Tag Archives: asmodee

Asmodee USA will Distribute Para Bellum Games’ Conquest Line of Miniatures

Para Bellum Games

Asmodee USA has announced they will distribute Para Bellum Games’ high-quality tabletop miniatures game line Conquest.

The Conquest miniatures line was built around three points to help the game stand out in the market: miniature detail, rules, and lore built around the world of Eä. The miniatures for Conquest have an amazing level of detail that is sure to please gamers and painting hobbyists. The Para Bellum crew stays updated on current industry trends. All items are developed and produced in the EU Or the US using unique methods of design and production to achieve this high level of quality.

Players will find the rules quick and easy to learn while still offering veteran players layers of strategy. Additionally, all miniatures can be used with their two rule sets: Conquest – The Last Argument of Kings, a mass battle wargame, and Conquest: First Blood, a thrilling skirmish-style game. No matter the Conquest game played, players will find themselves immersed in a deep, mature world. The world of Conquest continues to evolve thanks to player participation in the Conquest: Living World and organized play supported by their system of volunteers called Vanguards.

The Conquest line of miniatures will be available through Asmodee USA this spring, including the brand-new faction, The Old Dominion. This is the 6th faction for Conquest and features the game’s unique look at an army in the style of the Roman Undead. This series will not only have an amazing aesthetic, but they will also bring new rules mastery to create exciting gameplay opportunities.

Spot It! Goes from Tables to Comics

Asmodee Entertainment has announced an agreement with publisher Ablaze to produce a graphic novel based on Spot It!, the award-winning visual perception game from Asmodee’s Zygomatic games studio.

Spot It! (known as Dobble outside North America) is a gaming phenomenon and worldwide bestseller in the family games market.

Characters from the game, including Dobbly, the famous anthropomorphic hand which features in the game’s logo, will appear in an original adventure story, written by Derek Fridolfs and illustrated by Gabriele Bagnoli.

The Spot It! graphic novel will be available to retailers through Diamond Comics and Diamond Book Distributors and is due to launch in Summer 2022, with further details expected soon.

Spot It!

Embracer Groups Announces Intent to Acquire Asmodee for €2.75 billion

Asmodee

Rumors have persisted for months that Asmodee has been looking for a buyer and it looks like they have found one in the Embracer Group.

The deal would be about €2.75 billion with €350 million paid to the main shareholder PAI and others with $2.4 billion in cash and debt refinancing.

Asmodee would still operate on its own with no reorganization expected.

Embracer Group is the parent company of 86 video game development studios representing over 250 IPs in over 40 countries. Studios include THQ Nordic, Gearbox Entertainment, and others with properties such as Saints Row, Dead Island, Darksiders, Timesplitters, World War Z, and Borderlands.

The purchase of Asmodee would give Embracer Group access to a massive amount of more IP to develop as video games, movies, and television, as well as an avenue to take their current IP and bring it to the board game market.

Asmodee includes numerous game studios such as Atomic Mass Games, CATAN Studio, Z-Man Games, and Fantasy Flight Games, and games such as Pandemic, CATAN, Ticket to Ride, Dead of Winter, Spot It!, and many more.

The acquisition would have a major impact not just on the board game industry but the video game industry as well.

Is Asmodee for Sale for 2 Billion Euros?

Asmodee logo

Rumors have swirled for some time that Asmodee‘s VC company PAI Partners has been looking to sell the board game company. The rumor has kicked up again due to reporting from Gus & Co. That site is reporting that PAI is looking to sell Asmodee for 2 billion Euros. They acquired the company in 2018 for 1.2 billion Euros from Eurazeo who purchased Asmodee in 2014 for 132 million Euros.

PAI Partners is reportedly working with Goldman Sachs and Natixis Partners to help sell the company.

The news and timing is an interesting one as the board game industry is booming with estimates it reached $11 billion in 2020 and $12 billion is projected for 2021. That’s a year-over-year increase of about $1 billion for the last three years. The industry is also looking to expand from the tabletop with licensing agreements for clothing, household items, entertainment, and more regularly being announced.

Asmodee is a juggernaut of the industry, the second-largest behind Hasbro. Fantasy Flight Games, Catan Studio, Days of Wonder, Z-Man Games are all part of the Asmodee umbrella covering games like Catan, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, and more.

Asmodee Announces 3rd Parties will No Longer Be Able to Sell on Amazon

Asmodee logo

In today’s Gama Expo, Asmodee announced that third-party retailers will no longer be able to sell through Amazon starting June 1st. Asmodee said they are working directly with Amazon to sell through their platforms. Part of the reason for this is the violation of the publisher’s MAP policy.

When pressed if Amazon will be required to stick to the MSRP and MAP, Asmodee was cagey in their response only saying that the decision is private and part of the contract and repeating their MAP will be enforced.

What lines this impacts, or if it’s everything, is unclear. The publisher is a large umbrella of a company that includes Catan Studio, Fantasy Flight Games, Z-Man Games, Days of Wonder, Plaid Hat Games, Lookout Games, and so many more. We’ll have more information as it’s released.

Asmodee Digital games are coming to SquareOne

Asmodee has announced that it has licensed its Asmodee Digital games to SquareOne. SquareOne is a new gaming system that blends board games and video games into one device.

SquareOne launched on Kickstarter in November and went on to eventually raise $219,755 from 380 backers.

It’s currently available on Indiegogo where it has raised an additional $237,773 from 404 backers. Expected to ship in December 2021, you can get the SquareOne Asmodee Edition for $649.

Atomic Mass Games Takes Over Fantasy Flight’s Miniature Games Including X-Wing, Armada, and Legion

Star Wars

Asmodee is reshuffling some things within the company with a reorganization of their miniature game development. Atomic Mass Games will now handle the future development of all of Asmodee’s miniature games as a “specialty studio” focused on that space.

This means that numerous games are shifting over to the game developer who has found success with their Marvel: Crisis Protocol Game.

Star Wars: X-Wing, Star Wars: Armada, and Star Wars: Legion are all moving from Fantasy Flight to Atomic Mass.

Simone Elliott, who has shepherded Fantasy Flight’s relationship with Lucasfilm Licensing since 2015, will
lead Atomic Mass Games during this time of expansion as Head of Studio. Will Shick assumes primary creative oversight as Head of Product Development. Joining them will be key members of the teams involved in the creation and evolution of Fantasy Flight’s current Star Wars miniatures games, Star Wars
X-Wing, Star Wars Legion, and Star Wars Armada.

Asmodee and Welbeck Publishing Release a Catan Puzzle Book

CATAN Puzzle Book

The timeless world of Catan is waiting for you to explore, build, settle… and solve. The CATAN Puzzle Book is available now!

Since its creation in 1995 by Klaus Teuber, CATAN and its many expansions have sold more than 32 million games around the world, been produced in more than 40 languages, and is sold in more than 70 territories. CATAN is a truly global phenomenon.

Inside the CATAN Puzzle Book are 100 original puzzles based on the wildly popular board game, providing a narrative adventure that allows you to discover the unsettled island of Catan.

Alongside original artworks from CATAN, each puzzle contains its own pleasures, and solving them allows you to win resources. Resources lead to victory points… and victory points lead to success!

The CATAN Puzzle Book from Welbeck Publishing is available now in English. French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Bulgarian, and Czech editions are coming soon!


Purchase: BookshopAmazon

Asmodee and Artovision Partner for Art Collectibles

Asmodee

Artovision and Asmodee Entertainment have entered into a licensing partnership to bring several of Asmodee’s fan-favourite properties to life through Artovision’s range of multi-dimensional art collectibles. Properties featured in the deal will include the omnipresent modern classic boardgame CATAN along with Fantasy Flight Games Arkham Horror, Twilight Imperium, KeyForge, and Legend of the Five Rings brands, known for their extensive library of high-quality
illustrations.

The cooperation will see artwork from these beloved properties produced as shadowbox and desktop artwork by the team at Artovision, bringing some of the brands’ most iconic pieces of art to life with a three-dimensional depth never seen before. Artovision’s shadowbox artwork combines four layers of full-colour art, each printed on optical grade
cast acrylic, and assembled within a durable high-quality finished frame to create astonishing visual depth. Artovision’s desktop artwork, meanwhile, combines two highquality printed art layers in a freestanding optical grade acrylic block, perfect for brightening up desktops, bookshelves, TV cabinets or home entertainment system surrounds.

Klaus Teuber’s CATAN is a highly visual and engaging game, known for the compelling art style of its box covers, board and other game components. Developed by Asmodee’s Catan Studio, the modern classic celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2020/21 and enjoys a great and growing audience all over the globe. Having sparked a revolution in modern game design, CATAN is well on track to become the world’s pre-eminent boardgame.

Twilight Imperium is a genre-defining strategy game set against the backdrop of a sweeping, epic space opera with awe-inspiring, epic art to match. The cyber-noir setting of Android sees megacorporations battling for dominance in an AI-enhanced future and is, like Twilight Imperium, KeyForge and Legend of the Five Rings, a product of Asmodee’s renowned Fantasy Flight Games studio. KeyForge is the world’s first Unique Deck Game, known for its deep, immersive melting-pot universe where anything is possible, with stunning card art central to its appeal. The world of Rokugan, home to Legend of the Five Rings, offers an epic fantasy vista and provides the backdrop for a range of beloved tabletop games. The chosen properties stand out as some of the most beautifully illustrated brands to be found anywhere in world, traits which make them a perfect fit for Artovision’s innovate, ultra high-quality shadowbox and desktop artworks.

The first products of this collaboration are due to launch in fall 2020. CATAN, Android, Twilight Imperium, KeyForge, and Legend of the Five Rings will each be the subject of two fantastic shadowbox designs and two more desktop artwork pieces.

CMON’s Comic Imprint Guillotine Press Brings Asmodee’s Twilight Imperium and Android to Graphic Novels in 2021

CMON

CMON LTD and Asmodee Entertainment have entered into a licensing partnership to bring two of the most famous boardgame universes of all time to the pages of comics! The best-selling game worlds of Twilight Imperium and Android are slated to make their graphic novel debut in 2021. The deal is the latest example of Asmodee Entertainment’s continued expansion into licensed publishing opportunities. For CMON, this deal secures the first-ever licenses for their newly minted comics arm, Guillotine Press.

CMON has seen some of their games turned into comics through IDW Publishing and recently Kickstarted three graphic novels “CMON Comics – Vol. 1.” That project raised $501,632 from 12,261 backers and featured not just print comics but expansions for CMON’s popular tabletop board games. It’s slated to be delivered in February 2021.

As with CMON’s first set of graphic novels, these new books will be created by veteran writers and artists, who will bring their immense talents to the projects. Scheduled to be launched on Kickstarter in 2021, the books will be paired with tie-in game components designed to delight long-time fans of both franchises.

Asmodee

Twilight Imperium, the genre-defining 4x strategy game immersing players into interstellar conquest and diplomacy for over 20 years, is set against the backdrop of a sweeping, epic space opera filled with iconic races, locations, ships, and characters. Twilight Imperium was first released in 1997 and has seen four editions released with the latest in 2017. The game was designed by Christian T. Petersen with art by Bill Heagy.

Meanwhile, the cyber-noir setting of Android explores a future where megacorporations compete across the globe and cyber-espionage is just business as usual whilst criminal gangs fight for dominance in the overcrowded streets below gleaming corporate starscrapers. Android has been explored through board games, card games, and roleplaying games for over a decade. Android was released in 2008 by designers Daniel Clark and Kevin Wilson. It features art by Julie Dillon, Henning Ludvigsen, Stefan Morrell, Aaron Panagos, Didier Poli, and Zoe Robinson. 2012 saw the release of the popular card game Android Netrunner by Richard Garfield and Lukas Litzsinger which featured art by Bruno Balixa, Ralph Beisner Del Borovic, Adam S. Doyle, Amelie Hutt, Thomas Lishman, Henning Ludvigsen, Ed Mattinian, Dallas Mehlhoff, Adam Schumpert, Mark Anthony Taduran, and Matt Zeilinger. That release saw numerous expansions well into 2018.

Both the Twilight Imperium and the Android game lines are products of Asmodee’s Fantasy Flight Games studio.

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