Asmodee posted record sales of €524m during the last quarter of 2025 despite a slump in its US performance, with trading card game earnings in Europe acting as a driving force for the business.
The board game giant’s overall net sales jumped 22.2% across October to December 2025 compared to the same period a year earlier, with the performance of products it distributes for other companies surging more than 50%.
Net sales for games published by Asmodee itself fell almost 13% year-on-year in the quarter, however, weighed down by US net sales slumping 23% to €70.4m.
That drop saw the US fall behind both France and the UK in Q3 in terms of the company’s highest-performing countries for net sales, with France surging 47% year-on-year to over €111m, and the UK growing 41% to €82.7m.
The US had previously outperformed all other countries for Q3 net sales for at least the past two years, Asmodee’s quarterly sales results show. Prior to that, individual country data for Asmodee was not publicly released while under former owner Embracer Group.
Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler said in the company’s latest quarterly report that successful TCG releases in Europe across Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering and One Piece had driven the record Q3 results.
He added that lower sell-in to larger retailer for some of its own products had contributed to the sinking US result in Q3, despite saying that “overall consumer demand on our products remained stable”.
Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler
The company’ chief financial officer, Andrea Gasperini, added in the company’s Q3 earnings call that “unfavorable FX exchange rate exposure since the beginning of the year” was also to blame, as was a “normalising” of the performance of Asmodee’s own TCG Star Wars Unlimited compared to its launch year of 2024.
Koegler added during the Q3 earnings call, “Let’s remember also that the beginning of the year has been quite shaken up in everybody’s supply strategies – ours, the retailers – by the various announcements on the tariffs. And I think that it has been a constantly evolving situation where I’m quite proud of how the teams reacted.
“Once we’ve said that, of course, let’s not underestimate the impact of foreign exchange, which is quite material in the decrease. And secondly, what’s important to look at beyond our own sell-in performance, which is what we sell to retailers, is the sell-out.
“As I did say we have, since the beginning of the year, overperformed the market, and even in Q3 it was a quarter for the Christmas period that was very much focused on lower price point products. We captured very strong growth with Exploding Kittens and did have some headwinds on higher price point products.
“But I would say in the grand scheme of things: first of all, it’s fine, our portfolio is diversified, and secondly, it’s limited to the US, so we should expect some better trends in the future.”
When asked in the Q3 earnings call how confident he was in Asmodee’s own studios’ ability to return to growth, Koegler said, “Yes, we had some negative developments on the games, but if you look at the sellout, which is the sales to consumers in the US, for instance, the market was relatively flat, and our sellout was in line with this, which means that we still have positive outlooks for the future.
“Our performance was impacted, especially by, I would say, some inventory positions and retailers’ purchase strategies. Now, if we look forward, first of all, the vast majority of our revenue is coming from existing titles. That’s the first thing that’s important, and we are constantly working on engaging consumers on those.
“You saw the recent announcements on Catan and Ticket to Ride with Netflix, all of this with the objective to further increase brand awareness and visibility, and in the future, generate additional sales.
“If we look at some of the products we’re looking forward to in terms of new releases for next year, we have announced the new LEGO game in the Ninjago franchise being released the same time as the Ninjago anniversary.
“We have Azul Kids coming out. We have Dino Picnic, we have the future sets of Star Wars Unlimited. We have a refresh of Ticket to Ride Europe. So I would say that it will be still an active year.
“What’s important, if you look back at the historical performance of Asmodee, is that some years it’s strongly driven by trading cards, and in the other years, usually when trading cards are less strong, you have a relay that’s coming from board games.”
Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler was asked during the company’s quarterly results presentation whether the company was ready to make “more meaningful” acquisitions rather than small bolt-on deals.
He said, “Without being specific, the activity in the pipeline is in accordance with our plan. The smaller acquisitions are faster. IP acquisitions and asset deals are faster to execute. I’m satisfied.”
Two weeks ago, we’ve looked at the first period of Soviet liberalization under Nikita Khrushchev from the 1950s on. While these reforms ended the era of Stalinist totalitarianism, they petered out when Khrushchev lost interest in them and was eventually overthrown and replaced by the more conservative Leonid Brezhnev. It would take another generation until a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, would undertake another broad reform program. These reforms – like last time, in the realms of domestic, foreign, and economic policy – are the subject of this article. Of course, you’ll also find a few board games in it!
Freer Press, Freer Elections
The Soviet Union’s political landscape had ossified under Brezhnev. This stagnation (or, if you want to phrase it more positively, hyperstability) also ruled out any experiments after Brezhnev’s death in 1982, and so the Politburo selected his loyal lieutenant Yuri Andropov. Unfortunately, Andropov was already 68 and severely ill then. He died in 1984, to be succeeded by another Brezhnevite stalwart, Konstantin Chernenko, who was similarly afflicted and even older (72 at his accession). Chernenko died in 1985. The rapid succession of aging Soviet leaders is poignantly captured in the contemporary joke: Margaret Thatcher calls Ronald Reagan: “It’s a pity you didn’t come to the funeral of the Soviet general secretary. Marvelous. A great spectacle. I’m totally going again next year.”
Cover of the English-language edition of Kremlin. Unfortunately, fake Cyrillic was once more irresistible, and so the R in Kremlin has been replaced with a Я (which would make the word Kyaemlin).
Another quasi-contemporary (1986) satirical take on the Soviet gerontocracy is Kremlin (Urs Hostettler, Fata Morgana): Players support the various Politburo members in the hopes of advancing those they have influence with to the top jobs, but many a hopeful candidate will die of stress and old age before realizing their ambitions.
After Chernenko’s death, even the most conservative Politburo members saw the need for a different tack: They elected Mikhail Gorbachev as their new leader in 1985, a real baby at age 54. Gorbachev’s reformist leanings were well-known, but he proceeded cautiously in his first year. As with Khrushchev, the big programmatic changes were first announced at a Party Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev’s first slogan for his reforms was glasnost (openness). That included sweeping changes to Soviet citizens’ freedom of expression: Gorbachev encouraged the Soviet press to scrutinize politics instead of simply parroting the party line. Dissidents were released from prison. Even non-state-sponsored demonstrations were allowed – a powerful tool to express malcontent with the government. Of course, these reforms undermined the power base of the Communist Party – but Gorbachev hoped that he could steer the ship of state in the new environment and might even benefit from a freer populace.
Even more radical were Gorbachev’s institutional reforms, usually referred to as perestroika (restructuring): The Communist Party’s monopoly on power was cut off by establishing the Congress of People’s Deputies as an independent parliament, and while the first elections in 1989 were not fully free, it was the first time that Soviet citizens could select from several candidates in a contested election. Gorbachev himself chose to base his power no longer on his role as General Secretary of the Communist Party, and instead was elected President of the Soviet Union by the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1990.
This nascent democratization drive – eventually rather envisioned than enacted – makes for the most powerful card in the last phase (1985—1991) of the Cold-War-in-a-nutshell which is Twilight Squabble (David J. Mortimer, AEG): It’s a bit of speculation on the internal and external legitimacy and attractiveness a more democratic Soviet Union could have enjoyed.
Speaking of external legitimacy and attractiveness: Gorbachev’s policies (and he himself) would prove immensely popular in the West… after he had weathered the initial suspicion. Gorbachev began to advocate for a return to détente soon after he assumed office, but US president Ronald Reagan assumed this to be a Soviet ploy. Only after Gorbachev had met Reagan at the 1986 Reykjavík summit did the president believe Gorbachev’s intentions to be genuine.
In the following years, the two of them agreed on far-reaching mutual disarmament, most notably the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Gorbachev’s immutable advocacy for arms reduction is reflected in Wir sind das Volk! – 2+2 (Richard Sivel/Peer Sylvester, Histogame) as his event card cannot be used for the arms race.
Besides the lofty realms of nuclear arms reduction, Gorbachev also had more grounded problems to deal with: The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up the failing pro-Soviet government there and had been embroiled since then in a costly and futile counter-insurgency. As the Soviet military could not present Gorbachev with a convincing roadmap on how to win the war, he decided to pull the Soviet forces out in 1988. By that time, the unsuccessful war had undermined the Soviet government’s legitimacy which had rested on its status as a military superpower, exacerbated by the new avenues of political expression open to disaffected citizens – the mothers of Soviet soldiers who fought (or had died) in Afghanistan were among the first to form associations, to pressure the government, and to protest.
In that sense, it is surprising that the withdrawal from Afghanistan can still net the Communist player points in 1989 (Jason Matthews/Ted Torgerson, GMT Games) – but the general principle holds true: The later the Soviets withdraw, the more their failure in Afghanistan becomes an asset to the opponents of Communist power.
Finally, Soviet power was the rock on which the Communist governments in Eastern Europe rested. Whenever they had been challenged – most importantly in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 – Soviet tanks had quashed the dissent. This limited sovereignty within the Eastern bloc had been the central tenet of Soviet foreign policy, after 1968 named the Brezhnev Doctrine. Gorbachev adopted a new approach: He would not militarily intervene in Eastern Europe anymore. Instead, the countries of the Warsaw Pact were free to “do it their way” – thus humorously called the Sinatra Doctrine.
Finally, Gorbachev’s reform agenda of perestroika also aimed to transform the Soviet economy. All Soviet leaders had engaged in some kind of economic reforms, so Gorbachev’s activity did not seem very surprising… until observers inside and outside of the Soviet Union realized how radically it would change the tenets of the Soviet economy, traditionally based on central planning, large state-owned companies, and very limited contacts with the outside world.
First, Gorbachev gave the state-owned companies much more leeway over what to produce and how to set prices. These market incentives were supposed to improve efficiency, but clashed with the existing structures.
Undeterred, Gorbachev went a step further and loosened the restriction on private enterprises. More Soviet citizens could start their own store or workshop and offer goods and services at their own responsibility.
Then, Gorbachev allowed for joint ventures with Western companies (provided the Soviet part owned a majority share), and even let them set up dependencies in the Soviet Union – the famous first McDonald’s restaurant in the Soviet Union opened in January 1990.
The End of the Cold War and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
Gorbachev’s daring move to end hostilities with the West was an unqualified success. In late 1989, he and US president George H.W. Bush could merrily declare together that the Cold War was over.
The consequences of Gorbachev’s foreign policy reverberated through the Eastern Bloc: The allied Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe were swept away in 1989.
Early in a game of 1989: The Democrat (blue) has already taken power in Poland and Hungary. It will be difficult for the Communist (red) to stop the ever-growing blue tide. From the Rally the Troops! implementation.
The Perestroika and Glasnost event in Wir sind das Volk! – 2+2 neatly shows the way in which Gorbachev’s reforms put stress on the system: On the one hand, it increases Soviet dominance and makes socialism more attractive (lower two icons). However, it also increases unrest in East Germany (fist icons).
Within the Soviet Union, the political freedoms granted allowed citizens to demand more freedoms. These centrifugal effects became particularly visible as most of the non-Russian republics soon had nationalist independence movements which began to eat away the Soviet Union from its ethnic fringes. Gorbachev responded by proposing a looser federation between the Soviet Republics.
The political reforms also had negative interaction with the economic reforms: On the one hand, the flurry of changes created new inefficiencies; on the other, the increased freedom of the press highlighted economic problems no matter if they were new or had existed for centuries. As Soviet economic performance thus both objectively worsened and also became more obvious to the average citizen, Gorbachev’s legitimacy eroded.
Hardliners within the Communist Party couped against Gorbachev in August 1991 to prevent the loose federation between the Soviet Republics. A coup might also spell the end for the player in the solo game Gorbachev: The Fall of Communism (R. Ben Madison, White Dog Games). It’s a States of Siege game with a twist: Whenever the marker on any of the five paths (four of which refer to various ethno-national groups in the Soviet Union, the fifth represents the Communist Party) reaches the center, the game is not lost immediately, but a coup is staged: If Gorbachev has enough elite support to weather it, he goes on to fight another day.
In history, that was not the case: While the coup failed, it made Gorbachev a lame duck. The supporters of reforms turned away from him and toward his erstwhile ally Boris Yeltsin (who had cut a much more dashing figure during the coup), and away from the Soviet Union and toward their respective ethno-national identities. Gorbachev resigned as president and the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991.
The most influential work on Gorbachev’s time in office and his policies remains Brown, Archie: The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996.
A magisterial mosaic of Soviet social, economic, and cultural life is Schlögel, Karl: The Soviet Century. Archaeology of a Lost World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 2023.
For the age of hyperstability before Gorbachev (and the discussion if it was an age of stability or stagnation), see the essays (in German, but with English abstracts) in: Belge, Boris/Deuerlein, Martin (eds.): Goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation? Perspektiven auf die sowjetische Ordnung der Brežnev-Ära, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2014.
On the transformative last third of the 20th century in Russian history, see Kotkin, Stephen: Armageddon Averted. The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001.
On the end of the Cold War, see Dockrill, Saki Ruth: The End of the Cold War Era. The Transformation of the Global Security Order, Hodder, London 2005.
For the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, see Braithwaite, Rodric: Afgantsy. The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979—1989, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2011.
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.
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.
Meeples Group co-founder Floris Toorenburg
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.”
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