▪️ Luma Imports has picked up Queen Games as a client for distribution, and a handful of titles that the German publisher has crowdfunded over the past couple of years will arrive on the North American retail market on June 19, 2026, along with a couple of other Queen releases. These titles are:
- Chichén Itzá, by Stefan Feld
- Ronin, by Emanuele Ornella
- Propeller Islands, by Stan Kordonskiy
- Kingdom Builder: Family & Friends, by Donald X. Vaccarino
- Alhambra: Family & Friends, by Dirk Henn
- Fast Out, by Dirk Roos (which I covered in March 2026)
- Five Families, by Friedemann Friese (with German publisher Skellig Games being the lead on this project)
▪️ Three other titles being distributed by Luma Imports are:
- Captain Flip: Isla Bomba, by Remo Conzadori, Paolo Mori, and PlayPunk (my overview of the base game) — also due out June 19, 2026
- Medium: The Hand of Fate, by Danielle Deley, Lindsey Sherwood, Nathan Thornton, and Synapses Games, which picked up the game after Flat River Group shuttered Greater Than Games — due out July 31, 2026
- Kittens in Space, by Jeff Wallace, Rylie Wallace, and Dead Alive Games — due out June 5, 2026
▪️ As of early April 2026, Taco Cat Games — né Dolphin Hat Games, a.k.a. the publisher of Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza — is taking pitches from outside designers. In this LinkedIn post, director of games Nick Bentley details what the company is looking for and how to pitch a design.
▪️ Similarly, Exploding Kittens now has a game submission page for those who want to pitch a product.
▪️ Florian Gigot of French publisher Fentasy Games has launched a separate company called Board Game Commerce that's simultaneously an online retailer of games on hand, a retail hub for other publishers to sell their own games directly to individuals or stores, a way for publishers to potentially find licensing partners, a pre-ordering system for participating publishers, and a P500-style pledge system for publishers who have committed to producing a game, but who want to gauge player interest before heading to print.
The image above, for example, shows Fentasy Games taking pledges for a French-language edition of Bernd Eisenstein's Papyria, which he released in a German/English edition through his own Irongames brand in 2025, as well as ready-to-purchase games produced by U.S. publisher The Dietz Foundation.
In an interview with BoardGameWire, Gigot says that "the structural reality of the traditional distribution model" has made it difficult for small publishers to succeed — a statement that I have heard in various forms from many publishers over the past fifteen years.
▪️ In mid-January 2026, Schmidt Spiele reported revenues of €61.5 million for 2025, an 8% increase from the previous year, with its jigsaw puzzle sales increasing by 19% from 2024.
