Maestro Media is opening up the publishing, licensing, manufacturing and retail infrastructure behind its own games to outside designers and publishers, including companies looking for a North American publishing partner.
Maestro founder and CEO Javon Frazier said, “The hardest part of this industry has never been the ideas. It is everything after them. Getting your design in front of a publisher, funding the development, entering distribution, landing it on a shelf.
“We built a machine to do that for our own titles alongside some of the largest licensors in the world. Overture by Maestro Media opens that machine to everybody else.”
Maestro says Overture will allow other companies to use its existing operations for areas including development and licensing, production, manufacturing, crowdfunding, direct-to-consumer sales and retail distribution.
The company has already struck several deals along those lines, including announcing in the summer that it would publish a new North American edition of Zoch Verlag’s Ghost Blitz from January 2027.
Frazier said of the Ghost Blitz deal ahead of unveiling the game at this year’s Gen Con, “Ghost Blitz has sold more than one million copies in 20-plus languages over 15 years. Most North American families have never seen it on a shelf. That’s not a demand problem. It’s a distribution problem.
“That’s the gap we built Maestro Media to close. Crowdfunding, direct-to-consumer, and retail working as one engine, with distribution partners already in place across North America.”
Peterson Rodrigues, CEO of D20 Culture, said, “We’re excited to work with Maestro because we see the same opportunity they do: great games shouldn’t be limited by borders.
“Bringing these titles to players around the world, in their own languages and through partners who understand their markets, is exactly the kind of collaboration we want to be part of.”
Game designers will get their first opportunity to pitch original tabletop games via the new operation through a month-long submission window running from January 1 to 30 next year.
The company says it has worked with more than 40 licensed properties to date, and shipped more than 400,000 products, while Frazier has raised more than $16m across 16 crowdfunding campaigns – although almost 60% of that total comprises the two Binding of Isaac projects.
The company added that Ryan Lumax has been promoted to vice president and head of games at the company, having joined last year after almost eight years at Canadian distributor Lion Rampant Imports.
Lion Rampant was acquired by Asmodee in 2019, when Lumax was working as head purchaser. He became a purchasing manager at the business in 2023.
Lumax said, “I spent eight years on the buying side, and the games that didn’t make it were almost never the bad ones.
“They were good games whose creators ran out of road somewhere between the prototype and the pallet. That is the gap Overture by Maestro Media closes.”
Back to the history of New York City! We have begun with the city’s origin before the founding of the United States and left off in the 1880s in the last post – when New York was undeniably the economic and cultural center of the United States. Today, we are covering New York in its most iconic form as a moloch of steel, concrete, and millions of people. A chronological narrative will not help us here. Instead, we adopt a thematic approach and look the economy, construction, infrastructure, and culture which made New York from the late 19th to the mid-20th century the model city of high modernity.
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New York had been America’s most dynamic hub for trade and manufacturing for decades. Yet the city’s riches had been shared unequally, just like the risks in producing them. In the late 19th and early 20th century, New York’s working class grew more assertive and found more political support to improve their lives: For example, the three Tenement House Acts of 1867, 1879, and 1901 mandated such luxuries as windows in every apartment and toilets in every building.
The 1909/1910 textile worker strikes led to improved pay and shorter hours. Just one year later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower Manhattan burned down and 146 garment workers died – many of them unable to escape through the staircase because management kept the doors locked during shifts. The fire catastrophe led to a public outcry against such practices and New York state introduced better workplace and fire safety regulations.
The garment workers were in some ways emblematic for the New York working class – most of them were young immigrants (especially Jewish and Italian). In another, they represented a shift – almost all of them were women, and their struggle for better working conditions mirrored the force of the American women’s movement in the political arena.
In one way, however, they represented New York’s present, but not its future: The industrialization of the 19th century had turned New York into the largest manufacturing hub of the world. Yet manufacturing, the physical production of goods, ran out of steam when the improved productivity provided most people in the United States with most of their basic needs. Eager customers were thus not to be taken for granted anymore. Instead, they had to be wooed and their desires – for items of whose existence they had recently been still ignorant – awakened. New York became a hotbed for the growing advertisement industry (with which Madison Avenue is synonymous until today) as well as for shopping (here, Fifth Avenue is the symbolic street). Our age of trends, shopping as a leisure activity, and overconsumption cannot be imagined without New York.
In the 19th century, foreign capital had funded the expansion into the American West, but now the capital flows reversed: American capital was instrumental in financing the Allies’ Great War effort. At the end of the Great War, America was for the first time a net creditor nation. Its role in the international financial system expanded after the war as American loans enabled defeated Germany to pay its reparations to the Allies (who, in turn, paid off their American war loans). At the same time as New York took London’s place as the premier finance hub in the world, America at large withdrew from the world under a renewed isolationism and the xenophobia which came with the Red Scare after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Political upheaval did not stop the investment craze of the 1920s: When a bomb exploded in Wall Street in 1920 and killed 30 people, stock trading resumed normally the next day – much in contrast to 1920 Wall Street (Perepau Llistosella, Looping Games), where the bombing marks the end of the game (and players hope to have made all their profits by then).
The New York-based financial system was robust enough to withstand such external shocks, but it collapsed under its own contradictions: The stock market boom of the 1920 led to ever more capital pouring into the New York Stock Exchange (at the expense of all other forms of investments, for example the American overseas loans on which the global financial system was now based). The spectacular gains fueled a debt-based speculation bubble which burst in October 1929. The inadequate response by central banks which did nothing to combat the contraction of the monetary supply led to an extended, global economic crisis – the Great Depression.
Unemployment and poverty plagued New York much like the rest of the world in the 1930s. The city bounced back through ambitious public works initiated by the energetic new mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (many of them funded by New Deal funds in a cross-party cooperation between the Republican LaGuardia and the Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt). Still, New York’s economy only recovered when demand for manufactured goods skyrocketed because of World War II: The industrial giant rose one last time. One example of New York’s awesome productive capacity may suffice: From 1941 to 1945, the New York Navy Yard built more warships than all of Japan combined. The United States won World War II because of their industrial productivity, and New York was the beating heart of it.
Construction: Upwards
New York had always grown. From the 1880s on, the city grew in a heretofore barely used dimension – upwards. The twin innovations of the elevator and steel frame construction allowed for building heights which had been considered impractical, if not impossible, before. While New York was not the pioneer of these technologies – that merit belongs to Chicago – they were accepted in Manhattan on a scale not known before. Ever more “skyscrapers”, as the tall buildings were soon to be known, sprang up between the Hudson and the East River, giving the city a characteristic look from far away. New York’s skyline has been continually changing, but since then, it has always been dominated by skyscrapers – as has been the image of the city in the public imagination.
Board games are no exception. No theme is as prevalent in games about New York as the construction of skyscrapers. Some are specific, like Flatiron (Isra C./Shei S., Ludonova) which has players build the eponymous Flatiron Building together, but many could be set in any city with tall buildings – but as they are about tall buildings, their designers and publishers think they fit best for a New York setting: Manhattan (Karl-Heinz Koch, Fagus) is a variant of Acquire (Sid Sackson, Avalon Hill) to which the third dimension is added. New York City (Stefan Feld, Queen Games) is a remake of Rialto (Stefan Feld, TMG) – just that the struggle for majorities in Venetian districts of the original, fought with councilmembers, has been replaced by a struggle for majorities in New York boroughs, fought with – you guessed it – skyscrapers.
The skyscrapers got ever taller: The first steel frame buildings in the 1880s and 1890s were well below 100 meters. In 1909, the Singer Building (187m) was the first structure in New York to exceed the height of Europe’s church spires – the first time that the world’s tallest building stood in New York. The city would retain that honor until the 1970s with a succession of ever taller skyscrapers.
The most iconic one was the Empire State Building whose construction was begun in October 1929 – just weeks before the stock market crash. It became the most visible sign of the economic crisis: Even five years after its completion in 1931, half of the Empire State Building’s office space remained empty. Like the rest of New York, it recovered by the 1940s. It would remain the world’s tallest building until it was overtaken by another New York icon in 1973 – the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Infrastructure: Transport and Leisure
New York did not only grow vertically. Originally, the city had been confined to Manhattan Island and gradually expanded into what became the Bronx. In 1898, New York merged with its neighbor Brooklyn (itself America’s third-largest city at the time) as well Queens county and Staten Island to become a massive metropolis of more than three million inhabitants.
This sprawling moloch, however, was initially still centered on Manhattan, as most people worked there and thus couldn’t live too far away: In 1900, more than half of New Yorkers lived in Manhattan. That changed with the construction of the New York subway from 1900 on. New York was late to embark on such a project (London had started in the 1860s), but it was undertaken with the characteristic boldness of the city and soon became the largest in the world.
Thus, the geography of the city changed: New Yorkers could work in Manhattan, but commute every day from one of the other boroughs. As land there was a lot cheaper, a residential construction boom set in, and by the 1920s, Brooklyn had become the most populous borough of New York.
The growth of the city required its transport and leisure infrastructure to keep up. One man would become synonymous with it from the 1920s on: Robert Moses, starting out on the Long Island State Park Commission in 1924, became responsible for all kinds of parks, beaches, roads, bridges, and tunnels for both the state and the city of New York over the next decades.
These projects shaped the face of New York: The parks, both in the center and on the outskirts, provided very real benefits in one of the largest, most densely settled cities in the world. And the transport projects took inspiration from the new trend of motorized individual transport – and reinforced it.
Large-scale engineering projects like these go beyond the mere technical aspects. Moses’s creations were shaped by his ideas about how society should look like. For example, already his very first project – Jones Beach State Park on Long Island – outlined his ideal: It provided New Yorkers with a beautifully designed leisure park on the seashore. They arrived there after a pleasurable drive on the new parkways through lush greenery – by car, as no train or subway station was built in Jones Beach, and the bridges crossing the parkway were too low for buses to pass through. This lack of public transport meant that Jones Beach was exclusively accessible for the middle classes.
An even more striking example is Riverside Park in Manhattan along the Hudson River. Around a third of the park is in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Harlem, two thirds in the predominantly White Morningside Heights and the Upper West Side. These southern two thirds were liberally sprinkled with dozens and dozens of playgrounds, the third in Harlem only received one – and here, the iron lattice at the toilets was “decorated” with little ape sculptures.
As you can see, Robert Moses was not quite a nice guy. We’ll see more of him in the next post in this series!
Culture: Roaring Twenties
America’s new, more assertive role in the world after World War I also increased global interest in the country’s cultural output. American literature developed a new confidence, and American jazz became the hottest new music around the world. New York as America’s cultural center both attracted established artists (like the jazz musicians Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong who both made the city their home in 1923) and produced its own original creations (like the Harlem Renaissance, which marked the first time that a movement of Black American writers and visual artists left their imprint on the wider American cultural consciousness).
One of the institutions of the 1920s New York cultural scene has gotten its own board game: 1923 Cotton Club (Pau Carles, Looping Games). The historical Cotton Club was founded in Harlem in 1923 and soon became the venue to see many of the finest jazz musicians – an attraction not only for regular New Yorkers, but also for the celebrities of the time. That, in turn, made the club even more attractive… well, not for everyone. While the performers on stage were Black, the club would not admit Black patrons (except for the rare Black celebrity). That is not explicitly addressed by the board game, but attentive players will notice that the almost all of the artists which can perform at the players’ clubs are Black, almost all of the celebrities which may attend the club (and are the chief source of points) are White – as are the gangsters.
“Gangsters?” you may ask. “In a game about running a nightclub?” Yes, as we are in the age of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. This fleeting episode (1920 to 1933), and the massive expansion of organized crime which came with it, is almost as irresistible to board game designers as the construction of skyscrapers. Sometimes, it is only the corollary to another activity (like in 1923 Cotton Club).
Of course, all these mafia games could be set elsewhere. After all, alcohol was prohibited everywhere in the United States. New York, however, is irresistible as the biggest city, where presumably also the biggest crimes are committed. It is no coincidence that both Superman and Batman, those heroes of the Golden Age of Comics, fight their mastermind criminal enemies in fictionalized versions of New York (Metropolis and Gotham, respectively). Apropos: Age of Comics: The Golden Years (Giacomo Cimini/Sónia Gonçalves, Lirius Games) allows players to run a comic book publisher, develop ideas, print, and sell comic books… and of course, they do so in New York.
For a concise introduction, especially focused on local politics, see Lankevich, George J.: New York City. A Short History, New York University Press, New York City, NY/London 1998.
If you want a treatment which is both more in-depth and more journalistic (and lavishly illustrated) and don’t mind its history practically ending around 1970, see the book version of the 17-hour PBS documentary from 1999: Burns, Ric/Sanders, James/Ades, Lisa: New York. An Illustrated History, Knopf, New York City, NY 2001.
An academic conference exploring everything from publishers’ environmental claims and sustainable manufacturing to Pokémon card investing and onboarding new players is set to kick off tomorrow, as researchers examine the many interpretations of this year’s theme ‘Green’.
While many of this year’s presentations explore environmental issues, the conference’s broad ‘Green’ theme also encompasses topics including newcomer experiences, representation, identity, game history and design philosophy.
All of the talks are set to be recorded and made publicly available after the event, which takes place on July 15 and 16.
Example sessions include Plastic Dystopia: Ideas towards More Sustainable Miniaturing Practices, which aims to propose new ways of minimising the ecological footprint of the hobby, and How Green Is Green Play? Gamewashing in Analog Board Games, examines what the researchers describe as “gamewashing” – where environmental themes or sustainability messaging may not be reflected by a game’s actual mechanisms or player experience.
Several sessions examine how environmental themes are represented in commercial games, while Daybreak co-designer Matteo Menapace will be providing a keynote speech discussing the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning title and how its realistic and utopian theme can be an antidote to capitalist realism.
Elsewhere, researchers from the University of York analyse five published climate change board games, arguing that many reinforce solutions rooted in existing economic assumptions rather than encouraging players to foster deeper engagement with the colonial and capitalist roots of the climate crisis, while another presentation explores how the relations between humans and animals are depicted in Uwe Rosenberg’s design Atiwa.
The full schedule for the conference is available here, and anyone interested in registering to view the panels and keynotes can do so here.
As board game publishers continue to grapple with volatile manufacturing costs, tariffs and freight disruption, UK-based Eurydice Games is celebrating reaching almost £400,000 in lifetime revenue without ever outsourcing production.
The Newcastle upon Tyne-based company has just completed its 7,000th box of FlickFleet, the dexterity-based tabletop space skirmish game it has manufactured entirely in-house since launching in 2018.
Every copy of the base game and its six expansions has been laser cut and assembled by Eurydice co-founder Paul Willcox in his garage in York, with the company estimating it has now produced well over 400,000 individual laser-cut components.
The unusual approach has allowed Eurydice to build a business that has generated almost £400,000 over eight years. Just under £250,000 has come through crowdfunding, with the remainder generated through direct website and convention sales.
While many indie game designers and small publishers view overseas manufacturing as an inevitable step in the process, Eurydice believes its experience demonstrates that remaining in-house can make commercial sense for certain types of games.
“When we ran our first campaign we had no idea how much money we’d raise, so we investigated doing a manufacturing run so we weren’t going to be caught out if it went wild,” Eurydice director Jackson Pope told BoardGameWire.
“As it was we 101% funded with four hours to spare at the end of the campaign, so stuck to laser-cutting as planned.
“…we would have needed well over £25k [to outsource manufacturing] in that first campaign, and obviously inflation means that number is much higher now.
Eurydice director Jackson Pope with FlickFleet’s latest expansion, Box of Xeno Flicks 2
Instead, narrowly crossing its target saw the team stick with its original plan of producing the game themselves – and that decision has shaped the business ever since.
Rather than treating each expansion as a standalone production run, Eurydice launches a new crowdfunding campaign each year, combining demand for the latest release with reprints of older products into a single manufacturing cycle.
Because production takes place in-house, the publisher says it can economically manufacture extremely small quantities of older products, with some reprints numbering as few as 100 copies.
The company believes that flexibility has enabled it to support a product line that would have been difficult to finance using conventional manufacturing methods.
“In an industry with a lot of indie companies, we are unusual in that we make the game ourselves, on a laser-cutter in Paul’s garage,” Pope said.
“… [rolling] up reprints of everything into a single large print run… has allowed us to reduce costs by placing one large order with each of our suppliers.
“As a result, we’ve been able to release a vast range of ship models, which would have required huge print runs and capital to fund through traditional injection moulding manufacturing.”
That manufacturing model has also had knock-on advantages for the company in fulfilling its games.
Components from FlickFleet
Instead of waiting for overseas production and freight, Eurydice says it often begins shipping rewards within months of a crowdfunding campaign ending, with complete fulfilment typically finished within a year.
But there are inevitable trade-offs, Pope added, with each copy of FlickFleet or one of its expansions taking Willcox hours to make – as well as having to be piled up in his home ahead of fulfillment.
The operation has also proven vulnerable to disruption, too, with the laser cutter purchased after the company’s first successful crowdfunding campaign catching fire in 2022 while Eurydice was fulfilling another project, forcing an emergency replacement before production could continue.
Even so, Pope believes recent geopolitical disruption has reinforced some of the advantages of keeping manufacturing close to home. But the model is not without commercial limitations, of course.
Despite considering a larger retail print run, Pope says the amount of labour required to manufacture each copy, coupled with international shipping costs from the UK, has made broad retail distribution difficult. Eurydice currently sells through crowdfunding, direct sales, conventions and just under a dozen UK retailers.
He also stressed that garage manufacturing is not a universal solution.
“It’s definitely an option, if you’re prepared to put in the work. And it is a lot of work,” he said.
“But it lets you do things that would be prohibitively expensive through traditional manufacturing and smaller runs of interesting ideas that would never sell tens of thousands of copies but should still see the light of day.
“If you’re confident you can sell thousands of copies, you’re definitely better using traditional manufacturing.”
Eurydice is planning to launch its seventh FlickFleet expansion, Box of Xeno Flicks 2, on Gamefound in October.
Czech Games Edition chief executive Petr Murmak has confirmed US tariffs are the main reason American customers will pay about $30 more than their European counterparts for the publisher’s newly announced Kingdom Come: Deliverance board game, underlining how import duties are now directly shaping board game pricing.
The publisher revealed it has eyes on a Spiel Essen release for the heavy euro adventure game, a Tomáš Holek and Vlaada Chvátil co-design based on the hit medieval RPG video game – which has sold more than 16 million copies across the original release and its 2025 sequel.
That announcement included the news that the game will cost €149.99 (~$170) in Europe, but $199.99 in the US – a situation Murmak explained in BoardGameGeek post was largely down to US tariffs on European imports.
“Shipping to US also costs us something, so we have slightly less profit on one copy in US than in EU. Moreover there is uncertainty about tariffs in the future (they might go up – there were some threats already from US government), or dollar might go down like last year…”
Although board game publishers have repeatedly warned that tariffs would push retail prices higher, few have publicly broken down exactly how those increases translate into MSRP in different regions.
BoardGameWire has previously spoken to publishers who said they had already begun passing on to customer both US tariffs on China and the lower rates applied to European manufacturing, while absorbing part of the additional costs themselves in an effort to avoid psychologically difficult price points.
Several board game publishers warned last year that some consumers had yet to fully appreciate how significantly prices could rise once tariff-affected print runs began reaching retail.
Ongoing uncertainty about further US tariff hikes have also heavily impact international freight in recent weeks, with rates on routes between Asia and the US east coast, and Asia and Europe, surging to their highest levels since the Red Sea crisis two years ago, according to a report from the Financial Times earlier this week.
It said the price of a 40ft container between China and the US east coast rose to $7,880 last week, up 62% from a month earlier, while rates between China and the Mediterranean jumped 47% to $6,431 – citing data from shipping platform Freightos.
That surge has come in anticipation of new US tariffs next month, the report added, bringing forward the annual increase in shipping demand that usually starts as retailers filled inventories before the Black Friday and Christmas shopping periods.
CGE said it would be releasing the game in limited quantity waves, citing the need to ensure a high production quality for the “massive, component-rich project”.
Vlaada Chvátil in a promotional image for Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game
Game co-creator Vlaada Chvátil’s pedigree include the huge-selling word game Codenames, the Mage Knight Board Game and Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization, while his co-designer Tomáš Holek scored a huge success two years ago with his multi-award-winning space exploration eurogame SETI.
Chvátil said, “I’m genuinely enjoying working on this game. Amazing source material, a co-designer whose approach to games is very close to my own, the care and support the CGE team brings to every project, and, above all, gameplay that feels both epic and playful at the same time.
“That creates a design playground where every card, quest, skill, and encounter is pure joy to work on.
“Every time Tomáš and I sit down for another playtest, look over the starting setup, reveal the opening cards, and watch the possibilities unfold before us, we inevitably glance at each other and think: damn, this game is still so much fun.”
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