The Company Quietly Building a Board-Game Empire With Catan, Pandemic, and Ticket to Ride
Strategy and cooperative board games have big adult fan bases. The little-known Asmodee has cornered the market with a series of acquisitions since 2007.
The board game Catan.
Photographer: Britta Pedersen/Getty Images
Dusting off old board games or buying new ones over the past year in your effort to avoid watching Bridgerton, you might have noticed something about Catan, Pandemic, Game of Thrones, Ticket to Ride, Specter Ops, Agricola, 7 Wonders, and Lord of the Rings. If you’d bought them a decade ago, they would have come from a half-dozen producers. Today, those titles are made by a single company: Asmodee Holding.
Like the Monopoly player who never rolls doubles or lands on Free Parking but suddenly has hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, the company has quietly bought up game studios and distribution licenses. Asmodee, based just outside Paris, owns about a dozen game publishers and has more than 750 employees, with operations in scores of countries. The company declined to provide financial information or make any executives available for comment, but press reports say its revenue topped €550 million ($650 million) in 2019. That’s up from €442 million in 2017 and €125 million just four years before that, according to Eurazeo, a private equity fund that owned Asmodee from 2014 to 2018.