We’re not going to Essen, and frankly, may never, but that won’t stop us from wishing we were going. From the mountain of games we won’t get to play in person, we’ve mined for the diamonds that we think you should keep your eyes on. Before we get to digging, we talk about Hanami,Brink, and Railway Boom.
If you don’t want to miss an episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts/Google Podcasts/Stitcher/Spotify, or add our RSS feed to your favourite app. Reviews and subscriptions really help us and would be greatly appreciated! To download the episode directly, click here.
If you’d like to discuss anything in the episode, please do so in the comments below, visit our BoardGameGeek guild, join our Discord, or Facebook Group! Any feedback is also always helpful. If you’d like to show your support for the show, we also have a Patreon with some fun rewards, and a merch store!
Timecodes:
02:14 – Hanami 12:06 – Brink 24:22 – Railway Boom 36:05 – Essen SPIEL 2026 Preview 38:16 – 1st CEO 39:24 – Robo Run 40:56 – -60° 43:49 – Apocalypse 45:31 – Kalypso 46:51 – Timespan 49:42 – 17 Dice Bets 52:51 – KumoKumo Park 54:11 – Chronocritters 56:09 – Tikal Legend 57:38 – Ancient Empires 59:10 – Almighty 1:01:41 – Old Ones Origins 1:06:02 – Courtroom: The Noir Trilogy 1:08:51 – For the Gods!
Thank you to Heart Society for generously letting us use What’s On Your Mind, Kid? from their album Wake the Queens.
Pandasaurus Games has heavily downsized its Spiel Essen booth this year, after finding it can still sell similar numbers of its hit games through Asmodee arm EPN while slashing its overheads and logistical workload.
The US publisher has shifted to using European Player Network, Asmodee‘s specialist English-language sales and distribution operation in the region, to handle its stock and sales at the giant German show – removing the need for Pandasaurus to transport and store hundreds of games, staff its own retail operation and devote much of its booth to selling them.
Pandasaurus had run substantial booths at Spiel – the world’s biggest board game fair – for several years following the Covid-19 pandemic, but told BoardGameWire its experience using EPN last year persuaded it to heavily scale back its own footprint for the 2026 show in October.
CEO Nathan McNair said Pandasaurus previously spent more than €50,000 ($57,000) attending Spiel with its larger setup, compared to between $20,000 and $25,000 under its current model.
He said games Pandasaurus expects to be hits still sell similar numbers of copies – typically 300 to 500 – under the new setup – although added that Pandasaurus now receives roughly half as much revenue per sale.
“The revenue is lower because obviously EPN will get a portion of the proceeds, but our cost is so much lower that the overall cost to revenue ratio is very similar,” McNair said.
This year EPN will handle the company’s stock and sales operation and host three Pandasaurus demo tables within its booth, while the publisher’s own, smaller stand will be focused largely on meeting space and additional demos of upcoming games.
Titles being shown off by Pandasaurus this year include Alex Cutler design Sandcastles, Machi Koro: Life from Masao Suganuma and embroidery-focused card game Fadenfroh from Jordy Adan and Alexander Pfister.
Pandasaurus’ previous large booth at Spiel Essen
McNair said, “The show is very expensive to get to and logistically trying to run a large booth half a world away is a lot. Running a show like GenCon is already a lot – but finding booth staff for the show when we need to staff 20 or more demo tables, stock games, sell games, figure out how to legally import/pay VAT/collect cash/deposit the cash in the US bank or get a correct license to take credit cards in Europe is a logistical nightmare.
“So, what we found is a way to more economically attend the show, get some marketing done, sell games to players, make sure we are demoing games and getting the meetings we need without having to spend €50,000 or more on the show itself.
“Our cost to attend with this model is roughly 1/3rd as much overhead, and while we make less per order when a game is sold our sales are actually just as strong, so players are still getting the games they want – we come close enough to ‘breaking even’ and it’s just a lot less work for us.”
McNair said US publishers “typically have a smaller footprint in continental Europe than we like to think”, and questioned the need for some English-language publishers to operate such large stands at Spiel.
“A lot of us run booths but I find it a bit strange given our limited sales in the region that so many have large booths,” he said.
“Some of course do sell and distribute in German (or other languages) themselves so that makes more sense – but for English only US publishers continental Europe isn’t our core market.
“If you look at US trade shows for the most part the only European companies with booths tend to be those that sell themselves in the US.”
He added, “I don’t want to tell other folks how to run their business and I’m a big believer that the folks with larger booths probably know more about their situation than me – so they may have found that this is really effective for them.
“I would absolutely prefer this model – it’s just a lot less work – besides the money difference I mentioned has taken the workload of prep and running the show to a fraction of what it was to try and run a larger booth in Germany.”
Part of the European Player Network booth and demo space at Spiel Essen
Pandasaurus’ decision to cut back on the size of its booth comes as Spiel itself continues to move in the opposite direction – with an expansion into all eight main halls at the Messe Essen exhibition centre for the first time expected to see the event challenge its record 220,000 attendance set last year.
Merz Verlag said demand for the additional space was coming both from existing exhibitors wanting significantly larger stands and an unusually high number of first-time exhibitors, with all available stands booked before the April 30 registration deadline.
And Pandasaurus’ smaller presence does not mean it sees less value in attending, according to McNair.
He said, “For me I really like to focus on meetings, seeing friends, trying to check out some games and building awareness of the new titles at the show – and I think the setup we have works really well for just that at a much lower lift,” he said.
“Essen is a much more international show in a lot of ways than most other board game conventions, so we know there are fans there who want to check out our new games really badly and I want to make sure they can – but if I can do it in a way that is less work and less risk for us I prefer that strongly.”
Spiel Essen 2026 takes place at Messe Essen from October 22 to 25.
Exploding Kittens has named chief commercial officer Joeri Hoste as its new head of studio, with the long-time game industry exec eyeing further expansion of the company’s namesake hit into a “long-lasting evergreen brand” beyond its big-selling card game.
Hoste joined Exploding Kittens to lead its international business in 2020, following multi-year stints at companies including Hong Kong based board game publisher and manufacturer Ooba Games, toy company BOTI and trading card and collectibles specialist Upper Deck.
Hoste said in a LinkedIn post that the past six years at Exploding Kittens had been the most rewarding of his career, adding that he was “ecstatic and humbled” to take responsibility for leading the company into the next stage of its development.
He said, “We’ll continue our mission of making great games and creating experiences that bring people together. Exploding Kittens is the game that built its namesake company, and our next challenge will be to develop the IP into a long-lasting evergreen brand that outgrows its original format.
“Exploding Kittens is unique within Asmodee as we combine deep commercial mass market expertise with publishing quirky and irreverent games that disrupt the games category.
“We did not get here by blending in. We succeed because of the talented team that’s willing to be different.”
Last year Exploding Kittens revealed it had sold more than 60 million games as it marked a decade in business – with the company’s growth having already extended well beyond the tabletop.
That has included a partnership with Netflix which expanded the property into mobile gaming and an animated series.
Asmodee bought a 55% majority stake in Exploding Kittens at the end of 2021, and exercised its option to purchase the remaining 45% minority stake last year.
Exploding Kittens has continued to stand out within Asmodee’s portfolio during a difficult period for parts of the US board game market.
The promotion comes as Asmodee is making a wider push into social and party games – a category where Exploding Kittens has been one of its strongest brands.
In March the company agreed to pay up to €250m for French social and party game publisher ATM Gaming, with Koegler saying the acquisition would combine ATM’s strength in Europe with Exploding Kittens’ strong position in the US. Asmodee has said it expects the social games category to grow at between 4% and 8% annually between 2025 and 2030, compared with about 4% for the broader board games market.
It also launched US party game studio Moodbox Games last year, a move de Barros described at the time as strengthening Asmodee’s presence in a category where Exploding Kittens and Zygomatic were already seeing strong success.
Tabletop game design pioneer Steve Jackson has ended a 17-month return running his namesake games company, with new CEO Sabrina Gonzalez taking charge of a business with years of falling revenue as well as a run of promising crowdfunding successes.
Jackson will remain president of the company he founded in 1980, but will refocus his attention on game design and development, with managing editor Allison Page promoted to COO.
He had previously stepped back from the day-to-day running of Steve Jackson Games in 2014, when long-time COO Phil Reed became CEO, allowing Jackson to devote more of his attention to game development.
Jackson’s return as CEO in 2024 was not presented as a permanent appointment, with him saying in the wake of her departure that her direct reports would report to him while he “figured out a plan”.
Gonzalez has been with SJ Games since 2013 as a production artist and production manager, apart from a brief period away from the company working for toy and game manufacturer Grand Prix International – and has been a member of the board of directors since 2021.
She said of her vision for the business, “As a general goal, I’d like us to continue to grow. We weathered the pandemic and pivoted project plans to address continually changing tariffs.
“The goal is always to make great games that people love. I want to continue developing new titles for future generations of gamers and also support (and sometimes update) the classics that our fans continue to request.”
New Steve Jackson Games COO Allison Page
New COO Page joined SJ Games as managing editor in 2023, having previously worked as executive artistic director of San Francisco comedy organisation Killing My Lobster. She also spent a year working as a narrative designer in the video game industry.
Page said, “I’m most excited to support Sabrina in her new role as CEO! We’ve always worked really well together and want the same things for SJ Games.
“I’m a problem solver, and I’m passionate about setting clear expectations. I’m excited to untangle whatever comes my way and ensure the team knows how to move forward and has what they need.”
He said on the company’s blog in May, “We made it through! But it’s not a story that fits well into the standard Stakeholder format. It took me a while to get up the nerve to start, and it has taken me longer to get it right. But I shall.”
Revenues have decline substantially since, however, falling about 2.5x from that peak to settle at around $3.5m across both 2023 and 2024 – the last years for which Steve Jackson has published the total – and bringing the annual total down to levels last seen back in 2010.
Annual revenue at Steve Jackson Games between 2003 and 2024. The asterisk(*) at 2022 indicates that the company overstated its revenue at $4.7m that year “due to confusion about BackerKit proceeds”, but it has not publicly provided an updated figure.
Jackson said in the executive summary in the 2023 report, “Cash flow was acceptable. It was not a profitable year, though. We have identified and dealt with some of the money-losing issues; others will be harder. We are working on it. (No fear; we have plenty of runway left. I just hate to use it.)”
He continued in the 2024 overview, “Cash flow was acceptable, but I don’t feel ‘prosperous’. This is not just us; individual game sales, industry-wide, were down at both the distribution and retail end, largely due to the glut of titles.”
Jackson added that year, “We are still working the problem, but we have less runway than we did last year! Cause for optimism: it was a rebuilding year and not expected to be good for cash, but thanks to your support for Munchkin Big Box it was better than we anticipated.”
Those challenges were exacerbated in 2025 by the impact of volatile US tariff policy, which included an unexpected “high five-figure” bill on its Munchkin Big Box after new tariffs were levied while the already-produced game was at sea.
The Munchkin Big Box || Photo Credit: Steve Jackson Games
The BackerKit campaign for the Munchkin Big Box had been one of the company’s bright spots over the past couple of years, bringing in more than $1.3m from over 9,000 backers – a situation Jackson credited with making 2024 financially better than expected.
SJ Games followed that with a $370,000 BackerKit campaign for Munchkin Second Edition this year to coincide with the game’s 25th anniversary, and in recent years has extended out the game with Munchkin Shadowrun, Munchkin Vox Machina and multiple Warhammer-based releases, as well as several other expansions.
It said at the time that the deal would allow Possum Creek, the publisher of Wanderhome and Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, to retain full creative and editorial control over its titles, while “lending their talents to the SJ Games design and visual branding”.
Possum Creek editorial director Jay Dragon joined the SJ Games board of directors as part of the tie-up, and became its lead game designer, while Ruby Lavin became the company’s art director.
Seven-Part Pact, designed by Jay Dragon
Since then Dragon’s TTRPG design Seven-Part Pact has raised more than $1m through a Kickstarter campaign, while SJ Games has also raised almost $600,000 across a pairof Kickstarters for the venerable Fighting Fantasy line of adventure gamebooks, having agreed a deal in 2024 to bring the UK-created titles back to the US for the first time in more than two decades.
Steve Jackson’s game design career dates back to the late 1970s, with his 1977 debut Ogre helping popularise the emerging microgame format of small, inexpensive wargames.
Within five years he had designed Car Wars and Illuminati, founded his own games company and been inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame in 1982 – all while still in his 20s.
He followed that with the Generic Universal RolePlaying System (GURPS) in 1986, which was his attempt to create a single roleplaying system capable of working across different settings and genres.
While not the first RPG to experiment with universal rules, GURPS helped popularise the concept and grew into a huge publishing line for Steve Jackson Games. By 2004 the company had released about 200 GURPS titles, with more than one million copies in print in English alone.
Jackson’s most visible modern design is Munchkin, which became the company’s biggest commercial success following its release in 2001. The game was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame in 2013.
Anmelden
