Restoration Games is no stranger to crowdfunding backers pledging hundreds of dollars for premium versions of its games – but its Kickstarter for The Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit has taken that to an entirely new level.

The crowdfund had raised $2.33m from more than 7,300 backers in the early hours of its final day, equivalent to almost $319 per supporter – an average spend well above Restoration’s previous major crowdfunding campaigns, including the roughly $260 from last year’s Battle Monsters: Godzilla x Kong.

Almost three-quarters of backers who have committed to one of the game’s various versions opted to spend at least $379 on one of the Mithril tiers, with more than 2,800 people going all-in on the game’s most expensive $449 option.

Those Mithril pledges together account for about 82% of the total raised at the time of writing – a figure well above that expected by Restoration prior to the campaign’s launch, co-owner Justin Jacobson told BoardGameWire.

He said the company had expected Mithril to be most popular, but had conservatively projected about three Mithril pledges for every two people committing to the base-level Limited tiers of the game

He said, “I’m not entirely surprised. We created the Limited Edition as a sort-of compromise pledge level for folks who wanted some deluxe elements but didn’t want to go all-in for the Mithril Edition.

“Ultimately, though, most Kickstarter backers are there precisely because they do want to go all in, and we try to make that pledge level as appealing as possible and as good a deal as possible.”

Despite the much higher-than-expected proportion of backers opting for Mithril, Jacobson said the campaign’s overall performance was “pretty in-line” with his expectations ahead of the campaign’s final few days – and that “in a vacuum” he would have hoped for slightly higher numbers.

He pointed to the absence of a standard retail edition from the campaign, Free League’s The One Ring RPG crowdfund running at the same time and wider global economic conditions among the factors potentially working against it.

Jacobson said the pattern of backers favouring Restoration’s most expensive option was familiar from what he described as the company’s previous “spectacle” campaigns, with all-in pledges typically outstripping other pledge levels at the close of those crowdfunds.

But King’s Gambit is generating substantially higher spending per backer compared with Restoration’s previous projects offering similarly expensive all-in options.

Last year’s Battle Monsters: Godzilla x Kong offered a $379 Mega Bundle – the same price as the basic Mithril Edition of King’s Gambit – but averaged about $260 across its 2,301 backers.

Return to Dark Tower: Expeditions went even higher with a $499 all-in pledge including the base game, its expansions and upgraded components – although as an expansion-led campaign, existing owners could enter at just $45. Its $1.49m haul from 11,665 backers amounted to an average of $128 per supporter.

King’s Gambit is currently averaging almost $319 across its backers to date – despite almost 1,000 people having committed just $5 for access to the pledge manager.

Jacobson nevertheless cautioned against seeing the campaign as evidence that $379-plus board games were likely to become commonplace.

“This campaign is unusual, and I wouldn’t expect this to become the norm,” he said. “It stems from the unique way in which the original licensing deal and co-publication arrangement came to be in the first place.”

Opening Gambit

Jacobson told BoardGameWire that the publisher decided to pitch licence holder Middle-earth Enterprises in 2023 for a new version of cult 2000 board game Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit, but instead based on The Lord of the Rings.

Bringing Queen’s Gambit back had been an ambition for Restoration since its inception – it was the first game Jacobson suggested reviving when he approached designer Rob Daviau about founding the company in 2016, although they decided at the time that it was too ambitious for their first project. Daviau had worked on the original during his time at Hasbro.

Jacobson told BoardGameWire, “I put together a big proposal and sent it in. Meanwhile, while that proposal was under consideration, Rob was at the Cannes Game Festival and got approached by Asmodee about doing the exact same thing.

“It seemed like serendipity so we just started that conversation about working on it together. It offered a lot of benefits to both parties.

“We brought our design pedigree and Kickstarter experience, and they brought their massive team for art, sales, distribution, and more. It’s always challenging working outside your own team, but [Asmodee studio] Space Cowboys have been absolutely amazing and have helped make this game the best it can be.”

Space Cowboys plans to release a retail edition of the game next year, which while sharing the same gameplay will use smaller boards, omit the large plastic Minas Tirith and Mordor set pieces and use just two colours of plastic for its miniatures.

Jacobson said, “It was important that our offering was a stark contrast to the retail edition. That edition will be what lives on for as long as the game is sold, long after the Kickstarter campaign is fulfilled. So, first things first, we had to align on what that version of the game was going to be.

“Then, we basically brainstormed all of the ways we could ‘deluxify’ that. The Limited Edition was a slight bump and the 3D plastic set pieces; the Mithril Edition was the whole list.”

When asked if there had been any concern internally over having such a large gap between the price points of the Limited and Mithril editions, Jacobson said, “Not really. There are so many variables and options in setting up any campaign. You’re never going to be 100% certain that you’ve gone the optimal path.

“That said, we were confident in the overall structure of the campaign, i.e., folks who want the cool 3D set pieces and folks who want everything.

“As I’ve always said, the price is always a function of the cost to produce. So once we determine what a pledge level includes, setting the price is relatively straightforward with some minor adjustments. For example, we actually shaved a bit off the Mithril Edition to try and make it a bit more appealing.”

He added, “It does highlight that all of the economic turmoil folks are feeling are not being felt uniformly.

“It also speaks to hobby gamers in general. When you compare it to other hobbies, it’s still a relatively good deal even at the highest end of things.”

Jacobson told BoardGameWire that Restoration deliberately looked beyond established tabletop audiences when marketing the game, in an attempt to leverage the vast fanbase of The Lord of the Rings.

About half of King’s Gambit backers are supporting a Restoration Games crowdfund for the first time, he said – a slightly higher proportion than the company has seen on some of its more recent campaigns.

“We made a concerted effort to try and reach out to influencers whose audience comprises The Lord of the Rings fans and not specifically gamers,” Jacobson said.

He believes the licence was likely part of the explanation for the campaign’s performance, although added that Restoration titles tend to come with followers even without a large IP, given the nature of the company’s strategy of taking memorable, usually long-out-of-print games and redeveloping them for the modern hobby market.

He said, “Fans of The Lord of the Rings are certainly avid and show up in large numbers, but we’ve seen similar excitement from fans of Return to Dark Tower and the like.”

Aragorn Art

Despite the campaign’s strong performance, the release has attracted a backlash from a small minority of online commenters for depicting Aragorn as Black.

That reaction has spilled into the unreleased title’s BoardGameGeek ratings, where some users have awarded it scores of 10 specifically to counter what they believe are 1 ratings motivated by objections to Aragorn’s skin colour.

Jacobson described the reaction as “disappointing but not entirely unexpected”, while stressing that not everyone who preferred a depiction closer to previous versions of Aragorn was motivated by racism.

He said, “The art team for both Space Cowboys and Restoration Games spent countless hours working on an extensively researched and thoughtful art brief for the look of the entire game along with each individual character. It’s 59 pages long!

“Our first priority is always to do something true to the source material. Within those pages though there are a number of interpretations. Ultimately, for each depiction, not just Aragorn, we were looking to do something interesting and perhaps novel that still stays true to the source material.

“I can point to details in the lore that support this depiction, but this just isn’t something I have any interest in debating.

“Great works, whether that’s a game or an epic fantasy novel or something else, only arise when the people creating them have a strong vision for what they want to make and put their full effort into realizing that vision.

“In every case, some folks won’t share that vision. But, in every case, if you set out to try and please everyone, you cannot make something extraordinary.”

He added, “There are folks who prefer a depiction more in keeping with prior ones; where other folks enjoy seeing broader depictions. Whenever you are working with an IP, the fans will have strong opinions. I want to be clear: not everyone who would prefer the former do so from a place of racism.

“That said, there are certainly racists, who are using these types of situations to espouse their abhorrent beliefs. It’s unfortunate that they muddy what can be an otherwise interesting conversation.

“As for folks on BGG rating a game a 1 before it comes out, this has been going on for a while for a host of reasons. There’s nothing we can do about it, so we press on and just make the best game we can.

“When people actually receive and start playing the game, we are confident that there will be a lot of great ratings for it that will make the current kerfuffle just so much background noise.”

The King’s Gambit’s crowdfunding campaign ends at 8.30am EDT on October 20.

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UK-based Osprey Games has let go of its entire board and card game development team and cancelled its booth at the upcoming Spiel Essen game fair, five months after parent company Bloomsbury began searching for a buyer for the operation.

Osprey revealed in May that multinational book giant Bloomsbury had made the “difficult decision” to sell the board and card game segment as part of a wider “strategic refocusing” on book publishing, which would see Osprey concentrate on its wargame and RPG lines.

Two sources with knowledge of the matter told BoardGameWire at the time that Bloomsbury hoped to find a buyer willing take on the existing board and card game team in addition to its catalogue, which includes acclaimed titles such as the Undaunted and Imperium lines.

But a Bloomsbury spokesperson has now confirmed to BoardGameWire that “all our colleagues who exclusively worked on creating and manufacturing our board and card games have now left the company”.

Multiple sources spoken to by BoardGameWire said those exits were in the form of redundancies at the end of September, although the company declined to say exactly how many staff were affected.

The departures mean Bloomsbury is now seeking a buyer solely for the board and card game catalogue, rather than the department as a whole – but questions remain over exactly how the rights to its portfolio of games could be sold on to a new owner.

BoardGameWire understands that some Osprey designer contracts include restrictions governing the transfer of publishing rights to third parties, which could complicate the sale efforts – with some agreements seeming to limit transfers to buyers acquiring all or substantially all of the imprint’s titles.

Asked about that situation by BoardGameWire, a Bloomsbury spokesperson said, “The contractual arrangements relating to Osprey Games are confidential, so we’re not able to share details of specific terms or comment on potential outcomes.

“We appreciate that these questions are important to designers and other partners, and we’ll share further information with those directly involved as soon as we’re able to.”

The spokesperson also confirmed that Osprey has multiple unreleased board and card game projects under contract at “various stages of development”, but did not say whether those titles would be published by Osprey or transferred to another buyer.

They said, “As with our published games, we will share information about the future of those projects with the relevant designers as soon as we are able to.”

Osprey’s existing games remain “well stocked”, the spokesperson said, adding that the company had no current plans for reprints “but will continue to review the situation as we move forwards”.

They said, “We remain committed to supporting our fantastic range of board and card games with sales, marketing and licensing efforts and each of our games remains available to purchase.

“Our upcoming games, Undaunted 2200: Revolution from David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, and Upland & Prairie from Peer Sylvester will be released as planned this month.  

“We are, as ever, incredibly grateful to our brilliant in-house team, to our wonderful designers and illustrators, and to everyone who has supported Osprey Games over the years.”

Osprey Games was launched in 2015 as part of Bloomsbury arm Osprey Publishing, which had a decades-long history of creating military and historical information and reference books before beginning to publish wargaming rulebooks in 2008.

The gaming arm’s early successes included Peer Sylvester’s The King is Dead and The Lost Expedition, as well as popular titles such as Hal Duncan and Ruth Veevers’ design Cryptid and the second edition of Martin Wallace’s London.

Those releases were followed by the high-profile success of the Undaunted series of deckbuilding wargames from David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin and the Imperium games from Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi.

Osprey also gained a reputation for taking chances on a range of titles with intriguing mechanisms and designs, such as Sylvester’s area control and trick-taking hybrid Brian Boru, highly asymmetric area control title Crescent Moon, card-based strategic wargame Battalion: War of the Ancients and small-box, quick-playing conflict title General Orders: World War II.

The publisher has continued releasing games in the wake of the sale process announcement, including Threaded, Flip Pick Towers and Rattlesnake earlier this year and CRAB RAGE! last month.

Bloomsbury has not specified a timetable for completing the sale, with the spokesperson telling BoardGameWire that conversations were “ongoing”.

They added, “I’m sure you’ll appreciate that this is a very complex situation, and the timelines are based around confidential conversations. We will provide updates when we can do so.”

Osprey parent Bloomsbury, which has a stock market valuation of more than £500m, announced in April that it was “streamlining its structure for further growth” – which included a reorganisation of the company’s editorial divisions and the loss of about 55 jobs. No mention of Osprey was made in the restructuring announcement.

Bloomsbury has seen its profits almost double in the last five financial years, and confirmed at its July annual meeting that it expects annual revenue of more than £350m and was on track for record adjusted pre-tax profits of £49.9m, according to Publishers Weekly.

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Ares Games has expanded its international distribution business again through a partnership with Spain’s Draco Ideas, bringing the English editions of its games to retailers.

The deal covers games from the company’s two publishing arms, Draco Ideas and Eclipse Editorial, which merged into a single business in 2023.

Ares said distribution of Draco games would begin in December with Viking and Anglo-Saxon territory-building title Dark Kingdoms, the first English-language edition of 2018 release Reconquista, and a second edition of family game RatLand alongside two expansions and a miniatures pack.

The agreement is the latest in a series of distribution partnerships signed by Ares over the past two years, including deals with Armenian publisher Red Cat Games, Italy’s Tabula Games and Czech publisher Albi.

Ares also signed a deal with Dark Horizon Games in July this year to bring its co-operative sci-fi dungeon crawler Earth Under Siege: Flashpoint and three expansions to US retail, with the titles beginning to reach stores last month.

The company has also been extending the geographical reach of its existing distribution business, announcing last December that it would begin supplying titles from five publishers – Galakta Games, Tabula Games, Albi, Nuts! Publishing and Don’t Panic Games – to European retailers and distributors through its Italian warehouse.

That expansion has continued despite the trade disruption caused by US tariffs which prompted Ares to rethink parts of its business model last year, including reducing inventory, becoming more selective about products and increasing direct sales.

Di Meglio told BoardGameWire last December, “We are growing in small steps, but considered how complex is the situation in the US in these days, we are quite happy of this slow but steady progress.”

He added, “The current level of tariffs is not something to be happy about, but manageable. However, we have seen through 2025 that the rates can change abruptly and unexpectedly – this means we must be very careful about which products we pick, more than ever.”

Ares’ distribution partnerships have offered a route into conventional retail for games which previously relied heavily on crowdfunding.

Speaking to BoardGameWire about its Tabula Games partnership in May last year, Di Meglio said the Italian publisher had run successful crowdfunding campaigns, but its games had barely reached retail distribution.

The new Draco deal includes crowdfunded title Dark Kingdoms, a strategy and conquest game set in fifth-century Britain, which will begin being distributed to stores once its Gamefound fulfilment is complete.

That game, which was designed by Marco Antonio del Campo, sees players lead Saxon, Angle, Jute and Briton factions competing for control of territory through resource management, construction and military conquest.

Del Campo also designed Reconquista, originally published in Spanish in 2018, which pits four rival kingdoms against one another for control of the Iberian Peninsula in the 11th century.

The third title, Eduardo Garcia’s RatLand, is a family game in which players compete to grow rival rat colonies while gathering and stealing food. Its second edition will be accompanied by The Conquest of the Port and Automa expansions, alongside a pack of plastic rat miniatures.

Draco Ideas was founded in Spain in 2014 by Luis Álvaro Hernández, initially to publish his own historical battle game ONUS! Rome vs Carthage.

It has since developed into a specialist publisher of historical wargames and strategy games, with Eclipse Editorial covering narrative, adventure and family games.

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Steamforged Games is facing mounting criticism from crowdfunding backers over unresolved refunds and dwindling updates across its undelivered projects, in the wake of the publisher cutting about a third of its workforce and refocusing towards its Warmachine miniatures line earlier this year.

BoardGameWire reported in June that the UK-based company, which made its name adapting video games such as Dark Souls into multi-million-dollar board game Kickstarters, was reducing its crowdfunding activity following a second set of redundancies in three years.

That left Steamforged with nine campaigns with outstanding fulfilment obligations, which together raised almost £19m including late pledges. The biggest of those is Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, which pulled in almost £6.3m from almost 15,000 backers and was originally estimated to be delivered almost two years ago, in November 2024.

Steamforged said in a Kickstarter update in January this year that it was aiming to deliver the title to all regions in July, but has provided just two updates since.

The first, in April, said things were “back up and running following Chinese New Year” and promising “more substantial updates” in the coming months, while another at the end of July read:

“We’d like to start by apologising for the lack of a formal update recently. We had intended to have concrete fulfilment information ready for you this month, but this update is waiting on some key information from partners which is still pending.

“In the meantime, we wanted to let you know we are working hard behind the scenes and will have an update to share as soon as we possibly can.”

That lack of communication about the status of projects has been repeated across Steamforged’s other outstanding crowdfunds, which include the £3.2m Helldivers 2 campaign, the £1.8m-raising Elden Ring: Rot & Sorcery and £1.2m Hearts of Iron: The Board Game.

Its other unfulfilled campaigns include the US production and shipping of Horizon Forbidden West: Seeds of Rebellion and Euthia: Cruel Frost, both of which were postponed due to tariffs uncertainty last year, and the second wave of its P3 Paints crowdfund, which has been delayed by up to a year due to a production issue with the metallic colours.

Campaign	Funding including late pledges	Initial expected delivery date
Monster Hunter World: Iceborne	£6,261,436	November 2024
Helldivers 2	£3,239,140	October 2026
Horizon Forbidden West: Seeds of Rebellion	£2,117,290	May 2025*
Elden Ring: Rot & Sorcery	£1,839,406	July 2027
Euthia: Cruel Frost	£1,446,056	November 2025*
Hearts of Iron: The Board Game	£1,240,053	June 2026
Terra Mystica Special Edition	£1,055,530	April 2027
Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade	£910,735	April 2026
P3 Paints Wave 2	£720,817	June 2026
Total	£18,830,463

Steamforged’s sparse status updates have led to rising discontent from backers across the comment sections of its crowdfunds and on its official Discord channel, which members say has been abandoned by company staff since the refocus towards Warmachine.

Backers across those channels are now questioning whether their games will ever arrive, with some reporting waits of weeks or months for responses to refund requests. Multiple backers have now turned to PayPal disputes and credit card chargebacks to recover their money.

At least one of Steamforged’s commercial partners has also expressed concerns. Hearts of Iron IP owner Paradox Interactive confirmed in June that it was in contact with Steamforged and working to ensure customers received their games as soon as possible.

Three months later, Paradox Development Studio Gold’s studio manager described the situation as “truly unfortunate”, saying the project “seemed to be going well, until it wasn’t” and that “it’s not a fast process by any means, but solutions are being discussed”.

A spokesperson for Paradox told BoardGameWire earlier this week, “Paradox has been closely tracking the progress of the Hearts of Iron board game. We are in talks with Steamforged Games to find the best way to get the game completed.

“We are not ready to comment on or commit to a specific course of action on the situation at Steamforged.”

A spokesperson for Feuerland Games, the publisher of Terra Mystica which teamed up with Steamforged for the special edition crowdfund, declined to comment on the situation to BoardGameWire.

Multiple sources who spoke to BoardGameWire in June on condition of anonymity said the latest Steamforged staff cuts affected departments including the creative, game design, production, project management, QA, marketing and commercial teams – adding that they feared the cutbacks would lead to problems delivering long-term projects.

But Steamforged told BoardGameWire at the time that the “vast majority” of creative work on its crowdfunded board games was complete, described the staff reduction as “carefully considered”, and said the company “retain[s] both the internal resource and the external capabilities needed to deliver on our commitments”.

BoardGameWire has attempted to contact Steamforged CEO Rich Loxam multiple times across August, September and October about the ongoing situation at the publisher, and to ask questions about refunds, production and delivery schedules and whether the restructuring had affected the company’s ability to complete its existing projects – but has received no response.

Loxam previously told BoardGameWire during Steamforged’s Terra Mystica Special Edition campaign last November that “backers need to feel heard, valued, and understood, which is why we spend so much time in the comments”.

Reflecting on the difficult fulfilment of Dark Souls: The Board Game, Loxam said in a 2022 blog post that one of Steamforged’s “bigger mistakes” had been handling problems “behind closed doors” and only speaking publicly when it felt there was something important to say.

“We were wrong,” he wrote, adding that Steamforged had “learned the hard way that transparency with supporters, backers, and fans is always the right choice”, and promising to communicate as much as possible to build trust and its reputation.

Steamforged signalled a change in its approach following June’s disclosure of the redundancies, telling BoardGameWire that “in the past, we would post updates once-a-month even during quieter periods for a project”.

“Moving forward, our focus is on providing key updates,” it added.

But the sharp decline in communication has extended beyond crowdfunding updates, with several of Steamforged’s public community channels now restricted or, like the Discord, no longer actively used by staff.

Comments are disabled on Steamforged’s YouTube videos – although the company has not uploaded anything to the channel for eight months – while posts on its Facebook page currently carry a notice saying it has “limited who can comment on this post”.

Despite the absence of staff activity on the Steamforged Discord channel, employees have remained active in the company’s dedicated Warmachine server – where the company has told users not to raise questions about its outstanding crowdfunds.

In a September 23 message on the Warmachine Discord, Steamforged’s head of marketing Chynna-Blue Perkins acknowledged that crowdfunding backers were turning to the server for answers, but said it was not the appropriate place to discuss the company’s outstanding projects.

She wrote, “As much as I understand going where you can to seek answers, I am going to have to draw a line under future Kickstarter queries in this server.

“Everyone’s been respectful considering the topic at hand, and I appreciate that, but this is a Warmachine server and it isn’t the right place for crowdfunding queries.

“The campaign pages are where any and all updates will be shared. I wish I could give you more information, but even if I could, this wouldn’t be the place for it.”

The reduction in communication has left backers increasingly having to divine for themselves exactly what is happening at Steamforged, with discussions in its Discord ranging from questions about whether to withdraw from campaigns and advice on procuring refunds, to speculation about the company’s financial stability.

Backer concerns around the latter were exacerbated at the beginning of last month when Companies House, the UK government agency responsible for company registrations, began compulsory strike-off proceedings against Steamforged Games and its parent company due to their overdue accounts, which were due on June 30.

Steamforged posted to its Facebook two days later:

We’re aware some of you have seen a First Gazette notice relating to Steamforged Games, and we’re sorry for any concern it’s caused.

This is a routine notice Companies House issues when a filing is overdue. Our filing was delayed as a result of the company restructuring work we announced earlier this year and is now being resolved.

To be clear, all business activities are continuing as normal.

The strike-off proceedings were discontinued by Companies House four days later, although Steamforged’s accounts are still listed as overdue on the agency’s website.

While the publisher’s latest accounts remain unavailable, data from Steamforged investor Foresight offers some insight into the company’s recent performance.

The investment house cut the valuation of its Steamforged holdings by almost 74% in the first half of 2026 across its Foresight VCT and Enterprise VCT investment vehicles, from £3.68m to just over £960,000 – although that does not represent the valuation of Steamforged as a whole.

Foresight, which invested £5m in Steamforged in 2019 across those vehicles and a third investment fund, said in an end of June update that the publisher had experienced “a few disappointing crowdfunding campaigns over the last 12 months” and was looking to transition away from that part of the market to focus on its higher-margin Iron Kingdoms business.

Steamforged picked up Warmachine – which is set in the Iron Kingdoms IP – P3 Paints and the Iron Kingdoms RPG from Privateer Press in 2024.

A spokesperson for Steamforged told BoardGameWire in June that Warmachine and P3 Paints revenue had tripled in the prior 21 months, despite significant stock constraints in its first year of ownership due to heavy demand.

They said at the time “Demand has been high and we’ve scaled production to meet it. Our US production capacity for Warmachine has increased by 70% since last March, with a 25% increase in Europe since August and new production facilities introduced in the UK in February 2026.”

But communication problems have also extended to P3 Paints. Backers of the Wave 2 crowdfund have complained about a lack of updates and unanswered refund requests, after Steamforged revealed in May that production problems with metallic colours had pushed expected fulfilment from June 2026 into 2027.

Steamforged has so far completed non-US fulfilment of Horizon Forbidden West: Seeds of Rebellion and Euthia: Cruel Frost this year, as well as the pre-order campaign for 6: Siege – which it picked up from now-liquidated crowdfunding major Mythic Games early last year.

The last crowdfunding campaigns substantially or fully completed by the publisher are all from last year, including Elden Ring: The Board Game, the original P3 Paints campaign and the Iron Kingdoms-set Strangelight Workshop RPG.

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Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering workers are moving to unionise after alleging rising workloads, unpaid overtime and job insecurity at Wizards of the Coast – despite the business having become the main profit engine of toy and game giant Hasbro.

Workers on Dungeons & Dragons, D&D Beyond and Wizards’ Studio X – which develops tabletop Magic: The Gathering and Duel Masters – plan to unionise with the Communications Workers of America, having secured the backing of a “public supermajority” of employees.

The move comes after several years of soaring sales and profits at Wizards, which has increasingly become the financial powerhouse of Hasbro amid struggles at the company’s traditional toys business – which includes Nerf guns, Transformers and Peppa Pig toys.

Wizards provided almost half of Hasbro’s $4.7bn revenue last year, with booming Magic: The Gathering sales pushing Wizards to a record operating profit of more than $1bn in 2025.

That performance was driven by hugely successful Universes Beyond releases including Final Fantasy, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Marvel’s Spider-Man, alongside strong backlist and Secret Lair sales.

Studio X workers specifically highlighted that financial success in announcing their unionisation effort, saying their team had been responsible for “back-to-back billion dollar years and a vast majority of Hasbro’s profit”.

D&D workers, meanwhile, said growing workloads without corresponding increases in headcount had left some teams regularly “crunching” simply to complete planned releases – describing crunch as “intense and mandatory unpaid overtime”.

They are also seeking contractual protections around job security, pay and career progression, saying, “Many of us are bringing home less money every month, adjusted for inflation, than we did when we were hired years ago. That needs to change.”

An open letter from those workers added that employees “live in fear of suddenly losing their jobs, with no warning and through no fault of their own”, and that Wizards prioritising in-office work had left workers “unsure of whether their current living situation is tenable for their role”.

Hasbro cut about 1,900 jobs across two rounds in 2023, including at Wizards, after a sharp downturn in its core consumer products business. That segment saw revenue fall 19% in 2023, swinging to a $64.7m operating loss, while Wizards revenue rose 10%.

Further cuts have followed since, including four Wizards employees during Hasbro-wide redundancies in October 2024, and about 30 developers – roughly 90% of the team working on Wizards’ now scrapped Sigil D&D virtual tabletop – in March 2025.

Hasbro cut roughly 150 more jobs three months later, including D&D staff, and last month D&D community manager LaTia Jacquise and Magic social media manager Jordan Hopkins publicly confirmed their layoffs – with Hopkins describing his departure as part of a “greater restructure”. Wizards has not disclosed the total number of jobs affected.

Magic rules manager Eric Levine said of the union effort, “Everyone I work with makes our company, our game, and our community stronger by bringing their talent, expertise, and effort to making Magic.

“Those incredible people deserve fair compensation, remote protections, clear career progression, and more. Supporting the people who make the game will ensure that Magic keeps getting better for years to come.”

The unionisation push also called for protections for work employees create in their free time, with the D&D workers’ announcement saying, “Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro can claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company, and what we make in our free time should belong to us.”

The D&D team also used its unionisation letter to reveal tension between Hasbro and Wizards over the use of generative AI, saying, “As pressure has ramped up from Hasbro to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work, WOTC has resisted these efforts and kept AI out of our games.

“That’s good! We want to preserve this commendable stance through a union contract that ensures our games will always be made by people for people.”

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks was openly enthusiastic about bringing AI into the D&D ecosystem in September 2024, saying at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia conference that Hasbro was already using AI “significantly and liberally internally as both a knowledge worker aid and as a development aid” – but was more excited about its potential in play.

He added, “I play with probably 30 or 40 people regularly. There’s not a single person who doesn’t use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That’s a clear signal that we need to be embracing it.”

In an interview with The Verge in March this year, however, Cocks said that while Hasbro was deploying AI widely across the company, he acknowledged there was resistance to its use in Wizards’ games.

He said, “There are some brands that the audience, the creators, just don’t want it, so we don’t even have it in our pipelines for our video games or for Magic: The Gathering, or D&D.”

Cocks added that he personally used huge amounts of AI-generated animation, images, text, sound effects and voice cloning in his personal D&D games, telling interviewer Nilay Patel there was so much on his home PC that it would “floor” him.

He added that AI was being used extensively elsewhere at Hasbro, including in toy design and as a general productivity tool across the company, and estimated it could save more than one million hours of work this year.

Cocks also told Verge that he did not believe the technology would cost creative workers their jobs, saying, “I see it only making the quality of the creative we have better.”

Other demands from the unionisers include better support for working parents, changes to healthcare provision and greater financial transparency, to aid the unions in collective bargaining.

The latest unionisation push at Wizards comes just a few months after developers of its online platform Magic: The Gathering Arena revealed their own plans to unionise.

More than 100 Arena workers announced their unionisation drive in April, with Wizards declining their request for voluntary recognition. The group subsequently won a National Labor Relations Board election in June, formally establishing the first union at Wizards.

D&D and Studio X workers – who are also organising under the United Wizards of the Coast-CWA – have asked Wizards and Hasbro to voluntarily recognise their respective units by an October 13 deadline, and have filed an election petition with the NLRB to allow the certification process to proceed if that does not happen.

They are also calling for Hasbro and Wizards to adopt a labour neutrality agreement allowing other workers at the company to organise without fear of retaliation.

D&D senior game designer Joey Haeck said they were organising “because scared workers are neither happy nor productive”.

Haeck said, “By organizing to negotiate a fair contract on issues of layoff protections, forced relocation protections, equitable pay and career advancement, mandatory AI use protections, parental support, and more, we make our game better by investing in our human creators and resisting the churn and brain drain caused by roller-coaster layoffs.”

The post D&D, Magic workers move to unionise, citing crunch and job insecurity despite record Wizards profits first appeared on .

Editor’s note: GAMA is a BoardGameWire sponsor, and has advertised Game Store Day on the site – but this article is not a paid placement, I just think it’s interesting enough to cover editorially!

Game Store Day, GAMA‘s annual initiative aimed at getting more people into local game stores to play, shop and take part in events, is growing for its second year after retailers and publishers were given substantially more time to prepare than for its debut.

Almost 300 retailers are currently signed up for this year’s Game Store Day on November 7, while nearly 60 tabletop publishers have committed games to a new promotional box, as GAMA looks to establish the event as a long-term fixture on the tabletop industry calendar.

GAMA board member and Red Raccoon Games owner Jamie Mathy told BoardGameWire that rising retailer participation was the clearest measure of success for Game Store Day at this stage, with this year’s 297 sign-ups already ahead of last year’s total with over a month to go.

But he believes there is scope for the event to grow significantly bigger in future years – and said GAMA had already learned lessons from 2025’s relatively short-notice launch.

He said, “Last year, Game Store Day was something [GAMA’s] Team Retail had been advocating for, and then suddenly it was announced and launched with less than eight weeks to prepare. That wasn’t enough time for a lot of retailers to really build it into their calendars or plan meaningful events around it.

“This year stores have had roughly four months to prepare, and we’ve had substantially more time to bring publishers into the program. The Publisher’s Box and other publisher initiatives give retailers additional reasons and tools to build something around the day.

“I think we’ll learn from this year as well. Ideally, I’d like stores and publishers to have even more lead time in future years.”

He added, “There are estimates of roughly 5,000 hobby game stores across North America. If we could eventually get 500 stores participating, that’s approximately 10% penetration and I would consider that a tremendous accomplishment. Getting to 1,000 stores – roughly 20% – would be amazing, even if that’s an ambitious long-term goal.

“More importantly, numbers like that would demonstrate to publishers and retailers that Game Store Day isn’t a one-time novelty. It’s something that has become part of the industry’s calendar.

“There’s a comparison to Free RPG Day here. It started relatively small, retailers can purchase a box of promotional products if they want those materials for their customers, and over time it has become something stores and consumers recognize.

“But ultimately, the part that excites me isn’t the box or even a particular participation number. It’s seeing hundreds of independent stores across the country celebrating our industry on the same day and giving people a reason to come together and play games.”

The short notice for last year’s launch left no time to run a Publisher’s Box – but 59 publishers including Leder Games, CGE, Blue Orange, Capstone Games and Bezier Games have agreed to contribute this year, with another four waiting to take part and others having approached GAMA after submissions had closed.

The $179 box will contain games, demos, promotional items and other material for participating stores – and Mathy said physical weight and shipping limits had now become the main constraint on adding more publishers.

“Probably, and that’s a wonderful problem to have,” Mathy said when asked whether GAMA would eventually need to rethink how publishers participate if interest continues to grow.

“This is only year two and the first year we’ve even offered a Publisher’s Box. Let’s learn from what works and what doesn’t this year.

“But if publisher interest continues growing, we’ll obviously need to think creatively about how publishers participate rather than assuming everything always has to fit into one physical box.”

Publishers are also beginning to build their own initiatives around the event aside from the promotional box.

Allplay is making 4,900 copies of new game Woo available exclusively to retailers participating in Game Store Day, with COO Joe Wiggins saying, “Allplay has been looking for new ways to work closer with our brick and mortar partners. When GAMA announced Game Store Day, we knew this would be an amazing opportunity. Allplay is all in.”

Mathy told BoardGameWire he believed part of the publisher interest was the difficulty some have in reaching hobby game retailers.

He said, “Game stores are incredibly diverse. We have different ownership styles, different product mixes, different customer bases and very different areas of specialization.

“Red Raccoon, for example, goes much deeper into board games and RPGs than many stores do, and that’s part of what has made us a regional destination. Another successful game store may have a completely different mix.

“That fragmentation makes it difficult for publishers to know where to spend their marketing dollars if they’re trying to get a product in front of retailers.

“Game Store Day gives them a self-selecting group of engaged retailers. A store willing to spend $179 on a box without knowing exactly what will be in it, because they believe in the idea and intend to build an event around it, is probably a pretty attractive audience for a publisher trying to get its products noticed.”

The increased publisher involvement brings Game Store Day closer to events such as Record Store Day – which GAMA has cited as an inspiration – where exclusive products, offers and other incentives have become part of the draw for customers.

But Mathy said, “I don’t personally think Game Store Day needs to become Record Store Day for games. The Publisher’s Box is a great addition, but to me it’s a bonus rather than the purpose of the event.

“I participated last year with essentially an idea, a logo and a store-locator website, and we had 35 people come specifically for our Game Store Day events.

“At its core, I think this should be a day when we celebrate local game stores, bring people together and play games. Publisher exclusives and promotional items can absolutely help stores make the day special, but they aren’t the reason Game Store Day exists.”

That vision has been taken up by participating stores including Oddwillow’s Game Haven in Wisconsin, which is partnering with its local library for activities including button-making, storytimes, miniature painting and game demos.

Pennsylvania’s Lookin’ For Games, meanwhile, is combining its first Game Store Day with game demos and a special Blood on the Clocktower event with a 24-hour gaming fundraiser for Extra Life benefiting Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Neil Goldberg, the owner of the New York-based Main St Board Game Cafe, said the event was a chance to focus customers on the experience offered by their local game store while also encouraging people to think of board games as gifts ahead of the holiday season.

Mathy said, “GAMA provides the umbrella, publishers can provide additional support, but individual stores make Game Store Day their own and use it to celebrate the communities they’ve built around games.”

The post Game Store Day gets more time, more publishers – and bigger ambitions – for year two first appeared on .

Luxembourg’s hospitality industry has named trick-taker Pili Pili as its board game of the year, continuing an eight-year initiative aimed at getting modern hobby games onto the tables of cafés, bars and restaurants.

Rather than solely recognising the best game of the year, the Bistrospill award is designed to encourage hospitality businesses to offer games for their customers to play, with the aim of reviving a tradition of cafés and bistros as spaces “buzzing with social life, where bonds were forged over a game of cards or dice”.

Bistrospill been run since 2018 by Horesca, Luxembourg’s association of hotels, restaurants and cafés, alongside the country’s biggest board game club Spillfabrik.

Horesca, which represents about 2,900 businesses, said it wants to re-establish tabletop gaming as a “vibrant part” of Luxembourg’s hospitality culture, harking back to the popularity of trick-taking games such as Whist and Belote in the 19th and early 20th century.

The organisation has persuaded cafés and bars to hold gaming afternoons and evenings, while participating businesses have been offered kits including posters, simplified rules, printed beer mats and suggestions for activities.

Its latest material also encourages hospitality businesses to keep a small selection of games available to customers, arguing that venues do not need to become dedicated board game cafés, and that a small shelf or clearly identified box of carefully chosen titles can be enough.

Spillfabrik is responsible for preselecting games suited to the bistro environment as part of the initiative, focusing on titles which are easy to explain, compact enough for café tables, playable by several people and sufficiently interactive to work in a social setting.

Publishers submitted 76 games for this year’s Bistrospill, with Spillfabrik whittling those down to five finalists – Udo Peise’s design Auf die Eier, Kei Kajino’s dnup, Antoine Bauza and Théo Rivière’s design Oh My Socks! and Sneaky, by Jannik Walter, as well as eventual winner Pili Pili.

Pili Pili was created by Ben B and Jean-Baptiste de Ghellinck, the founders of French party game publisher ATM Gaming – which was acquired by board game giant Asmodee earlier this year in a deal worth up to €250m.

Players predict how many tricks they will take each round, receiving penalties if they miss their target, while mission cards alter the rules as the game progresses.

The game’s roughly 20-minute playtime, compact card-based format and simple rules were among the elements highlighted by Bistrospill organisers as making Pili Pili particularly suited to cafés and bars.

Previous Bistrospill winners have included Illusion, Calavera, Pearls, Hula-Hoo!, Split It, Trio, Quando and last year’s victor Flip 7.

The post Luxembourg hospitality industry’s drive to get board games into cafés names Pili Pili its 2026 winner first appeared on .

Bomb Busters designer Hisashi Hayashi has followed up last year’s Spiel des Jahres triumph with another significant award win, after Railway Boom was named the International Gamers Awards’ best multiplayer game for 2026.

The Arclight Games title is a reworking of Hayashi’s 2022 Japanese release of the same name, with Barrage and Darwin’s Journey co-designer Simone Luciani acting as a developer for the new version.

That result means Luciani has been involved in three IGA multiplayer category winners in the last six years, having previously scooped the award for his co-designs Barrage (with Tommaso Battista) in 2020 and Nucleum (with Dávid Turczi) in 2024. He also won with Daniele Tascini co-design The Voyages of Marco Polo in 2015.

Hayashi was also in the running for the IGA multiplayer award last year with Bomb Busters, but missed out to Tomáš Holek’s SETI. His design Yokohama was also a multiplayer finalist back in 2017.

Railway Boom saw off competition from a heavyweight field including Matt Leacock’s The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, huge-selling Asmodee hit Take Time and multiple Dice Tower Award winner Luthier to take the prize.

The Druids of Edora, Nippon: Zaibatsu, Recall, Sanctuary and World Order were all also in the running for this year’s multiplayer award.

While missing out on the multiplayer award, Fate of the Fellowship did secure a win in the best solo game category, beating out Benjamin Amorin’s Ace of Spades, Tyler Brown’s design Hercules and the 12 Labors and Jamey Stegmaier’s Vantage to the prize.

That result marked Leacock’s first IGA win in any category, 18 years after Pandemic earned him his first nomination in 2008. His other nominations have included Pandemic Legacy, which lost out to Mombasa in 2016, and Daybreak, which was beaten by Nucleum in 2024.

Hans im Glück’s Duel for Cardia, designed by Faouzi Boughida and Mathieu Rivero, took this year’s award for best two-player game.

That title beat a six-strong field which also included Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s design Moytura, Richard Borg and Adrien Martinot’s Star Wars: Battle of Hoth, Corentin Lebrat and Gricha German’s Tag Team, Israel Cendrero and Sheila Santos’ The White Castle Duel and Stegmaier’s Vantage.

The International Gamers Awards were founded in 1999 with the aim of recognising outstanding games, their designers and publishers, with winners selected by an international panel of board game critics.

Other previous multiplayer winners have included Carnegie, Lost Ruins of Arnak and Root.

The post Railway Boom beats Fate of the Fellowship, Take Time to win International Gamers Award first appeared on .

Ukrainian board game studio Boardova has broken into US hobby distribution through ACD, four years after being launched by two volunteers who met while supporting refugees and Ukraine’s army in the wake of Russia’s invasion.

ACD has added the Lviv-based publisher’s debut title Aridnyk and upcoming George Orwell-inspired game 1984: Unperson to its extensive catalogue, a year after the first title’s $132,000 Kickstarter success.

The move into US distribution continues a unique success story for Boardova, whose co-founder Volodymyr Kuznietsov told Wargamer earlier this year he had been forced to flee his home city of Sievierodonetsk for the second time amid Russia’s 2022 invasion.

Kuznietsov relocated more than 1,000km away to Lviv in western Ukraine, leaving behind possessions including his entire board game collection – which he described to Wargamer as being “occupied by Russia”.

He added that while volunteering to support refugees and the Ukrainian army he decided to change the status of those games on BoardGameGeek to “pre-owned” – a joke spotted by fellow volunteer and board game enthusiast Zholud “Acorn” Dobrovolskyy, sparking a conversation which led to the pair founding Boardova the same year.

The company’s first game, Aridnyk, draws on the mythology and traditions of the Hutsul people of the Carpathian Mountains. Boardova released the game in Ukraine in January 2024, before raising more than $132,000 from almost 1,600 backers – almost half from the US – via a Kickstarter campaign the following year.

1984: Unperson, meanwhile, is a semi-cooperative card game designed by Kuznietsov and Yaroslav Kifor inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel. The game sees players trying to fulfill collective directives handed down by a totalitarian regime, while also trying to achieve their own secret ambitions.

Kuznietsov told Wargamer the subject had an unavoidable resonance for a Ukrainian studio, describing the dangers of blindly following government orders as a “painful and obvious topic while we are under attack from Russia”.

Boardova has also previously expanded into Germany, signing a localisation deal for Aridnyk with Koalla Spiele shortly after Spiel Essen last year.

ACD said it had separately added five titles from Los Angeles party game publisher McMiLLER to its catalogue, including Jolt, Dummeez and Fish Fight.

The post Ukrainian board game studio born during Russian invasion breaks into US hobby distribution with ACD deal first appeared on .

Huge demand for Asmodee‘s co-operative puzzle game Take Time has seen the publishing giant print more than 325,000 copies less than a year after release – outstripping even the company’s high expectations which surrounded its record-breaking launch.

Asmodee printed a massive 145,000 copies of Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière’s design for its worldwide launch last October, citing heavy enthusiasm from its distribution teams, board game media and pre-release playtesters.

Game line manager Auguste Lecoeur told BoardGameWire, “As soon as the game’s prototype was shown to us and signed, it became an internal priority, with resources and manpower being redirected from other projects to Take Time.

“Huge credit goes to everyone involved in the project for getting it done so quickly while maintaining such a high level of quality, especially considering that the game went through only around six months of visual development.

“When the game was first presented to Asmodee’s distribution units and partners, the enthusiasm was immediate as well, with Take Time being flagged as a key new release for Libellud.

“The same enthusiasm was shared by media outlets and players that were able to test the game prior to its release, so we had multiple positive signals ahead of launch.

“In that sense, we were definitely expecting a strong first print run, but you can never realistically expect to reach 145,000 copies. It was a very pleasant surprise and clearly exceeded our expectations, even though we were prepared for strong numbers.”

Every major reprint of the game since has topped 60,000 copies, Lecoeur said, with Asmodee currently planning another two to three global print runs of the same size each every year to keep up with demand.

Lecoeur said, “At this point, it is clear that Take Time won’t be a ‘one-hit wonder’, a game that enjoys a high initial print run but then quickly fades. Instead, the game is maintaining a strong sales pace and continues to perform well across markets.”

He added, “The game gained strong visibility and positive feedback at conventions such as Cannes’ FIJ and Spiel Essen, while also achieving higher-than-usual numbers online, thanks in part to its visual appeal and the buzz surrounding it.

“More broadly, the game was quickly validated by the core and specialist market, as well as by opinion leaders, critics and content creators within the board game community. It received strong critical acclaim – it is now ranked [in] the top 95 family games on BGG – and was nominated for multiple awards, which played a huge part in its success.

“Sure, we would have loved to win the As d’Or and Spiel des Jahres (who wouldn’t?), but I guess we’re being picky here!”

Success Story

Part of the game’s powerful performance has been down to it penetrating well beyond the specialist board games market, with Asmodee saying its distribution is now relatively evenly split between hobby stores, mass-market retailers and e-commerce.

Lecoeur said, “I’m convinced that this wouldn’t have been possible if the game hadn’t first been embraced by the core gaming community. Their strong support and enthusiasm for the game helped open the door to other distribution channels much more quickly.”

He added that part of Take Time’s wider appeal was down to the game’s compact size and “accessible price point”, as well as its “high level of replayability and substantial gameplay content”.

Those first two elements have become increasingly important amid ongoing financial strain for people in some of Asmodee’s core markets, such as France, Germany, the UK and US, with rising food and energy prices and ongoing economic uncertainty putting pressure on their purchases.

Other successful initiatives which helped boost Take Time’s appeal included what Lecoeur described as an “unusual” cardboard demo kit, with detachable cards and clocks, which could be ordered by distribution units to give players a taste of the game’s core mechanisms.

He said the kit “generated strong enthusiasm at launch”, but added that the format was not something which could be replicated for every one of its releases.

Award nominations also helped drive sales, especially in Germany and France, which Lecoeur said had been two of the strongest markets for the game from day one.

He said Take Time’s Spiel des Jahres recommendation was followed by a higher-than-usual reprint demand from Germany of 30,000 copies – and added that the impact of other ‘smaller’ awards “should not be overlooked”.

Take Time triumphed in this year’s Swiss Gamers Award and also took the Austrian game of the year prize, in addition to its ‘recommended’ nod in the Spiel des Jahres and nomination in France’s As d’Or.

Lecoeur also believes Take Time benefitted from the success of Libellud’s previous release Harmonies, which also picked up a Spiel des Jahres recommendation and the Swiss Gamers Award, as well as a Golden Geek – and was highlighted by Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler as having had a strong launch.

Lecoeur said, “The fact that Libellud’s previous release, Harmonies, had been a hit certainly helped. It raised expectations around the studio’s next title and put the spotlight on its launch.

“It’s clear that each publisher develops its own reputation and ‘brand’ image based on its releases (among other things) and that this plays a significant role in the confidence they receive from retailers and, to some extent, from players.

“The success or failure of each release will inevitably have an impact on the games that follow, particularly when it comes to forecasts and initial orders.”

Time After Time

Asmodee is now beginning to turn Take Time into a wider product line, with debut expansion Mirage set for release next month, and the company having “many more ideas we’re currently working on for the range”.

Lecoeur said, “As soon as we received the first feedback on the game and it became clear that the launch was going to be massive, the first discussions about an expansion began in April 2025 with Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière, the game’s designers, to explore the possibilities for additional content.

“They worked on it and presented an iteration that led to a contract being signed in November 2025, as the first market feedback started coming in and multiple markets were selling out.

“However, this timeline was only possible because the designers were fully confident that the game offered enough design space to support an expansion, and because they presented an idea that genuinely excited the team, both mechanically and thematically.

“We’re not releasing expansions simply for the sake of releasing them or to get a marketing boost. If an expansion is published, it’s because we believe it genuinely adds something to the game and offers players a meaningful new experience.”

He added, “Mirage’s format also played an important role. It is a compact expansion, with a €7.99 MSRP, that introduces a new chapter while also adding a new gameplay twist that can be used to replay the entire base game in a different way.

“It isn’t a large expansion that takes up a significant amount of shelf space in stores or represents a massive financial commitment; instead, it is designed to complement the base game and extend the experience without overshadowing it. Its difficulty is also carefully tuned so that players can enjoy the expansion even if they haven’t finished the base game.

“Regarding expansions and product lines, there is a balance to strike between fully trusting your game and not overcommitting. You want to anticipate demand for expansions and reprints in order to avoid out-of-stock situations or a lack of releases and support that could hurt a game’s prospects in the medium to long-term.

“At the same time, a game needs to demonstrate commercial stability before being turned into a full-fledged product line and treated as such.

“It’s no secret that overproducing a game is one of the easiest ways for a publisher to get into financial trouble, and we’re doing our best to avoid that. We want to support successful games and build on their potential while remaining disciplined about production and inventory.”

A Board Game Arena version of the base game is also due for release in Q4 of this year.

The post “It is clear that Take Time won’t be a one-hit wonder”: Asmodee hit passes 325,000 copies after record-breaking launch first appeared on .

Financially-troubled board game publisher CMON has secured a $19m injection of new capital as it battles to turn around years of heavy losses and dwindling cash reserves – which had left it with just $368,000 in bank and cash balances at the start of August.

The huge investment from new shareholders gives the crowdfunded board game giant much-needed financial breathing room, as it continues its attempt to recover from losses of almost $23m across 2024 and 2025.

CMON warned in the summer that its core business was suffering a “prolonged structural downturn” and was still consuming more cash than it generates, despite a drastic restructuring which has seen the company halve its workforce, sell off some of its biggest game IPs and halt new crowdfunding campaigns.

Those efforts dramatically reduced its losses, with the company reporting a loss of just over $2m for the first half of this year, compared to almost $7m for the same period in 2025.

But CMON’s balance sheet remained under pressure at the end of June, with $7.34m more in short-term liabilities than short-term assets, up from $6.89m at the end of 2025.

A significant part of CMON’s liabilities relates to eight crowdfunded games whose campaigns raised $14m from backers, but which the company has yet to deliver – including DC Super Heroes United, which raised more than $4.4m, and DCeased, which brought in over $2.5m.

CMON’s directors in its H1 report that the liabilities position had caused the company’s directors to give “careful consideration to the future liquidity and performance of the group and its available sources of financing in assessing whether the group will have sufficient financial resources to continue as a going concern”.

The directors added that they believed CMON would be be able to continue operating – but central to that assessment was the success of the planned share sale, which was designed to raise up to HK$150.5m, or about $19m.

Existing shareholders agreed to buy just 7.76% of the new shares offered to them by the August deadline, leaving CMON looking to raise more than $17.5m from other investors through the rights issue – a figure approaching 2.5-times the valuation of the entire company implied by its last share sale in February this year.

But the company has now revealed that placing agent Yuen Meta managed to sell every remaining share on offer, giving the business the full $19m it had been seeking – a significant mark of belief in the beleagured business.

That capital injection is more than 50-times CMON cash balance from early August, and almost double the $9.9m in revenue CMON generated across the whole of last year, although it pales in comparison to the $37m to $45m revenues it posted each year between 2021 and 2024.

CMON said it plans to use 40% of the newly-raised money to fund its day-to-day operations across the next 12 months, including staff costs, royalties, shipping and distribution, professional fees and other administrative and operating expenses.

Of that slice, about 30% – which works out to $2.28m – was set to go towards staff costs including salaries, bonuses and allowances, 30% towards selling and distribution expenses, and 35% towards general administrative and operating expenses, including its sales operation, utilities, insurance, government registration and filing fees, listing fee, repairs and maintenance. The the final 5% was earmarked for paying professional fees

That news could provide some relief to the tens of thousands of backers still waiting for their games via CMON’s heavily-delayed crowdfunding campaigns – although the publisher has not specified exactly how much of the capital will be used to deliver the overdue titles, or whether the capital is enough to ensure all eight will be fulfilled.

CMON has not completed fulfillment of a crowdfunding project since Zombicide: White Death in mid-2025, but did manage to deliver pre-orders for Cthulhu: Dark Providence, Marvel United: Witching Hour and Dune: Desert War in the first half of this year.

Four other pre-order titles: Assassin’s Creed Role Playing Game, The Adventurers, The Dead Keep and Super Fantasy Brawl Reborn, all remain undelivered, although the first of those is currently slated for completion in Q3.

Game	Amount raised	Number of backers	Fundraise completed	Initial delivery estimate	Latest delivery estimate (as of September 24, 2026)
Mordred	$669,976	5,687	July 2023	August 2024	Q4 2026
Masters of the Universe: The Board Game – Clash for Eternia	$719,664	4,182	January 2024	November 2024	Q1 2027
DCeased	$2,564,789	12,787	December 2023	April 2025	Q1 2027
DC Super Heroes United	$4,478,989	14,040	August 2024	August 2025	Q1 2027
God of War	$832,945	4,388	May 2024	June 2025	Q2 2027
Massive Darkness: Dungeons of Shadowreach	$2,854,553	9,842	February 2025	March 2026	Q3 2027
A Song of Ice & Fire: Tactics	$1,886,509	6,406	February 2024	February 2025	Q3 2027
Degenesis: Clan Wars	$339,742	1,232	June 2024	July 2025	n/a
Total Dollars	$14,347,167

About 20% of CMON’s newly-raised capital is earmarked for repaying debts and other outstanding liabilities, including $2.46m owed to a CMON director and $385,000 of unsecured advances from employees, as well as outstanding production, shipping, royalty and other operating costs.

CMON has slated 25% of the new money for expansion in existing and new markets, including strengthening the company’s presence in Europe through marketing and potential attendance at events including Spiel Essen and Cannes, as well as targeting growth in Japan and the Philippines.

The company added that it plans to put 15% of the new capital towards potential acquisitions as part of a push into digital gaming, although said it had not yet identified any targets.

CMON said it intends to look for between one and three businesses, primarily in Asia-Pacific, valued at between about $1.3m and $2.5m each, which could help it develop digital adaptations of its existing games, companion apps and other digitally-enabled features.

The publisher stressed that it intends to retain physical tabletop games as its core business, with the digital push designed to complement rather than replace them.

CMON’s capital raise has also radically reshaped the ownership of the company, with chairman and CEO Ng Chern Ann ceasing to be the largest shareholder after his overall stake was diluted down from about 20% to just over 5%.

The capital raise has made investor Yip Ka Ki Cherry CMON’s largest disclosed shareholder with a roughly 19% stake, personally and via her investment holding company Legend One.

Yip was already an investor in CMON before the rights issue, with a stake of about 4.8%. Her other previous investments through Legend One include Japanese entertainment business TryHard Holdings.

CMON has also strengthened its board following the capital raise, appointing two new independent non-executive directors – veteran financial management, corporate governance and audit executive Chan Ka Kit, and corporate communications, marketing and investor relations specialist Claire Luk.

The post CMON succeeds with $19m capital raise in major boost to financially-troubled publisher’s turnaround first appeared on .

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.

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.”

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.

Spiel said earlier this year that it had reached the reached the limits of its expansion at its long-time home after boosting floor space to 81,200 sq m – larger than 15 American football fields – amid what it called “overwhelming interest” from exhibitors.

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.

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Chip Theory Games has hired eight-year Keymaster Games veteran Jennifer Graham-Macht to lead its lighter-games imprint Neon Knight, after discovering that building the business means developing a new audience – as well as rethinking some of the approaches behind its prior success.

The Too Many Bones publisher told BoardGameWire it is very happy with Neon Knight’s progress since it began building the studio two years ago, but has acknowledged being “maybe naive” about how many of its existing fans would follow it into lighter games.

Chip Theory chief marketing officer Josh Wielgus said, “We had hoped there would be a very high percentage of ‘omni-gamers’ in the Chip Theory audience who would gladly come along for the Neon Knight ride. That hasn’t been as true as we had initially hoped for, and thus we’re learning that we really need to put the effort into building that audience and brand.

“That has meant on the Chip Theory side investing more resources into the building of Neon Knight than we first anticipated. Obviously the biggest move we’ve made to that end is bringing in an experienced pro’s pro like Jen.”

Chip Theory has spent more than a decade building a hugely successful business around expensive, lavishly produced games aimed at a devoted audience of heavier and solo-focused hobby gamers – with standout hits including Too Many Bones, Cloudspire and The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era.

But the publisher looked to expand the breadth of its offering in April 2024 by bringing in Dice Throne co-creator Manny Trembley’s recently-launched studio Good Knight Games, which it rebranded to Neon Knight.

That move was designed to give Chip Theory a dedicated route to more retail friendly and affordable lines of games, while drawing on its longstanding operations, customer support, fulfillment and marketing experience.

Wielgus told BoardGameWire, “We’re very happy with the direction things are going, even if thus far there hasn’t been a ‘megahit’ to speak of.

“We’re really proud of the titles that have been released thus far and are learning a ton about a market – the light/medium/mass market side of board games – that we have historically been absent from on the Chip Theory side.

“We fully understand that this basically needs to be treated as building a new business. Chip Theory proper didn’t really find its footing until after Too Many Bones released, which was almost five years into the company’s existence.”

But he said one assumption the company had got wrong with Neon Knight was expecting the tastes of Chip Theory’s staff – who enjoy games across a range of weights and genres – to be mirrored across its customer base.

“I think we were maybe naive about the number of traditional Chip Theory fans who would be excited about this direction,” he said.

“Chip Theory caters primarily to a heavy and solo-forward audience, but all of us here in the building love most types/genres/weights of games. We presumed that much of our audience was likely the same.

“That hasn’t turned out to be as true as we maybe hoped, and so it didn’t take long to realize we needed someone who didn’t have their mind in Chip Theory world at all to help us really reach what has turned out to be a very new audience.”

Theory Into Practice

New Neon Knight lead and managing director Jennifer Graham-Macht previously spent about eight years at Parks publisher Keymaster Games, initially as community manager before taking on roles in production, project management and ultimately being named Games Director.

She has also recently returned to board game retail as co-owner of New Jersey-based retailer The Player Agency, having previously run Satellite Comics and Games in the mid-2010s.

Graham-Macht told BoardGameWire that moving into full studio leadership felt like a natural next step after a long spell at Keymaster, and described Neon Knight as having “equal parts amazing pedigree and plenty of room to keep improving”.

Her new role sees her responsible for the “health and growth” of the studio as well as leading its operations, with Trembley remaining creative director with responsibility for game design and art direction.

She said, “I’ve spent the first couple of months getting clear with Manny what the vision is for the imprint. We first want to make that clear internally and then use it to start shaping how we grow our catalog and talk to our audience.

“In every aspect of studio work, I’m focused on making sure we are walking well before we run. That includes how we say yes to projects, how we work with external partners, developing a sustainable omni-channel strategy, and much more.”

Part of Graham-Macht’s role will be helping determine which lessons from Chip Theory’s existing business are useful for Neon Knight – and which do not fit a company targeting a different market.

Wielgus told BoardGameWire, “The lesson we’re learning is that not every lesson we’ve learned with Chip Theory is applicable on the Neon Knight side of the business.

“Jen’s here to really help us gauge what bits of our experience are helpful and what bits of our experience are perhaps holding us back from doing mass market well.

“Our penchant for ‘overproduction’, a laser focus on making games solo-friendly, and a crowdfunding-first mindset don’t necessarily benefit us here.

“Jen has been helping us shed those tendencies where we need to and really think about Neon Knight stuff as its own distinct creature with very distinctly different needs.”

He cited Fight 5, Neon Knight’s reimagining of classic card game War, as a prime example, saying, “We were very proud of our box for Fight 5. It’s sleek and sexy and we kind of modeled it after the Compile box (which is also sleek and sexy).

“Post-release, we learned that for the type of game Fight 5 is, we did a horrible job of making it a retail-friendly box. It doesn’t tell you what the game is at all and is far too abstract to sell itself.

“We’re also learning that the direct to consumer marketing we rely on so heavily for our big Chip Theory stuff isn’t a silver bullet for retail/distribution/mass market audience acquisition.

“While the games and the mechanics can be great (and we believe they are), you need to stop and consider a whole lot more things when you don’t have the luxury of literally speaking to your audience directly the way we can on our big Chip Theory crowdfunding campaigns.”

Future Plans

Graham-Macht said her experience at Keymaster had taught her about connecting with customers through different sales channels, adding that it was “exciting to apply that knowledge to a different vision”.

She added, “I think the biggest challenge for any new brand right now is discoverability. There is a lot of competition for how a person chooses to spend a weeknight hour with friends, family, a spouse.

“Most customers won’t know that Neon Knight is an imprint of another brand let alone what that brand stands for. The products themselves need to shine.

“And that being said, a premium experience can look and feel like a lot of things. More than component materials, I think thoughtful product design and attention in all the right places goes a long way to building customer trust and loyalty. That’s the mark we’re striving for.”

She added, “Any amount of that community engagement we can foster at Neon Knight will be a big win for the studio.”

Crowdfunding is another area where Chip Theory is reconsidering whether its established approach is the right one for Neon Knight.

Wielgus said its debut Neon Knight title, Neon Reign, had launched with almost no pre-marketing, as the agreement to bring the studio into Chip Theory was signed just two days before its campaign.

He said, “That one I would chalk up as simply an experiment. Jump Masters I think we hoped would do a bit better than it did, but again so much of that I think is that we were relying on CTG’s existing Gamefound audience to show up for a lighter game that has no solo mode.

“As we look at the possibility of future campaigns, we’re having a lot of conversations about how to go about generating a unique audience and brand for Neon Knight, as well as things like moving Neon Knight campaigns back over to Kickstarter which seems to be a better fit for more accessible fare. “

Crowdfunding will not necessarily be the default route for future Neon Knight releases either, with Wielgus saying the company expects to use it occasionally, but will assess each game individually to decide whether a campaign is necessary or beneficial.

Graham-Macht added that while for now Neon Knight would rely on internally-developed designs, putting out games from other creators was “something we see in our future”.

“We’ve honed in that our games are inspired by/re-imagined modern classics, and that’s where we’re excited to explore”, she said. “Manny has a lot of ideas in this vein, but as we continue to grow and get our sea legs, there will be room for other designers’ work as well.”

Chip Theory is also hoping to staff up Neon Knight further following Graham-Macht’s hire, with the company gearing up to make two more hires that will split their time between the two arms of the business.

Wielgus told BoardGameWire he hopes the business will expand “in a huge way” across its release slate, staff numbers and amount of investment, but added that time – and sales – would tell if the business is able to achieve that.

He said, “I may be crazy, and I know a lot of folks consider Chip Theory one of the most successful board game companies of the last decade (I don’t have a way to measure that really, maybe they’re right. We certainly feel like we’ve been very successful!) – but I think Neon Knight can absolutely grow to match Chip Theory’s success.

“That can look a lot of different ways financially (sales quantity vs actual profits is always a bit of a moving target), but ultimately we’re excited enough about this brand that we really want to give it the full send.

“If Covid and tariffs have taught us anything, it’s that having a lot of irons in the fire and a strong diversification of our portfolio is the best way to shield ourselves from catastrophe.”

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After 20 years growing the UK Games Expo into one of the largest tabletop gaming conventions in the world, founders Richard Denning and Tony Hyams are preparing for their eventual exit by bringing in AireCon co-founder Mark Cooke as operations director.

Cooke joins following another record year for UKGE, which has seen its annual unique attendance surge almost 65% since 2023 to reach more than 51,000.

The show has already well surpassed Gen Con in terms of trade hall size, with the British event now spanning about 44,000 sq m – about 40% larger than Gen Con’s trade hall area – and hosting around 900 exhibitors in 2026.

That soaring growth has put increasing pressure on the small organising team at UKGE, with Denning telling BoardGameWire last year that the show had strained a full-time workforce which stood at just six people – although UKGE also relies on more than 200 volunteers, GMs, umpires and other helpers to deliver the convention each year.

Cooke is no stranger to growing a UK board game convention, having co-founded and built AireCon with Ben Clarkson from a 28-person gaming weekend in his flat a decade ago into England’s second-largest board game con, with about 5,000 attendees this year.

His hire by UKGE comes just three weeks after AireCon revealed that despite its own soaring growth, its 2027 show in Harrogate would be its last – saying a combination of factors had “made it increasingly challenging to run AireCon in a way that preserves the character and spirit that made it so special in the first place”.

More than 5,500 people are expected at the final AireCon – which has been nicknamed Airemageddon – with Cooke set to continue working on that final show before moving to UKGE full time.

A statement from UKGE emphasised the hire was part of a phased transition for UKGE’s organisers, and was “not a sudden change of leadership or direction”.

It said Cooke would work alongside Denning and Hyams “over the next few UK Games Expo events”, ensuring that knowledge, experience and responsibilities the pair have built up over the last 20 years are handed over “gradually and thoughtfully”.

Denning said, “As UKGE has expanded to now one of the world’s largest shows we have gradually grown our team, adding event managers, administrators and logistics support.

“Bringing in Mark as operations director is the next logical step as we put in place plans to ensure UKGE can run far into the future.

“We have known Mark through AireCon and other industry roles for many years now and he is an ideal choice bringing both event management experience, energy and fresh ideas to the team as well as a safe pair of hands as and when Tony and I eventually step away from the show we have built together with others.”

Cooke added, “I’m incredibly excited to be joining the UK Games Expo team and to have the opportunity to play a part in the next chapter of such an important event for the tabletop gaming community.

“I have huge respect for what Richard and Tony have built over the years, and I’m looking forward to working alongside them over the coming events.

“This will be a gradual transition, giving us plenty of time to share knowledge, ideas and experience. My aim is to build on the fantastic foundations already in place while helping UKGE continue to grow and thrive for many years to come.”

Denning and Hyams launched UK Games Expo at Birmingham’s Clarendon Suites in 2007, when the convention attracted about 1,000 visitors.

It moved to Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre in 2013, and had grown to more than 25,000 unique attendees by 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted its run of physical events.

Its growth has accelerated since returning, with unique attendance passing 31,000 in 2023, 39,000 in 2024 and 42,000 last year, before jumping beyond 51,000 at its 20th anniversary event this summer.

Denning told BoardGameWire last year that building a world-class trade hall in the UK had been a personal ambition stretching back almost two decades, adding at the time that UKGE was “now fully on the world stage of ‘mega-cons'”.

Despite this year’s record attendance, Denning told BoardGameWire after the show that there was still room for further expansion, particularly around the roughly 500 events taking place during the convention.

The next UK Games Expo is scheduled to take place at Birmingham NEC from June 4 to June 6, 2027.

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Ants, the debut release from designers Renato Ciervo and Andrea Robbiani, has scored its first board game award by picking up this year’s Jogo do Ano, the Portuguese game of the year prize.

The worker-management title triumphed amid strong competition from titles including Galactic Cruise – which already has the Dice Tower Awards game of the year and Golden Geek heavy game of the year to its name, and is one of the three finalists for this year’s Deutscher Spiele Preis.

Vital Lacerda design Speakeasy, Dave Beck and Abe Burson’s Luthier and Toni López creation Ada’s Dream were also nominated for the annual prize, which is organised by the non-profit board game association Spiel Portugal.

The Jogo do Ano, which has been presented since 2006, tends to skew towards the heavier end of board gaming, with recent winners including SETI, Nucleum, Barrage and Imperial Struggle.

Spiel Portugal says the type of game it looks for is “strong, spirited, dense, and stimulating”. Each member of the organisation initially selects ten games, with the resulting five finalists played again and scored according to a weighted set of criteria.

Half of the final score is based on what Spiel Portugal calls “time/fun”, with production accounting for 15%, theme, mechanics and replayability each worth 10%, and player interaction making up the remaining 5%.

Ants’ win follows a pair of high-profile award nominations for the design, through both the French As d’Or and the best expert game category of the Nederlandse Spellenprijs.

The title was originally published by Italy-based Cranio Creations, and has since been picked up for localisation by publishers including US-based Capstone Games and Germany’s PD-Verlag.

Ants is the sole design to date from chemist Renato Ciervo, who also works with Italian publishers as a game developer, according to his BoardGameGeek page.

His Ants co-designer, engineer Andrea Robbiani, has subsequently created Maestro – themed around the fierce rivalry between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo – and co-designed Timeless Journeys: The Italian Grand Tour with Nestore Mangone.

Ciervo and Robbiani have another unnamed co-design together due to be released next year, according to Robbiani’s BoardGameGeek page.

Jogo do Ano awards 2026

Winner:
Ants – designed by Renato Ciervo and Andrea Robbiani (Published by Cranio Creations)

Nominees:
Ada’s Dream – Toni López (Alley Cat Games)
Galactic Cruise – TK King, Dennis Northcott, Koltin Thompson (Kinson Key Games)
Luthier – Dave Beck and Abe Burson (Paverson Games)
Speakeasy – Vital Lacerda (Eagle-Gryphon Games)

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CMON has warned that its core business is suffering a “prolonged structural downturn” and is still consuming more cash than it generates, despite a drastic restructuring which has seen the board game crowdfunding major halve its workforce, sell off some of its biggest game IPs and halt new crowdfunding campaigns.

The warning comes amid an extraordinary period of upheaval for one of tabletop gaming’s biggest crowdfunding publishers, which suffered losses of almost $23m across 2024 and 2025 and is still working to deliver a string of heavily-delayed campaigns that raised more than $14m from backers.

CMON has spent the past 18 months attempting to stabilise its finances by cutting staff and other costs, selling high-profile IP including Zombicide, Blood Rage and Cthulhu: Death May Die, divesting its Singapore office and raising fresh money from investors.

Those efforts have now dramatically reduced its losses, CMON’s newly-released H1 financial report shows – with the company reporting a loss of just over $2m for the first half of this year, compared to almost $7m for the same period in 2025.

CMON’s revenue also rose more than 7% year-on-year in H1, up to $3.68m from $3.43m in the first six months of 2025, while its selling and distribution expenses more than halved from $1.83m to $859,000, and its general and administrative expenses fell from $4.37m to $2.37m.

But that improvement has failed to make the underlying business self-sustaining. CMON’s cash reserves, which stood at $3.9m at the end of 2022, had fallen to $2.1m by the end of 2024, and slipped again to just over $900,000 by June 2025.

CMON revealed last month that it had about $368,000 in bank and cash balances as of August 4, which it described as enough to cover less than a month of its daily operating expenses.

Crowdfunding Commitments

Despite the sharp reduction in its losses, CMON’s balance sheet remained under pressure at the end of June – with $7.34m more in short-term liabilities than short-term assets, up from $6.89m at the end of 2025.

A significant part of CMON’s liabilities relates to eight crowdfunded games whose campaigns raised $14m from backers, but which the company has yet to deliver.

They include DC Super Heroes United, which raised more than $4.4m, and DCeased, which brought in over $2.5m. Both of those campaigns were initially due to be delivered last year, but fulfillment has been pushed back several times since and both are now scheduled for the first quarter of 2027.

CMON has not completed fulfillment of a crowdfunding project since Zombicide: White Death in mid-2025, but has managed to deliver pre-orders for Cthulhu: Dark Providence, Marvel United: Witching Hour and Dune: Desert War in the first half of this year.

Four other pre-order titles: Assassin’s Creed Role Playing Game, The Adventurers, The Dead Keep and Super Fantasy Brawl Reborn, all remain undelivered, although the first of those is currently slated for completion in Q3.

Funding Push

CMON said in its H1 report that the liabilities position had caused the company’s directors to give “careful consideration to the future liquidity and performance of the group and its available sources of financing in assessing whether the group will have sufficient financial resources to continue as a going concern”.

Those directors believe CMON will be able to continue operating – but central to that assessment is a major share sale designed to raise up to HK$150.5m – about $19m.

CMON first announced the rights issue fundraise in June, proposing to offer existing shareholders the opportunity to buy three new shares for every share they already owned in an attempt to raise the capital.

The plan was approved by shareholders in late July and the formal offer opened in mid-August – but existing shareholders took up just 7.76% of the new shares offered to them by the August deadline.

That leaves CMON looking to raise more than $17.5m from other investors through the rights issue – a figure approaching 2.5-times the valuation of the entire company implied by its last share sale in February this year.

CMON said it plans to use 40% of the money raised to fund its day-to-day operations for roughly the next year, including staff costs, royalties, shipping and distribution, professional fees and other administrative and operating expenses.

Another 20% is earmarked for repaying debts and other outstanding liabilities, including $2.46m owed to a CMON director and $385,000 of unsecured advances from employees, as well as outstanding production, shipping, royalty and other operating costs.

CMON has earmarked 25% for expansion in existing and new markets, including strengthening the company’s presence in Europe through marketing and potential attendance at events including Spiel Essen and Cannes, as well as targeting growth in Japan and the Philippines.

Digital Ambitions

The company added that it plans to put 15% of the new capital towards potential acquisitions as part of a push into digital gaming, although said it had not yet identified any targets.

CMON said it intends to look for between one and three businesses, primarily in Asia-Pacific, valued at between about $1.3m and $2.5m each, which could help it develop digital adaptations of its existing games, companion apps and other digitally-enabled features.

The publisher stressed that it intends to retain physical tabletop games as its core business, with the digital push designed to complement rather than replace them.

That announcement comes just a few weeks after CMON terminated its planned $2.1m investment in NFT video game maker Blissful Link, an investment it had previously said formed part of a digital shift necessary to remain “relevant” in the games industry and expand its revenue stream.

That plan had included transitioning the company’s titles such as Massive Darkness and Super Fantasy Brawl Reborn into “high-quality digital assets” – with CMON saying the group would “continue to supplement this digital transformation as physical games would still offer a ‘screen break’ for individuals as well as foster direct face to face interaction”.

The proposed investment would have valued Blissful Link at more than $95m. Blissful Link made a loss of about $197,000 in 2024, on revenues of just over $408,000, and had net liabilities of about $889,000, according to unaudited figures provided by CMON in April. It did not include finances for 2025.

CMON said in the rights issue offer, “Under prevailing high-interest lending conditions, traditional bank borrowings and debt financing carry heavy interest and securing such financing would severely strain the group’s remaining liquidity.

“Accordingly, equity financing via the rights Issue is the most viable strategic path to recapitalize the group’s capital base without increasing debt distress.”

The directors’ assessment that CMON can remain a going concern also takes into account continued financial support from some of its directors, progress fulfilling its outstanding contract liabilities and further restructuring aimed at reducing cash outflows.

Revenue Collapse

CMON’s latest figures also reveal the scale of the collapse in its North American and European revenues over the past five years, transforming the geographical make-up of what remains of its business.

North America alone generated more than $8.6m for CMON in the first half of 2021, making up 57% of its roughly $15.1m H1 revenue. By the first half of this year, however, revenue from North and South America combined had fallen to just $642,000.

Europe has undergone a similarly dramatic contraction, with revenue from the region falling from about $4.5m in the first half of 2021 to just $982,000 in the latest six-month period.

Asia has consequently become CMON’s largest market by a considerable margin, generating more than $2m in the first half of this year and accounting for about 55% of its total revenue, compared with less than 10% in the same period of 2021.

That reversal has not been driven by Asian growth, however. CMON generated $3.22m from Asia in the first half of 2022, marking a roughly 37% decline since – but a far more resilient performance than the steep falls recorded in North America and Europe over the same period.

The publisher said in its H1 2026 report, “The group intends to continue developing its distribution and market presence in Asia while supporting its established markets in Europe.

“The group will also continue to monitor trade and tariff conditions affecting the US market, and maintain a prudent approach to allocate resources to markets and projects.”

CMON said in March this year that it intended to resume crowdfunding in the second half of 2026, but its latest interim results stop short of repeating that commitment, saying instead that new titles will be developed and launched selectively depending on market conditions, available financial resources and project readiness.

The final result of the rights issue is due to be announced on September 15.

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Three-year-old Dutch board game publisher DSV Games has continued its rapid rise by securing three nominations in this year’s Dutch game of the year awards, a year after picking up its first win in the contest.

DSV has landed a nomination in each of the three Nederlandse Spellenprijs categories with Reiner Knizia design Rebirth, Tomáš Holek’s Pondscape and Ants from Renato Ciervo and Andrea Robbiani – equalling veteran Dutch publisher White Goblin Games and industry giant Asmodee as the most-nominated company this year.

The entirety of this year’s nominations are split between those three publishers, with White Goblin selected for Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel’s design Castle Combo in the Family category, and Keith Piggott-created River of Gold and Hisashi Hayashi’s Yokohama among the Expert games.

The remaining nominations are from Asmodee studios: Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière’s Take Time from Libellud in Family, and Space Cowboys’ Dewan (Johannes Goupy, Yoann Levet) and Office Dog’s two The Lord of the Rings: Trick-Taking Game releases (Bryan Bornmueller), which were judged as a single title, completing the Connoisseurs’ game shortlist.

The result sees DSV and Asmodee join White Goblin and fellow Dutch board game publishing veteran 999 Games as the only publishers to score at least three nominations in a single year since the Nederlandse Spellenprijs moved to its current three-category format in 2020.

This year’s shortlist is a stark change compared with last year’s Nederlandse Spellenprijs, when eight different publishers shared the nine nominations.

999 Games was the only company to secure two nominations last year, and ultimately won both categories it contested, with Hisashi Hayashi design Bomb Busters taking the Family award and Botanicus (Samuele Tabellini Ferrari, Vieri Masseini) triumphing among the Connoisseurs games. DSV won the remaining Expert award with Tomáš Holek’s SETI.

This year 999 Games has no nominees at all – a not unprecedented situation, with the publisher also having missed the shortlist in 2021, but one that marks a sharp turnaround from its five nominations across 2024 and 2025. They included Sky Team winning the Family award two years ago.

DSV Games was launched in 2023 by online shop De Spelletjes Vrienden, with a focus on visually appealing titles which offer exceptional gameplay – making use of “stunning artwork, high-quality components, and well-crafted mechanics”, according to its website.

Its debut release slate in 2024 comprised four games including Rats of Wistar, designed by Simone Luciani and Danilo Sabia, which secured the publisher its first Nederlandse Spellenprijs nomination. The publisher increased its output to nine releases in 2025, and put out another 11 releases between January and the end of June this year – the cut-off point for games eligible for the 2026 award.

DSV picked up its first win in the competition last year with its localisation of SETI, which also won Golden Geeks for heavy game of the year and best thematic board game in 2024, and the Deutscher Spiele Preis last year amid a lengthy run of international awards success.

DSV co-owner Marieke Kuit-van Woesik said after the Nederlandse Spellenprijs victory last year, “We are really proud that as a publisher, which has only been around for two years, we receive this wonderful confirmation that we are on the right track with our small team.”

This year’s nominations take DSV into territory previously reached under the current award system only by two of the most established names in Dutch-language board game publishing.

The Nederlandse Spellenprijs added its intermediate ‘Connoisseurs’ category in 2020, creating the current annual line-up of three nominees apiece across Family, Connoisseurs and Expert games.

999 Games took five of those nine nominations in 2020, with White Goblin taking three. White Goblin followed with four nominations in 2021, while 999 again reached three in 2024. No other publishers bar those had scored three nominations in one year under the current format prior to 2026.

More than 100 board and card games released for the Dutch market during this year’s eligibility period were played by the Nederlandse Spellenprijs jury, which selects its nominees with a focus on quality, playability and originality.

The winners of the Family, Connoisseurs and Expert categories are due to be announced on October 10 at BumbleBeez Spellenwinkel in Bergen op Zoom.

Nederlandse Spellenprijs nominees 2026

Family
Castle Combo – designed by Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel (Published by White Goblin Games)
Rebirth – Reiner Knizia (DSV Games)
Take Time – Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière (Libellud / Asmodee)

Connoisseurs
Dewan – Johannes Goupy and Yoann Levet (Space Cowboys / Asmodee)
Pondscape – designed by Tomáš Holek (Published by DSV Games)
The Lord of the Rings: Trick-Taking Game (Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers) – designed by Bryan Bornmueller (Office Dog / Asmodee)

Experts
Ants – Renato Ciervo and Andrea Robbiani (DSV Games)
River of Gold – Keith Piggott (White Goblin Games)
Yokohama – (White Goblin Games)

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Gaming convention major PAX is doubling down on the success of its tabletop-focused Unplugged show by launching a second event in Houston, after growing the original into the second-largest tabletop gaming convention in the US after Gen Con.

PAX Unplugged Houston is set to take place at the George R Brown Convention Center from June 25 to 27 next year – marking the first expansion of the Unplugged brand since the dedicated tabletop convention debuted in Philadelphia in 2017.

Company event manager Sean Gonzalez told GamesBeat that PAX had considered several major cities while investigating the feasibility of a second Unplugged show, adding that Houston stood out based on infrastructure, demographics, data from other ReedPop events and demand from the industry.

“Most importantly though, Houston is where exhibitors wanted us to place the event,” he said.

PAX said in a separate announcement that Unplugged Houston will feature an expo floor for tabletop exhibitors alongside panels, tournaments and community events, although it is yet to reveal exhibitors, floor space, expected attendance or badge prices.

The show marks a return to Texas for the business, which previously ran PAX South in San Antonio from 2015 to 2020.

That convention featured both video games and tabletop gaming, but was discontinued after organisers said it had failed to expand during its four years, with the impact of Covid-19 ultimately delivering the final blow.

Gonzalez told GamesBeat Houston offered an opportunity to bring PAX back to the community which had attended PAX South, while giving the new event a more specific tabletop focus.

He added, “While we know that the current state of the economy impacts everyone, we are extremely confident based on the tremendous success we continue to see with the PAX events, particularly our Philadelphia PAX Unplugged, that the market will support PAX Unplugged Houston.”

PAX was launched by Penny Arcade web comic creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik in 2004 as the Penny Arcade Expo, after the pair decided they wanted a show exclusively to celebrate video gaming and game culture.

About 3,300 people attended the inaugural show, but that attendance had already soared to 58,500 by the 2008 event, leading to organiser to team up with New York Comic Con organiser ReedPop in 2009, and to launch a second con, PAX East, in 2010.

The company expanded again with PAX Australia in 2013 and the short-lived PAX South two years later, before launching the inaugural PAX Unplugged in 2017 after seeing the tabletop sections of its existing PAX conventions continue to expand.

PAX does not disclose precise attendance figures for PAX Unplugged, but says the Philadelphia event draws “tens of thousands” of visitors each year – believed to be north of the 30,000 mark. Its record 2024 show sold out all three days for the first time, filling all 528,000 sq ft of exhibition hall space with more than 350 exhibitors.

That growth puts it some way off the giant attendances of veteran North American tabletop convention Gen Con, which continued its record-breaking run this year to draw in more than 74,000 attendees.

But Pax Unplugged’s success has seen it displace long-running peer Origins as the second-largest tabletop gaming convention in the US – and its decision to launch a second event just 12 days after Origins 2027 is due to take place puts further pressure on the latter event.

Origins has been rebuilding its attendance since the pandemic, but unlike other major tabletop conventions such as Gen Con, Spiel Essen and the UK Games Expo has yet to regain its pre-Covid record of about 20,600.

The show’s attendance fell 2.5% this year to 18,700 – its first annual decline since the pandemic, although the fall came as other measures of activity at Origins remained stable or continued to grow. Exhibitor numbers increased marginally from 410 in 2025 to 413 this year, while the number of scheduled events climbed about 10% from 7,810 to more than 8,600.

PAX has not overtly positioned Houston as a competitor to Origins, but publishers weighing whether to exhibit at both now face the prospect of getting their teams and products to two major US tabletop shows within less than two weeks, alongside the associated staffing, travel, freight and booth costs.

That segment of the year also features the UK Games Expo, which has continued its meteoric growth into one of the world’s largest tabletop gaming conventions after more than 51,000 people descended on Birmingham’s NEC for the show’s 20th anniversary this year.

Badges for PAX Unplugged Houston are due to go on sale later this year, with applications for media and content creators also opening before the end of 2026.

The original PAX Unplugged returns to Philadelphia for its tenth show between December 4 and 6 this year.

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Spiel Essen has launched a dedicated B2B matchmaking system aimed at helping publishers, designers, retailers and other industry professionals find potential business partners and arrange meetings before arriving at the world’s biggest board game fair.

The new service, which is restricted to exhibitors and people with business visitor tickets, lets users create profiles detailing what they are looking for and what they can offer, send specific business inquiries, connect via chat and schedule appointments at the show using the built-in calendar.

Spiel said today that the system will be integrated directly into its dedicated app, adding that the move is intended to make networking between trade visitors, professionals and publishers “more targeted, simple, and effective”.

Business has long been an important part of Spiel despite its status as a public-facing convention, with major publishers operating their own dedicated B2B areas for meetings with retailers and other industry professionals.

B2B-specific companies such as manufacturers, crowdfunding services and trade organisations were still scattered across various halls in 2019, but that situation began to change after Spiel was taken over in 2022 by Merz Verlag – whose core event, Spielwarenmesse, is one of the world’s biggest B2B toy trade fairs.

Those companies began to be more concentrated in Hall 4 during the 2022 event – a move which intensified the following year amid a major reorganisation of the halls which attempted to more obviously split the fair into themed segments such as children’s games, family and light-to-medium games, expert games, tabletop and miniature games, roleplaying games and TCGs.

Florian Hess, managing director of Merz Verlag, said after last year’s record-breaking Spiel, “For exhibitors at the fair the focus is also on the joy of the games. At the same time, an incredible number of effective business developments emerge here – and this happens naturally alongside everything else.

“I don’t know of any other event that is as strong a springboard for a business’s launch as Spiel. I have met exhibitors who started here a few years ago with a small booth and are now occupying several hundred square meters and selling games internationally.

“Experiencing this kind of B2B rocket launch never ceases to fascinate me.”

The new system arrives as Spiel prepares for its biggest-ever event from October 22 to 25 this year – 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.

Spiel said earlier this year that it had reached the reached the limits of its expansion at its long-time home after boosting floor space to 81,200 sq m – larger than 15 American football fields – amid what it called “overwhelming interest” from exhibitors.

But despite the show bumping against its space limits at its long-time home, a Merz Verlag spokesperson told BoardGameWire in March, “We love Essen – as a venue and the city – and have no intention of leaving. For the foreseeable future SPIEL will remain in Essen as it has for more than 40 years now.”

The fair’s expansion into a seventh hall last year helped the four-day show to its record 220,000 attendance, outstripping the 209,000 visitor record it set just before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Spiel might have broken its attendance record in 2024 were it not for a self-imposed visitor cap, which limited the number of attendees each day to about 50,000 – a measure introduced alongside wider aisles post-pandemic to help visitors move around the often crowded halls more easily.

More than 920 exhibitors from 53 countries are expected at this year’s event, with Merz Verlag saying in March that demand had come both from long-term exhibitors keen to “significantly increase” their booth space, as well as an “impressive number” of first-time exhibitors hoping to attend this year.

About half of the available tickets for Thursday, Friday and Saturday have already been sold, seven weeks before the show opens, with Sunday sales currently “lagging slightly behind”, the show announced today.

Access to the matchmaking platform comes as part of Spiel’s €46 business visitor ticket, which compares with €25 for a standard adult day ticket.

Spiel Essen 2026 takes place at Messe Essen from October 22 to 25.

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Asmodee has continued its revived acquisitions spree by picking up the Welcome To… IP and game range from French publisher Blue Cocker.

The deal hands the board game publishing and distribution giant control of a flip-and-write series which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since Benoit Turpin’s breakout design Welcome To Your Perfect Home was released in 2018.

Subsequent releases have included standalone sequels Welcome to the Moon and Welcome to New Las Vegas, while its implementation on online platform Board Game Arena has racked up more than 3 million played games, and averages over 3,000 unique players daily.

More new versions seem likely to be on the way following the acquisition, with Asmodee head of collections Mathieu Aubert saying, “This acquisition goes beyond bringing a strong IP into our portfolio. We see huge potential to expand the Welcome To… universe, and the team already has plenty of ideas to bring it to life. I look forward to sharing more about our projects in the coming month.”

Asmodee announced in November 2024 that it was preparing to “reignite” its strategy of buying up smaller board game publishers and distributors, saying at the time that it had a pipeline of more than 20 acquisition opportunities.

That expansion kicked off with the opportunistic purchases of Zombicide and Cthulhu: Death May Die from financially troubled CMON in 2025, and has accelerated this year with deals including the striking buyout of French social and party game publisher ATM Gaming in a deal which could reach €250m.

Other acquisitions from Asmodee this year include returning to CMON to buy Sheriff of Nottingham and publisher Japon Brand, buying Time’s Up from R&R Games and picking up the remaining 45% of Exploding Kittens it did not already own.

Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler said during the announcement of the revived M&A strategy that many of its targets were businesses it already knew “in and out” through existing commercial relationships.

He specifically highlighted publishers behind successful games it already distributed as potential targets, alongside social and party game businesses and IPs, hobby game studios and local distributors.

Welcome To… fits withing that strategy, with Asmodee already handling Blue Cocker titles in markets including the UK and US. In Asmodee’s home market of France, however, Welcome To… and other Blue Cocker Games are currently distributed by Hachette subsidiary BlackRock.

The original game helped popularise the flip-and-write format, replacing dice rolls common to roll-and-write games with shared cards which allow players to make their choices simultaneously.

Asmodee SVP of tabletop games Benoit Clerc said, “Welcome To… established itself as landmark titles in modern board gaming, combining elegant game design with exceptional accessibility.

“We have tremendous respect for the work accomplished by the Blue Cocker team, Benoit Turpin, and everyone who contributed to the success of the game and their different iterations.

“We are excited to welcome this intellectual property into Asmodee’s portfolio and join our line-up of great family games and look forward to building its future.”

Blue Cocker founder Alain Balay added, “From the very beginning, our ambition was to create a game that would stand the test of time and bring people together around the table.

“We are incredibly proud of everything Welcome To… has achieved over the past years, and we are confident Asmodee will now carry the brand forward and introduce it to even more players around the world.”

Blue Cocker was launched by former aeronautical engineer Balay in 2013, and operated as a one-person business until the success of Welcome To… and the company’s international sales allowed it to expand to a five-person operation in 2019, he recently told French newspaper La Gazette du Midi.

He said exports accounted for 60% of Blue Cocker’s revenue at that point, but have since fallen to just 10% amid ongoing global financial and political uncertainty.

Balay added that despite that, the French market has held up well despite concerns about a resurgence in inflation in the country.

Blue Cocker’s remaining titles include 2014’s Medieval Academy, 2016 release Meeple War and 2025’s The Last Droids, while its main 2026 release so far has been corporate deckbuilder SAN.

The company’s 15th release, the two-player cooperative title Les Yeux Fermés designed by Antonin Boccara and Julien Prothière, is slated for a 2027 release according to its BoardGameGeek page.

Asmodee has kept its potential acquisitions tightly under wraps, but has plenty of financial firepower for further deals.

Its net sales rose 23% to €1.68bn in the financial year ending March 2026, while its adjusted EBITDA – its earnings before taxes, depreciation, amortisation and irregular one-off costs – was up about 25% to €285.4m.

The company’s net debt, meanwhile, stood at 1.6x adjusted EBITDA at the end of June, rising to 1.7 times once M&A commitments were included – down from 2.1 times a year earlier and comfortably below the company’s 2.5-times leverage target, given it significant headroom for M&A.

Despite Asmodee’s long-time image as a board game publishing heavyweight, more than 72% of its revenue now comes via its distribution of other companies’ games – up from an already hefty 63% in the previous financial year to March 31, 2025.

TCGs make up the lion’s share of Asmodee’s annual net sales – about 60% in the 2025/26 financial year, up from just over 50% across the preceding 12 month period.

The company’s own board game publishing operation, meanwhile, saw its net sales fall 5.8% in the last financial year – while net sales for the first quarter of this year were down 9.8% compared to the same period in 2025.

Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler was asked directly during a Q&A session on Asmodee’s latest financial results in May if the company was still primarily a board game publisher, or whether it was “increasingly becoming an infrastructure company for TCGs”.

He said in response, “We have insisted a lot on the fact that one of the strengths of Asmodee is to be a publisher, but the first strength that we do have is our global reach across all categories, from TCGs and board games.

“That’s the superpower of Asmodee – and then being a very strong publisher is a way of accelerating performance.

“So I would say that there is no change, we continue to capture opportunities across the board wherever they come from… our aim is to be a dominant player, bringing all games to the market, anywhere they can.”

Last week Asmodee named Exploding Kittens CEO Carly McGinnis as head of its global publishing operation, putting an executive who helped transform a record-breaking Kickstarter game into an international brand in charge of a portfolio including Catan, Ticket to Ride, 7 Wonders and Dobble/Spot It.

The move puts McGinnis into a hugely influential position within the tabletop industry. Asmodee’s chief product officer has responsibility for its studios, franchise development, licensing and studio marketing, according to the organisational structure the company published ahead of its stock market listing last year.

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