Z-Man Games founder Zev Shlasinger has teamed with fellow board game industry veterans including Stronghold Games founder Stephen Buonocore to launch a new publishing house called Play to Z.
Zev Shlasinger, the founder of original Pandemic publisher Z-Man Games, is leaving his role as director of board game development at WizKids after seven years with the business.
Board game giant Asmodee continues to outperform for troubled parent company Embracer Group, despite its latest quarterly sales falling compared to the same period last year.
Few people in the modern board game industry can boast a career as long and storied as Zev Shlasinger. After launching Z-Man Games 25 years ago, he found huge success bringing games such as Agricola to the US market - as well as signing one of the biggest board games of all time in 2008's Pandemic. After leaving his seven-year role as director of board games at Wizkids last June, Shlasinger wasted no time launching a new publishing house, Play to Z Games, and the company launched its first offering onto Kickstarter at the end of February - marking the first time Shlasinger had dipped his toes into crowdfunding. He tells BoardGameWire how he approached the campaign, lessons learned and what he plans to do next.
Board game giant Asmodee has confirmed it has a string of projects in development at the Canada arm of its Plan B Games studio, following the firm merging the Germany-based part of Plan B into its Lookout Spiele subsidiary.
Four years have passed since Plaid Hat creator Colby Dauch bought back the Dead of Winter studio from Asmodee - but an exclusivity deal signed as part of the exit has put limits on what the newly-independent studio has been able to experiment with. That deal expired ten days ago - and Dauch has wasted no time in spreading Plaid Hat's wings for its first-ever foray into crowdfunding, with the launch of its latest narrative-fuelled Crossroads game, Wandering Galaxy, set to go live on Kickstarter in the summer.
Challengers, a deck-management board game designed to replicate the feel of a digital auto-battler, has continued its powerful run of award wins by being named Italian Game of the Year.