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Ross Connell, Head of Crowdfunding at Mantic Games

Board game marketing and communications specialist Ross Connell has left North Star Games after almost five years to become head of crowdfunding at UK fantasy and sci-fi board game and miniatures maker Mantic Games.

Connell joined North Star as marketing manager in 2021, and worked on projects including Nature, the redesign of the publisher’s 2014 hit Evolution, which raised about $850,000 through a Kickstarter campaign in late 2024.

He previously spent almost two years as communications manager at Dice Hospital and Tinderblox publisher Alley Cat Games, and also works as a freelance photographer within the board game industry.

Connell has also spent almost a decade interviewing dozens of board game artists about their work on his blog More Games Please.

Writing on BlueSky about his time at North Star, Connell said, “Looking back, what I want to shout most is how many AMAZING humans I’ve met.

“Creative, funny, intelligent, and kind humans. People make games. Thanks to those who make this a space worth being in.”

Recent Kickstarter campaigns from Mantic include Assassin’s Creed Animus, Worms: The Board Game and mass-battle sci-fi wargame Epic Warpath.

The post People moves: Ross Thompson leaves Asmodee’s Atomic Mass Games; Druid City Games brings in ex-Incredible Dream marketing director Ilya Ushakov; Ross Connell joins Mantic from North Star Games first appeared on .

Last year’s Kinderspiel des Jahres-winning publisher Schmidt Spiele saw its sales rise nearly 8% to €61.5m in 2025, citing children’s and family games as a key driver of its growth.

The veteran board game maker, which has a history stretching back to 1907, said its “core area” of children’s and family games grew 6% last year, with Wolfgang Warsch-designed 2025 Kinderspiel winner Topp Die Torte highlighted for achieving “encouraging sales figures”.

Schmidt Spiele said its classic board game brands Mensch ärgere Dich nicht and Yahtzee – known as Kniffel in Germany – were key contributors to that result, as were popular titles from its Klein & Fein series of small-box dice games, which includes the Warsch-designed Ganz Schön Clever! (That’s Pretty Clever!) range.

The publisher, which also makes puzzles, plushies and toys, is best known in hobby board games for critical and commercial successes Quacks of Quedlinburg and Daybreak – winners of the Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel respectively – and Ganz Schön Clever, a Kennerspiel des Jahres nominee in 2018.

Schmidt Spiele previously scored sales of about €57.5m in 2024, a total it said was almost identical to the previous year, despite a tricky 2024 domestically amid the closure or shrinkage of two major retailers stocking its games and puzzles.

The company said during the unveiling of its 2023 results that sales for its family and children-focused division had remained flat, albeit at a level it said has been on a high since 2020.

Schmidt Spiele managing director Axel Kaldenhoven said of the 2025 results, “The growth across all product ranges confirms both our strategic direction and the strength of our brands and products.

“Classic games, strong licensed themes, and innovative new products complement each other perfectly and form the basis of our success.”

Schmidt added that a key component of its ongoing success was its commitment to attending trade fairs including Spielwarenmesse, Spiel Essen, SPIEL DOCH! Dortmund, Brettspiel Con Berlin, Hobbymesse Leipzig and SPIELidee Rostock, which allowed it to cultivated exchanges with partners and game designers and continuously expanded its network, in addition to making sales to consumers.

The company’s 2026 releases are set to include Reiner Knizia-designed Kniffel: Das Duell, a tenth-anniversary re-design of Inka and Markus Brand’s Encore! (Noch Mal!), titled Noch X-Mal!, and magical ingredients tile placement game Morty Sorty Magic Shop from Challengers co-designer Markus Slawitscheck.

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Hachette has signed an exclusive UK and Ireland distribution deal with Captain Flip publisher PlayPunk, the board game studio launched three years ago by 7 Wonders and Hanabi designer Antoine Bauza and Repos Productions co-founder Thomas Provoost.

The French publishing giant will take over UK and Ireland distribution from Asmodee UK for PlayPunk’s existing titles, the Spiel des Jahres-nominated Captain Flip and Kennerspiel recommended title Zenith, and upcoming expansions Captain Flip: Isla Bomba and Zenith: Secret Agents.

The deal comes a month after Codenames and SETI publisher Czech Games Edition signed its first-ever distribution agreement with Hachette – for the UK distribution of its new title Wispwood – following a decade of Asmodee being the sole distribution partner for its titles in the country.

A statement from PlayPunk said, “We are more than delighted to be working with the Hachette UK team. They are true enthusiasts who have shown nothing but genuine passion for our two games.

“We are confident that Captain Flip, Zenith, and our future titles are in good hands!”

Hachette Boardgames UK CEO Flavien Loisier added, “We are humbled to work with PlayPunk. They have immense industry experience and knowledge, and have set out to produce high-quality, long-lasting games developed with passion and attention to every single detail.

“We can see that passion in the two brilliant titles they have already published. It is their goal to create ageless, evergreen games that make them and their titles a perfect fit for our portfolio. We are beyond excited about this partnership!”

Hachette began a heavy push into board games in 2019 by picking up French tabletop publisher and distributor Gigamic, French distributor Blackrock Games, and by founding in-house publishers Studio H and Funnyfox.

It has since gone on to buy publishers including Le Scorpion Masqué, Sorry We Are French, Catch Up Games, La Boîte de jeu and Hiboutatillus, Canadian board game distributor Randolph, and now runs Hachette branded board game operations in the US, UK and the Benelux region.

Hachette Boardgames UK, which was launched in 2021, currently localises and distributes more than 200 games in the UK and Ireland.

Other distribution deals signed by Hachette Boardgames in the last couple of years have included taking over US distribution rights for Super Meeple from Asmodee USA, scoring a deal to distribute MicroMacro publisher Edition Spielwiese‘s games in the US and UK, and picking up the UK rights for distributing Trefl games.

Bauza and Provoost officially unveiled PlayPunk in the summer of 2023, almost a year after it began quietly hunting for prototype designs to craft into finished games.

Bauza made a name for himself with Ghost Stories in 2008, before going on to design the widely lauded 7 Wonders in 2011 and Spiel des Jahres winner Hanabi in 2013. His other games include 7 Wonders Duel, Draftosaurus, Conan and Terror in Meeple City.

Provoost previously co-founded 7 Wonders and Ghost Stories publisher Repos Productions in 2004, before selling the business to board game giant Asmodee six years ago.

Bauza explained the pair’s decision to strike out and launch their own publisher in this extensive interview with BoardGameWire in 2023.

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