Everybody always goes for the dark blues in Monopoly (Mayfair and Park Lane in the UK edition), but I’m convinced that the cheaper colour groups offer a better return on investment, partly because you can fully develop them quicker, and partly because you can own more squares, thereby giving you more "hits" and a steadier income. But is there any analysis to support (or refute) this view?
Damn, the nice little friendship thing Embracer Group had decided to morph into after earning the ire of lots of folks by going hard on the layoffs, closures and sales is no more.
The company’s decided to ditch the “and friends” tag it had given to different bits of its business, and form a fellowship, as it does yet more corporate shuffling around. It does also plan to actually release some more games.
As announced by Embracer, the bit of previously dubbed Middle-Earth and Friends will now be known as Fellowship Entertainment. As you might have guessed, that’s the part that looks after The Lord of the Rings, as well as housing the studios behind likes of Kingdom Come Deliverance, Tomb Raider, the Metro series, and Dead Island.
With Asmodee, the second of the three bits Embracer divided itself into last year, having spun off from the company as of February this year, it’s the turn of the third bit formerly known as Coffee Stain & Friends to do the same. Now named Coffee Stain Group, the subsidiary that includes the dev teams behind the likes of Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim and Goat Simulator is being released into the economic wild as a separately stock market-listed company.
“The games industry is more competitive than ever, but also more rewarding if you do things right, and we believe this move gives us the clarity and control to navigate the landscape better on our own terms,” Coffee Stain Group CEO Anton Westbergh said, “We can now focus even more on what we do best—supporting our developers, staying close to our communities, and building an even brighter future for Coffee Stain.”
Right, that’s enough on the corporate shuffling of people’s livelihoods. In the financial results it’s published alongside this spin-off announcement, Embracer says that it’s got “76 different games” it plans to release in the coming financial year. There’ll be “a mix of new IPs, sequels, and remasters”, including Killing Floor 3 and the recently delayed Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, with Embracer expecting the latter to “drive notable revenues but to have lower margins due to shared economics with several other partners”.
Another as of yet unannounced AAA game that Embracer things will have “financial dynamics more similar to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2” is also in the works, but the company reckons it’ll have to be pushed back to the 2026/27 financial year to allow for more “polish”
The rest of the lineup for the upcoming is being filled by the likes of Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, Metal Eden, and “the next SpongeBob SquarePants game”. Spongebob Squarepants tries to get to the Bikini Bottom of where Embracer’s friends have gone, maybe?
Even if I did have magical telekinetic board gaming powers, I wouldn’t know how to use them. Sure, I could cheat at games, cause havoc with components, and shuffle every deck of Dominion at the same time, but I wouldn’t make any friends doing it. And without friends, board gaming isn’t much fun.
Board games are intensely social, almost by definition. Solo games do exist, but they’re still fairly niche, and as standard, games require communication between multiple people in the same room. That isn’t true of all hobbies – some can be done solo (fitness, art) and others can be done online (video games, arguing). And while online adaptations of games and applications like Tabletopia are gaining ground, the vast majority of board gaming is still done in person.
This is, by and large, a good thing. This isn’t about to become a society-is-dying-because-internet post, but it’s undeniably pleasant to treat board gaming as a means of bringing people together face-to-face. This is something that as a hobby it does perhaps uniquely well, and a feeling that it’s tough to replicate online. The big downside to this aspect is that it introduces a prerequisite for participation: having a group to play with.
Maybe you just moved to a new city and you don’t know anyone. Maybe your friends are not the board-gaming type (much as I want to convert everyone I know, I’ve come to accept that some people just… don’t like games). Or perhaps the problem is even worse – you do have gaming friends, but you’re all so busy with other things that it’s impossible to get together to play. This is normally Kevin’s fault. Damn it, Kevin.
At The Treehouse, we’ve thought about this quite a bit. People come in semi-regularly to ask if we have a way to find them some players, and over the last year we’ve tried a few different methods of helping them out.
Before The Treehouse opened, owners Ruth & Andy hosted a monthly board games evening called Across the Board at the Showroom Cinema, for exactly this purpose. Each month would have a theme, from “Go Team!” (cooperative games) to “Art & Design” or my personal favourite, “Crime!”.