MingYang Lu’s puzzle fighter-style board game Re;MATCH has had a storming start to its Kickstarter campaign, picking up almost $250,000 from over 1,250 backers with half of the month-long crowdfund still to go. In this sponsored interview, Lu talks about why his design looks to derive fun from game mastery rather than discovery, the importance of conventions for small publishers, and why AI art “cheapens creativity”.

Hi Ming! A big part of your design philosophy for Re;MATCH is centred around the difference between ‘mastery’ and ‘discovery’. Can you give an overview of what you mean by those terms?

Yeah! So I’ve developed this personal philosophy about the different types of fun designers can incorporate into hobby board games, and I currently feel there are two main types.

First is Discovery, which is the fun you get from being presented with new information to respond to. This could mean seeing new cards revealed in a shop for an engine or deck builder game, or encountering a new enemy or event card in a miniatures game.

Second is Mastery, which is instead the fun derived from realizing new combos or optimizations with the options you already have. This could involve learning the optimal strategies in a roll-and-write game, or realizing the political intricacies between the factions in Root.

I don’t think these two types of fun are mutually exclusive. In video games, particularly single player ones, both are almost mandatory for a great experience.

Can you give us an overview of Re;MATCH, its design and mechanisms, and how that sets it towards either mastery or discovery?

Happily! Re;MATCH a 1 vs 1 competitive fighting game inspired by Puzzle Fighting games. Players take turns pulling connected and matching marbles from a tray of marbles, and the color and number of marbles you pull will resolve a corresponding attack on your character’s move list.

In the same vein as my first game, Re;ACT, it is a skill expression game that focuses primarily on mastery type fun. All of your abilities are shown upfront, and you must figure out how to use these options to win. There are no event decks to shake things up mid game, and no new options to consider as you play. The fun in Re;MATCH is more about seeing the floor of possibilities open up as you start to understand the system and the characters.

This is pretty standard for fighting video games though. In those games, after selecting your character, you can immediately pause to see the massive list of your abilities and combos, and it’s up to you to learn how to use them to win.

How do you think mastery relates to complexity? And what are the design challenges for a game like Re;MATCH, in terms of getting that balance right?

Mastery and complexity are not directly related in my mind. Most abstract games provide fun exclusively through mastery. From Chess to Hive, the complexity might be low, but the potential for skill expression is high, leading to repeated plays being the source of joy in the game.

How do you see mastery vs discovery-style titles doing in the current board game hobby landscape, especially when it comes to crowdfunding campaigns and online marketing?

I’ve noticed that in recent years, hobby game releases – games that aren’t party games and generally cost $30 or more – tend to focus on discovery rather than mastery. With so many games being sold on vibes and people posting their opinions or reviews after just a few or even only one playthrough, it’s more important than ever to make sure that first game experience is as smooth and perfect as possible.

Games that front load too much information typically don’t have a smooth first game experience, so you want to slowly drip out the options a player can take. Giving a player a deck of cards with a ton of variety and telling them not to worry about what’s inside that deck upfront is a great way to do this, as you’ll discover new and cool options every single time you draw a different card. However, such randomness can make one group’s first game wildly different from another’s. So this wide variety of cards that feel different actually needs to produce very consistently similar outputs, ensuring that most first games deliver as optimal of an experience as possible.

I think this meta has produced a lot of games that feel incredibly satisfying on your first playthrough, constantly offering new options to explore or challenges to overcome, but don’t really hold that spark after repeated playthroughs.

Of course there are games that successfully offer lots of both types of fun, and I think those are the games that we remember. All of the most replayable deck building games are great examples of games that offer both!

I’ve already seen this game shared on social media, especially from people spotting it at Pax Unplugged last year – and I think part of that is its use of bright colours, those attention-grabbing marbles and that it generally doesn’t look like most of the other board games out there. Was that an intentional decision, in terms of potential marketing, or is this just how you wanted the game to be?

The artstyle was certainly intentional. The hardest part of selling games, or anything really, is getting people to even notice it in the first place. For Re;ACT, featuring very large acrylic standees with bases that can hold tokens was driven by what would make people stop and look when passing by the game at a convention.

Re;MATCH, however, is a really old design. When I first came up with the very first iteration of Re;MATCH, I was inspired by my favorite game at the time, Battlecon, with its very asymmetric characters and fully open information, brain-burning game play, and the idea of using marbles as a component due to the popularity of Potion Explosion and Gizmos at the time.

But after learning many lessons with Re;ACT, I realized that Re;MATCH needed a much more colorful and eye catching art style to match the energy of the marble tower.

How did you find artists PsyOptima and machimile, and what was your process in terms of getting to the final artwork? Did you have strong ideas early on, and how much were you guided by those artists / were they guided by you as the process progressed?

Both of them were actually artists on my previous fan projects! Just between Anna’s Roundtable, Genshin Tarot, and Star Rail Tarot, I’ve commissioned over 400 artists. My vision for Re;MATCH was a much bolder and funkier aesthetic compared to Re;ACT, and both of these artists were perfect for that.

Having worked with so many artists over the years, I’ve also grown pretty comfortable acting as an art director for my teams. I’m certainly no drawer, but I’ve learned how to communicate effectively to guide my team towards my visions.

You’ve been very frank online in your opinions about AI generated imagery being used within the board game industry. Why do you think some publishers are leaning into it, despite the well-publicised concerns around copyright, ethics and the environmental impact?

I’ve become increasingly frustrated about the use of genAI to replace or supplement artists in games. To me, the issue is very existential. I am not surprised that already massively successful publishers are leaning into using AI art. There have always been companies trying to squeeze profit out of any artistic medium, from movies to books and beyond. But AI slop feels different from just disingenuous cash grabs. Environmental impacts and stolen work is one part of it, but the idea of letting AI produce the art we consume really cheapens creativity as a whole.

The joy of creativity is so fundamental to life, and the spark of inspiration passed from one person to the next is so vital for human progress. If people continue to consume these things, be it AI art in games, AI written screenplays, or AI generated music, I fear that the very light of human existence will dim.

What would you say to smaller publishers and solo operators who believe they can only bring their projects to completion by leaning on AI generators?

I can see the argument from new designers who want to make games but feel like AI is the most effective way to make their games ready for sale, either because they can’t find a publisher or they can’t afford to pay for art. To these people I would ask: Why do you want to make games? Why do you play games yourself?

I think games can be art, just like novels, music, and movies can be art. The reason I enjoy any of these things is intrinsically tied to the shared human experience I feel when consuming them. A board game’s only component other than rules are its visuals, so I believe the human intentionality behind how the game looks is just as important as how it plays. The artists who want to paint are just as passionate as the designers who want to make good games, so don’t cut them out of the process! There are tons of affordable artists on VGen, and you can always just pick up a pen and make simple drawings yourself! “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations,” so let the limitations of your budget or your art skills be part of your creative process. Just look at how Stardew Valley or Undertale were made!

In aiming for the mastery experience, does that mean you’re not too concerned about expanding this game? Because it looks to me to be ripe for expansions, especially in terms of new fighter characters. How does that fit into your mastery and discoverability theory?

I definitely want to keep adding more characters to both Re;ACT and Re;MATCH! In fact, receiving new characters and discovering their interactions with existing ones is the main source of discovery type fun in these games. This is similar to TCGs, where every new set front loads you with a ton of new options to tinker with.

But the cost of a new character for these games is much higher than just adding more variance to a deck of cards or more enemies in a miniatures game. Not only does each character require a ton of assets, but every new character is exponentially more difficult to balance and integrate successfully into the game. This is why I’ve made additional characters our primary stretch goal targets back during Re;ACT and now Re;MATCH!

Can you give us a little background about your time in the board game industry – where did you start out, and how did you get to here?

Sure! I guess I first started experimenting with making card games like many other kids: my friend (Eric Zeringue, who still helps me with game design today) and I designed our very own very bad TCG. In college, I took things a bit more seriously by designing my own pretty bad deck builder based on isekai anime, and then I designed a not so bad fan game based on the indie video game Crawl (one of my favorite indie games of all time).

I then just kept making fan games, and eventually, I made one for Fire Emblem and posted it on Reddit. This one kind of blew up, and Kotaku even wrote an article covering it. I then just kept making print and play fan games and posting them online. I did one for Code Geass, Darling in the FranXX, and Persona 5, among several others that never saw the light of day.

Right around the time I designed the Darling in the FranXX game, I also designed the very first version of Re;MATCH. I brought it to a prototyping convention, posted it to YouTube, entered it into a design competition, and eventually signed it to the publisher Penguin and Panda, who renamed it Sento. After that, I met Chris Lin, who had his very own design for TCG that I enjoyed the core of. While Sento progressed with Penguin and Panda, I started working with Chris to completely redesign his TCG into a board game instead of a TCG, which eventually became Re;ACT.

After Covid hit, it became clear that Penguin and Panda wouldn’t be able to publish Sento, so I focused entirely on Re;ACT, brought it to several conventions, obtained my US citizenship, funded it on Kickstarter, and then quit my job to pursue board games full time.

You’ve run several Kickstarter campaigns before, for Re;ACT – The Arts of War in 2024 as well as several for dice and standee collections and other accessories. What were your big lessons learned through those campaigns, and how are they applicable to running the campaign for Re;MATCH?

Honestly, I’m still figuring things out myself [laughs]. But I will say that the most important thing for me is to always be authentic and only make things I would want to buy myself. Doing something purely to make money is a slippery slope, and I constantly remind myself that if I wanted to just make money, I would’ve stayed at my comfortable 9 to 5 desk job.

But if someone asked me for some more practical advice, specific to running a board game Kickstarter, I would say to just get your game in front of as many eyes as possible beforehand. Bring it to conventions, post playthroughs, and do whatever you can to make it eye-catching. Obviously the game needs to be good for people to stick around, but no one will know if it’s a good game if they don’t sit down to try it first! For Re;ACT, I brought it to Pax Unplugged, Gen Con, and ProtoATL two years in a row before we launched. Re;MATCH moved a bit faster, with me taking it to Pax East, Origins, Gen Con, and Pax Unplugged all in the same year.

That’s a lot of conventions! I think there’s a feeling among smaller publishers that it’s a big financial hit to attend multiple cons a year, and it can be hard to stand out against the competition on show floors. What advice would you give for attending conventions as a small publisher yourself?

Definitely agreed that cons are expensive, and I started small as well! In 2023, I attended Gen Con by myself and just offered ticketed event demos. Two of the people who played my games loved them so much that they ended up helping me teach demos at Gen Con in 2024 and 2025! Hosting events at Gen Con is free (outside the cost of travel), and in 2023 I stayed together with over 20 other indie designers and publishers in a big Airbnb to save on cost.

Another cheap option is prototyping and protospiel conventions. I attend ProtoATL nearly every single year, and its by far one of my favorite weekends every year. Many of the early prototype photos of Re;MATCH come from ProtoATL! The badges are very cheap, and you get your prototype ripped apart and rebuilt so many times that you make more progress in three days than you would have in three months. You also make so many meaningful connections with other designers and publishers, who are often avid supporters of games themselves!

I recommend exhibiting at a consumer convention only after gaining experience pitching games to strangers. Prototyping cons and hosting events lets you practice with a captive audience, but working at the booths of established publishers is a great way to practice pitching to passing customers. (I’m always hiring as well!) Another great opportunity is the Indie Games Night Market, which New Mill Industries has hosted at Pax Unplugged for the last two years. This event gives indie designers a single table to sell a small print run (think five to 50 copies) of their game, often with homemade elements.

Once you are ready, Pax Unplugged is by far the best choice as an indie publisher to exhibit at. Unlike Gen Con, Pax really cares about indies (see Indie Games Night Market), has a strong culture of inclusivity, and doesn’t allow AI grifters into their show! Standing out at a convention is definitely very hard though, and I’m still figuring that step out for myself. My booths are pretty basic looking still, but working with really great artists has worked out very well for me, so I’d recommend that as well!

I saw that you’re providing access to the full game on Tabletop Simulator for free. How important do you think that will be for discoverability, and how do you think that balances against the chance some people will just use the digital version and not back the physical campaign?

Super important. Personally speaking for board game Kickstarters, if I don’t see a playable demo, I am very unlikely to pledge. Even if I don’t have the time to personally try it, not allowing backers to try the game before they buy signals to me that the publisher lacks confidence in the game. A good game should make players want to buy it after playing it, end of story.

Not to mention the benefit of getting so many more eyes on your game to tell you what is bad about your game before you hit the irreversible button to start printing! For me, there are absolutely no downsides to having the game fully playable for free digitally during a Kickstarter, and I try really hard to ensure it’s available long before that as well.

What are your ideal goals for this campaign – what does a success look like for you, and how do you ideally see the rest of the year panning out?

For me, I’d like to surpass the number of backers I had on Re;ACT and POND as a minimum. Re;ACT had 1,730 backers, and POND had 1,900 backers. If Re;MATCH hits at least 2,200 backers, that will indicate a consistent growth trajectory for me as a publisher, so that is my real goal.

After Re;MATCH, I’ll be working on Season 2 of Re;ACT, along with several unannounced secret projects I’ve been working on for quite some time now, so please look forward to them!

The Re’MATCH Kickstarter campaign runs until March 31.

The post Why Kickstarter success Re;MATCH’s designer is focused on player mastery rather than the dopamine hit of discovery [sponsored] first appeared on .

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.

The post Pandemic creator Matt Leacock on fighting for designers’ rights, working with effective developers and his publisher ‘pet peeves’ 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.

—

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 .