ODN's work over the years has included crowdfunding and marketing support for companies such as Roxley Games, Indie Boards & Cards and Stronghold Games, Devir North America and Allplay, while individual campaigns worked on include the $2.2m More Terraforming Mars! Kickstarter and Roxley's Santorini Co-op & Deluxe Pantheon Edition crowdfund, which raised about CA$2.1bn.
The publisher has broken a three-year run of losses since bringing in John Coveyou to restructure the company last July, with the profits allowing it to get Santa’s Workshop into the hands of backers, as well as starting to pay some of the backlog of royalties it owes designers.
Two more significant hires in the board game industry across the marketing side of the hobby. If you have news of a new role, hire or job change within the hobby that you’d like mentioned on BoardGameWire, please send an email with the details to the editor, Mike Didymus-True, on:
mike@boardgamewire.com
Arizona-based Silver Dragon Games scooped Retailer of the Year at this year's awards, adding to the Innovation In Games (Retail) and Outstanding Store Design titles it won at the same awards in 2024.
Soaring interest in the show has now seen Spiel Essen boost its floor space four times in as many years, with this year's event in October set to be about 30% larger than the already massive 62,500 sq m show which took place in 2023.
Universal becomes an authorised US hobby distributor for Stonemaier's games, which include the massive-selling Wingspan series and other popular titles such as Scythe, and will take on sole distribution rights in August of this year.
The Tabletop Game Designers Association, a professional organisation launched in 2024 to advocate for creators in North America, said it requested that year that GAMA begin including designer names in its Origins Award announcements - and reiterated the plea when designer names were left out again in 2025.
More than 610,000 copies of Wingspan, its Asia expansion, dragon-themed title Wyrmspan and last year's fish-focused release Finspan were printed by Stonemaier in 2025 according to its latest annual stakeholder report, bringing the total lifetime copies across the trilogy to more than 3.3 million.
Zenith picked up the intermediate award ahead of First Rat and Take Time, while the children’s category was won by Mooki Island in a contest with Archeo and The Twisted Spooky Night.
The dice and card-focused combat game has become a crowdfunding heavyweight following its original $180,000 Kickstarter project from Mind Bottling Games in 2018, going on to raise almost $13m across a string of subsequent campaigns.
This year's 20 finalists include a magnet-based vertical castle-building game, a medium-weight strategy title centred around wedding planning, and a Persian folklore-themed action selection design which sees players use astrolabes to read stars and hunt demons.
Cardboard Alchemy has taken the next step in its rapid expansion by shifting to distribute its own games into retail, powered by the evergreen success of its dragon-themed design Flamecraft.
That drop saw the US fall behind both France and the UK in Q3 in terms of the company's highest-performing countries for net sales, with France surging 47% year-on-year to over €111m, and the UK growing 41% to €82.7m.
The latest deal comes eight months after Asmodee kicked off its reignited strategy of buying up smaller board game publishers, distributors and IPs by acquiring CMON's flagship IP Zombicide, a series which had raised more than $40m on Kickstarter since its 2012 launch.
Dancey told BoardGameWire, "This tide is, in my opinion, only running one way, and AEG is going to have to fight hard to hold it’s [sic] position."
Asmodee said a feature film based on Ticket to Ride is already in development, written by Ben Mekler and Chris Amick - the Kung Fu Panda animated series writers who previously prepared a movie pitch for Leder Games' breakout title Root.
Kosmos managing director Matthias Kienzle said, "With the new ownership structure and the newly formed management team, we aim to further scale and continuously expand our international sales activities."
Leder Games founder Patrick Leder told BoardGameWire, Liz has a unique creative vision, with a talent for understanding what makes a game resonate with players. She shares my passion for cooperative games, which is an area I've wanted Leder Games to explore for a number of years. She's earned the trust and respect of everyone on the team, as well as our audience."
The much-needed capital raise is the latest move by CMON as it continues its attempt to recover from massive losses racked up over the past two years.
Magic's record-breaking year was capped off by a storming fourth quarter, which saw revenues from the game up 141% compared to Q4 2024 on the strength of the Avatar: The Last Airbender and Final Fantasy releases.
Rodney Smith, the founder and host of board game ‘how to play’ video giant Watch It Played, has accused long-time site colleague Chaz Marler of misleading advertisers on the latter’s Game Night Picks YouTube channel by paying to boost viewer…
