▪️ On January 21, 2026, John Nephew, co-owner of U.S. publisher Atlas Games, announced that the company was ditching Amazon.com as a fulfillment partner, describing it "a lousy business partner and more often a hostile adversary for small businesses that have to work with it" — but Amazon's awfulness turned into free gifts for a few hundred gamers. In Nephew's words:
In addition to all the other fees, WE HAVE TO PAY to have our removed [Fulfilled by Amazon] inventory sent back to us. We can also ask them to destroy it, but that is THE VERY SAME FEE as having it returned to us. Also, the return fee is based on the weight of each individual item returned; if they charge a fee of $X to return one item, then having 30 returned is $30X.
Now here's where my min-maxing heart leaps ... inexplicably, I can CHANGE THE RETURN ADDRESS FOR EACH of the manual returns. That means I can send each individual item wherever I want, and the cost to me is the same as if Amazon just carried it all to their dumpster.
Nephew's offer: Send us an email with a U.S. address, and we'll send you free stuff. All of the material has been claimed at this point, but I wanted to highlight both Amazon's awfulness and Atlas's clever rules-lawyering.
▪️ Speaking of terrible fulfillment partners, in late January 2026, Milton Griepp at ICv2 reported that "Diamond Comic Distributors is holding and attempting to seize and sell" US$47,395,014 worth of inventory based on the cost of goods on hand. From Griepp:
The dispute over Diamond’s attempt to seize the inventory was being litigated and the parties had been negotiating with the help of a mediator (see “Mediation”), but the issue had not been resolved when the bankruptcy was converted from a Chapter 11 reorganization to a Chapter 7 liquidation in December (see “Court Orders Chapter 7”).
While at Spielwarenmesse 2026, I ran into a couple of publishers with games sitting in Diamond's hands. One had already mentally written off their inventory, while another was faced with the prospect of a thousand copies of a mid-priced Eurogame either vanishing (which would be bad) or being released onto the market ahead of a reprint of the game, which would be even worse since the company would both lose the original inventory and be stuck with newly printed stock that might no longer have a market.
▪️ Speaking of lawsuits, on January 21, 2026, two Hasbro shareholders filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming that it "printed too much product for its most lucrative holding, the trading card game Magic: The Gathering, while misrepresenting its strategy to shareholders".
▪️Speaking of TCGs, in late January 2026, Rascal's Chase Carter wrote about non-profit company Null Signal Games and its efforts to keep up with the success of the Netrunner card game without jeopardizing the community that's grown up with the game.
▪️ The night before the Festival International des Jeux opens in Cannes, France on February 27, 2026, the winners of the As d'Or — France's game of the year award — will be announced. The nominees for the main prize — the Jeu de l'Année — are:
- Flip 7, by Eric Olsen and The Op Games
- Rebirth, by Reiner Knizia and Mighty Boards
- Toy Battle, by Paolo Mori, Alessandro Zucchini, and Repos Production
The nominees for the other three awards are:
- Children's category: Archeo, Mooki Island, and The Twisted Spooky Night
- Intermediate category: First Rat, Take Time, and Zenith
- Expert category: ANTS, Arcs, and Civolution
▪️ In late January 2026, the Tabletop Game Designers Association posted an "In Memoriam" document (PDF) recognizing people in the tabletop game industry who passed away in 2025.
