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.
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…
The Toni López-designed dice manipulation game fought off big name titles including Galactic Cruise and Luthier to win the 2026 Diamant d'Or, which was created more than a decade ago to celebrate complex euros the organisers felt were being overlooked by more mainstream board game awards.
After being catapulted into the board game industry limelight following the success of Pandemic in 2008, Matt Leacock has scored ongoing success through titles such as the Forbidden series, Ticket to Ride and Pandemic legacy titles and his Kennerspiel-winning climate-change co-design Daybreak. In this in-depth interview he spoke with BoardGameWire about how the industry has changed for designers over the last quarter of a century, how working with developers can best help a design to sing, and why fighting for designer rights is among his most important jobs in 2026.
Company co-founder Floris Toorenburg told BoardGameWire the company handled 14-times the number of orders in December 2025 that it did 12 months earlier, and estimated the business will ship about 118,000 packages and pallets this year across e-commerce fulfillment, crowdfunding fulfillment and its own sales channels.
Super Meeple, which releases its own designs as well as localising major titles such as Ark Nova and Gaia Project, says it is planning a "downward trend" for the number of games it releases each year in order to help each title stand out in an increasingly competitive market.
Sam Healey, the veteran Dice Tower reviewer who has contributed to the channel for much of the last 20 years, has resigned after comments he made blaming Alex Pretti and Renee Good for their deaths at the hands of ICE…
This year's As d'Or sees Flip 7, Rebirth and Toy Battle fighting it out for the main prize, with Arcs, Civolution and Ants competing for the expert game award.
The company added that international toy markets were showing "positive developments" despite global challenges, driven particularly by a growth in purchases for families and adults - with card games among products which "benefited significantly" from the trend.
A long list of more than 20 titles has been whittled down to six challengers for this year: Galactic Cruise, Luthier, Shackleton Base, Speakeasy, Thebai and Thesauros, all of which have been released in Germany since Spiel Essen last October.
CMON announced more IP sales could be on the way alongside making an apology for the delays to its outstanding crowdfunds - some of which are now running almost two years beyond initial delivery estimates.
The company's previous collaboration with Warner Bros Discovery Global Consumer Products saw it launch a DC trading card set in March last year, which was followed in October with the announcement of Legendary: A DC Deckbuilding Game.
When news broke three months ago that board game giant Asmodee had been named manager of the hugely lucrative Middle-earth licence for tabletop games and accessories, questions naturally abounded within the industry about what that would mean for other publishers hoping to create The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings-based titles. Luke Peterschmidt, the tabletop veteran tasked with running the Middle-earth operation at Asmodee, sat down with BoardGameWire at Spiel Essen following the announcement to outline his vision for the IP, what they want from publishers in terms of pitches, and how they hope to prove naysayers of the deal wrong.
