Asmodee

We also talked about overhead, Allplay owns a warehouse, and the general concept of growth.

Joe mentioned the size of Asmodee as an aspiration for Allplay.

Bite Wing is a little more similar to Stonemaier in that both companies have less than ten employ- employees and rely heavily on outsourcing to independent contractors, facilities, and services.

We incur different risks than Allplay.

And, uh, now who is it? I think it's Fantasy Flight now owns the, the United Games.

Asmodee.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or Asmodee does, yeah.

Um, and so yeah, they're still actively working on that.

I still get updates on that.

I'm just not capable of doing that." [laughs]

Yeah, I mean, GSP positioned themselves to be able to partner with an official capacity with, like, FFG, Asmodee, AMG, all these, you know, these c- the companies-

Yeah

... that ran and facilitated X-Wing over the years.

It's on my shelf and I'm going to keep it because even though like, thematically it's cool like an alternate you know japanese type world it's an interesting world to play in and all that kind of stuff that wasn't a draw for me it really was that i knew that these designers do thoughtful stuff and so their their draw was what what drew me into this one so yeah so uh that's gunsen the battle for toshi rambo from office dog office dog they make pretty fantastic games because they kind of like, I think they cherry picked a lot of the fantasy flight folks that like kind of left around that time.

And Asmodee kind of helped form them into a studio.

And like, they've done some really, really good stuff.

Like they do the Lord of the Rings cart.

It's awfully clear that BGA has got sort of the critical mass from publishers' interest.

And, of course, it's got Asmodee backing, right? And probably a number of new games can be played on Tabletop Simulator, but who wants to do that? It was very exciting to see a whole bunch of games available on Board Game Arena.

Now, you might say, of course, but I remember...

Going back to those early episodes where I did Essen Anticipation Shows, I remember one year, I can go back and date this, I should have done this ahead of time.

Their hit games include Summoner Wars, of course, as I mentioned, Freelancers, The Monolith.

They were part of the Asmodee group, but then they went independent in 2020.

Two things here.

All play.

This is

another, and Sirius has been getting into IPs and dice and accessories for IPs.

Most famously, they were one of the few companies listed as an official brand IP user for Middle Earth Enterprises in the press release when Asmodee was announced to be the, what are you going to call it, the judge, the holder of the IP, the people who are in charge of deciding who uses the IP and who doesn't.

They were one of the few companies listed in that initial offering.

How can we get this product? The answer, first and foremost, you should check your local game store.

You can also purchase these products from Asmodee US store or Amazon in the United States.

So much of the online stock is sold out already.

I think your best bet may be to check local stores if you're in the US.

And then all of a sudden it went from like, ah, we'll maybe put something out every three to six months to like, it's constant.

It's the unstoppable Asmodee puzzle.

They currently have slotted for

late November the Electra Hero Pack, and then for October is the Shadowlands Scenario Pack, actually guest designed by Michael Boggs, who is a former designer of Champions and a former designer of Netrunner, who is actually now one of the creators slash designers of Hub World, which we were just talking about.

So like comparing Riftbound or those kinds of games to something like a Flesh and Blood, right? There's a big difference there.

So the reality there, too, is that the indie studio of Fantasy Flight Games got bought by a commercial entity, Asmoday, and then was starting to answer to shareholders and all of that, which typically is just kind of like, if we're going to throw our support and interest into games and publishers and people...

We think Asmodee is going to do just fine without us playing Marvel Champions.

So it's just not as much a priority for us as a business as it would be to lift up somebody like a Here Be Monsters or a Sorcery or whatever that is a more independent, smaller, intimate studio or Earthborn, et cetera, et cetera.

ICV2.

And this one is Asmodee hiring a Wizards of the Coast vice president.

Asmodee has hired Brian Trunk as their new senior vice president route to market for the Americas.

Trunk comes directly from Wizards of the Coast where he spent over 17 years.

So there's a major pull out of Watsi.

And over

the last three years, Trunk has been leading a $2.2 billion global games portfolio to performance records and building up the WPN back up to what they were before the pandemic.

So big, big acquisition for Asmodee, but they've got the pockets to make those kind of acquisitions.

But well, it was a good showdown and a good PQ for you.

I would love for FFG and Asmodee to actually do change the limited PQs to draft PQs.

That would be

amazing.