The French company Asmodee buys the most popular board games

Board games undoubtedly have a large fan base and shorten many long times during the pandemic. The inconspicuous French company Asmodee therefore began to build a monopoly in this sector and since 2007 it has bought some of the most popular games on the market. If you are a board lover, you've probably heard of the Settlers of Katan, the Pandemic, the Lord of the Rings-inspired board games and the Game of Thrones, the Ticket to Ride board game or the 7 Wonders card game. While ten years ago each of these games would have come from a different company, today they all belong to the French company Asmodee Holding. As in the popular game Monopoly, where the goal of the game is to buy as many squares as possible, Asmodee has quietly bought a number of game studios and publishing licenses for board games. The Paris-based company, which has around 750 employees, currently has dozens of games under it, which it distributes worldwide. The French company was founded in 1995 by war veteran Marc Nunès after he broke through the market with several board games based on the principle of fantasy games for heroes resembling American Dungeons and Dragons . His original plan was to invent his own games, which he would then sell, but there was not much interest in them. So he gradually began to add other types to his own fantasy games, such as the Uno card game or Hasbro’s Yahtzee, which is played with a dice. He later bought the rights to the party game Jungle Speed, which sold around 4 million in France alone. Since 2007, the company, which has changed several owners over the years, began to focus on purchasing games from other studios and manufacturers. Although the company does not want to say what its current financial situation is, according to Bloomberg, according to press releases published so far, it earned around 550 million euros in 2019. It is so clear that the company's profits are skyrocketing, as it reached 442 million euros in 2017 and 125 million euros in 2013, according to the Eurazeo equity fund, which owned the company between 2014 and 2018.