Asmodee, LEGO team up to launch LEGO-focused board game design studio

Board game giant Asmodee has inked a partnership deal with LEGO to launch a dedicated design studio focused on creating new LEGO board games.

Denmark-based Dotted Games will “nurture and develop all games within the LEGO Group and Asmodee’s partnership”, a statement from the pair said, starting with family-weight party game Brick Like This!

The move marks a resurrection of LEGO’s push into the board game sector, with the company having created a string of buildable board games in its LEGO Games series between 2009 and 2013.

Reiner Knizia was a consultant on that previous project, and also guest designed Lunar Command and Ramses Pyramid alongside Lego Games lead designer Cephas Howard.

LEGO heralded its return to the board game space earlier this year with the unveiling of Monkey Palace, a light strategy game tasking players with building longer and taller staircases of LEGO to pick up extra bricks and points.

The family-weight game, from designers David Gordon and Tin Aung Myaing, is set to be available to buy following its debut at Essen Spiel in October.

Jaume Fabregat, board games lead at LEGO Publishing, said in a recent interview with Mojo Nation that the company began looking again at the board game space, before the internal project was derailed by the Covid pandemic.

He said the company eventually decided to move forward with a plan to create games with lego building and strategy at their core, and approached Asmodee “to help nail the game concept”.

Asmodee’s Birgitte Bülow, who will head up Dotted Games, said in a separate interview with Mojo Nation that it would be on the lookout for game concepts from the board game design community which could “bring new ways of integrating LEGO bricks and values into board games”.