Grail Games follows Matagot tie-up with ‘rebirth’ of Maple Games to publish heavier titles
Australian board game publisher Grail Games has teamed up with the new incarnation of Canada’s Maple Games as an outlet for its heavier titles.
Maple has been renamed Frost Bite Games under the partnership, which sees Grail founder David Harding join forces with former Maple studio head Billy Chandler.
Harding will be production director at the rebranded publisher, while Chandler will work as its creative director.
Frost Bite will be the new home of the Manhattan Project family of games – which Grail bought from Minion Games in 2021 following the death of Minion’s founder James Mathe – as well as other heavier titles, while Grail will focus on small games and mid-weight strategy titles.
The move comes three months after Grail signed a partnership deal with Matagot to take on publication of the French board game company’s eurogames and strategic card games, after Matagot decided to focus the company’s future on the family, beginner and children’s games market.
Frost Bite will now take on responsibility for the upcoming Kickstarter for a new edition of The Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, which is set to launch its campaign on February 28.
Harding said that under the partnership, Grail Games would itself take on some upcoming releases from Maple that are “more Grail’s ‘style'”, including Valedictorian, from Sagrada co-designer Adrian Adamescu and Sparks co-creator Florin Purluca.
Maple was launched in 2018 by former Fantasy Flight Games graphic designer Peter Wocken and ex-Bezier Games developer and prolific board game designer Daryl Andrews – the co-designer of Sagrada alongside Adamescu.
The publisher raised almost C$36,000 for its debut Kickstarter, Dragon Boats of the Four Seas, and about C$30,000 for follow-up title Imagineers that same year.
Andrews was let go as president of the company in April 2019, in the same week the publisher’s crowdfunding campaign for Folding Space was suspended by Kickstarter.
Wocken left the company a month later according to his LinkedIn page, and was subsequently brought on board by Pandasaurus Games as its head of graphic design.
While the Folding Space project never rematerialised, Maple went on to raise about $25,000 for Octopus’s Garden through a Kickstarter in 2021, and about $40,000 for Expedition: Northwest Passage – HMS Terror Edition, a 2013 Matagot release, in March last year.
Andrews has spent the last two years as head of talent acquisition at Maestro Media, where Wocken is now also employed as director and head of graphic design.
Grail, which was launched more than a decade ago, made a name for itself through reprinting and refreshing older strategy titles such as Reiner Knizia’s Medici and Stephenson’s Rocket and small games such as Boomerang and Elevenses through a string of Kickstarters.
Its most successful Kickstarter to date, a refresh of 2005 design Fjords with new variants and modules designed by Phil Walker-Harding and updated artwork from Beth Sobel, raised more than A$234,000 from over 3,600 backers in 2021.
Grail’s next planned crowdfunding campaign is a Pocket Game Collection comprising a trio of small box titles, including a small edition of Fjords, new title Farm Hand and two-player trick-taking game Tango.
