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This week; Asmodee gets sold, but still manages to buy another company, Eric Lang came close to creating a "Unique Game," and Grind House brings some horror to Kickstarter. Plus. there is lots of IP movement: books getting games and games getting movies.
Asmodee is Sold
The previous owners of gaming giant Asmodee, Eurazeo, have sold the company to PAI Partners. Both are private equity firms with a home in Paris. If you’re wondering, their press release has this nugget:
“Proceeds from the sale of this transaction amounted to €565 million for Eurazeo and its investors, including €426 million for the Eurazeo share, a multiple of almost 4x its initial investment and an Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of about 35%.”
Also, Asmodee are still buying, because they’ve snapped up ADC Blackfire Entertainment, a European distributor.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell adaption coming
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a fantastic novel, by Susanna Clarke, about Napoleonic era magicians, and a slightly less successful TV adaption. Now, Osprey Games have teamed with the brains behind War of the Ring to create a board game set in that world, where you are also magicians trying to learn magic and beat your contemporaries while doing that dash of social climbing that a game with Jane Austen in deserves.
The title is pretty straight forward: Strange & Mr Norrell: A Board Game of English Magic and we should be able to play it in summer 2019.
Eric Lang nearly created a “Unique Game”
‘Unique Game’ is a major buzz word in the tabletop industry, pushed by Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) and the forthcoming Keyforge (in which every single pack of cards is unique) and Discover: Lands Unknown, which is also a one of a kind system. Well, we nearly had one from Eric Lang. Basically, Fantasy Flight founder Christian T. Petersen has been speaking about how he and Lang were throwing around the unique game concepts around a few years ago, and while they worked on how such a thing could work Lang created a game concept.
Not a whole game, but “core ideas and play pattern,” however, Lang then signed with CMON and any chance of working for FFG ended for a while. Lang gave full permission for the idea to live on in other hosts, and Keyforge’s Richard Garfield developed his independently. We’ll leave you with this though:
“I expect (and hope) Eric will create his own vision of a ‘Unique’ game one day, be it with CMON or otherwise…I can’t wait to play it when it arrives.”
Grind House: Hold on to your limbs
Do you feel there’s not enough amputation in games? Then get ready for Grind House, where your player board has overlays for when bits of you get cut off. Yeah that sounds grim but Grind House invokes both the movies of the same name as well as Saw, as the players are people trapped by an evil mastermind in an old Slaughterhouse, all working to their own agendas (save everyone, kill everyone) as well as the main one: survive mostly intact.
If you die, you come back as a ghost to haunt the rest and why wouldn’t you. It’s strongly hinted that the Kickstarter campaign for Grind House will begin around Halloween.
Inis Designer Invites you to Trool Park
Want a theme park game that doesn’t involve dinosaurs? Inis designer Christian Martinez is inviting you to Trool Park. Admittedly, it seems to share the same bright colours as Dinosaur Island, and is a light, relatively fast playing game where you draft and place tiles to grow your parks either dedicated to one aspect of entertainment (e.g. food) or cover all the bases. One dark part: you have to impress journalists. You might prefer velociraptors. Ankama is releasing it later this year.
Concept for Kids
Concept has developed into Concept Kids: Animals, with a playing age of four and up. As you can guess animals are a strong theme, but the gameplay has been tweaked so you and your family play as a team trying to guess as many answers as possible by playing your pieces onto a board of ‘concepts’ such as green, land, sharp teeth etc. It should be out before the end of the year.
Carcassonne goes on Safari
Z-Man Games have another Carcassonne expansion on the way… and this one is about going on Safari. Yes, it’s another entry in the Carcassonne Around the World range, so forget about scoring cities, you’re trying to collect animals while placing your Savannah and bush (amongst other things).
Mice and Mystics: The Movie!
According to Variety, an entertainment news source, Dreamworks are working out whether to turn the Mice and Mystics board game into an animated movie. There’s no official decision, and the attached names are the writer behind Aquaman (David Leslie Johnson) and the director behind a strong of modern horror movies.