Multiple members of the organisation expressed their disgust during the AGM that board members had suggested people only attended because free food was provided, while others were upset at the way they were shouted at and talked over during a fiery discussion on changes to the non-profit's bylaws.
MingYang Lu's puzzle fighter-style board game Re;MATCH has had a storming start to its Kickstarter campaign, picking up almost $250,000 from over 1,250 backers with half of the month-long crowdfund still to go. In this sponsored interview, Lu talks about why his design looks to derive fun from game mastery rather than discovery, the importance of conventions for small publishers, and why AI art "cheapens creativity".
GAMA Expo's attendance this year is more than double its pre-pandemic record of 1,800 set in 2019, and up more than 87.5% compared to the event's final Reno show in 2023.
Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière's design sealed top spot above Eric Olsen's Flip 7 - which won the separate family game prize - and also finished in third place in the family-weight category.
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."
