Matthieu d'Epenoux, who founded French publisher Cocktail Games in 2001, passed away on June 3, 2026 at the age of 60.
D'Epenoux has a design credit on a few early releases from Cocktail Games, including what I believe was its first title — Contrario, co-designed with Roberto Fraga and Odet L'Homer — but I believe his main strengths as a publisher were game choice, packaging, and presentation.
In the late 2000s, for example, all of Cocktail's releases were card games that came packaged in a square metal tin. You want a game with simple rules that plays quickly and travels with you easily? That's our entire line! If you like one, come back for more!
During a conversation with me at SPIEL '08, d'Epenoux spelled out his ideal Cocktail design: The game consists solely of cards; you can teach it in one minute and play it in ten; and it's as much fun to watch as it is to play. When I happened to invent a game in 2013 by misremembering the rules to one I played as a child — a story included in this designer diary — the game, which has teams of two holding cards between various body parts, fit the Cocktail ideal, so I pitched it to Matthieu under the name "Cheek to Cheek". If he wanted it, great; if not, I wouldn't bother pitching it elsewhere. I didn't intend to be a designer, but had chanced upon the Platonic ideal of a Cocktail design, so I gave it a go.
Incredibly, Matthieu responded to my pitch by cc'ing someone else within the same message, writing, "The worse thing for a game publisher is to receive two good games with brilliant ideas in each of them but which are very close. It is what happened on your respective games, and it is the reason why I send you the rules of each game." Someone else had pitched pretty much the same idea as me at the same time, but after testing the designs, Matthieu went with mine because it was simpler, that is, better suited for the Cocktail audience.
In the end, the game was titled Body Party since "Cheek to Cheek" was not viewed as a meaningful phrase in France. (My prototype included cards in which you'd have to hold it between one teammate's face and the other's butt, thus "cheek to cheek".) The game was released in September 2014, and at NY Toy Fair in February 2015, Matthieu presented me with the copper award for his third favorite Cocktail title published in the year — at least I think that's what the award was for. As I wrote in my diary, I had doubts:
D'Epenoux agreed to publish the game, after which I immediately started wondering whether he had signed the contract because he thought I was going to publicize it heavily on BGG, after which I started hating myself for not trusting his judgment and honesty because he had always seemed like an up-front person in the past. I could barely talk to him after that, always feeling like a fraud who had snookered his way into publication. I hesitated to cover Cocktail following the game's announcement as I didn't want to come across as favoring my publisher, effectively punishing it instead. I didn't know how to relate to this experience, and I just wanted it to end so that I could retreat to what I knew and keep on keeping on.
I originally pitched the design to Matthieu because it fit so well with what he wanted! In my head, it was an ideal design for him — then my success with the pitch only led to me distrusting him, which took years for me to overcome so that I could interact with him normally again. As the saying goes, "It's not you; it's me." I never told him about my fears because no matter what he said, I would have still doubted my ability to land a contract legitimately, and therefore would have doubted him. Better to let time bury my feelings...
And I still have doubts, even though I also think Matthieu had an incredible track record of success with his publication choices, especially when it came to picking up designs already on the market and repackaging them. One early example of this success was with Antoine Bauza's Hanabi & Ikebana, which was released in 2010 by tiny French publisher Les 12 Singes. Cocktail picked up the design and re-released it as Hanabi in 2011, licensing the game in many other countries, including Germany, where it won the Spiel des Jahres in 2013 for ABACUSSPIELE.
Surprisingly, that award success for Hanabi was not repeated in France, with the game not even receiving a nomination in its As d'Or game of the year awards. Cocktail did have other titles nominated for the As d'Or, but nothing won for nearly twenty years, with Cocktail joking about its repeated near-misses, as with this 2022 image following an As d'Or nomination for Happy City by Toshiki and Airu Sato:
Here's another from that year:
Happy City was another example of Cocktail picking up a game and bringing to a larger audience, with this being a revision of Happiest Town, which the Satos had released through their own company, Sato Familie, at Tokyo Game Market in 2018.
In the list above, the 2021 nominee was Aurélien Picolet's Top Ten, which was also a Spiel des Jahres nominee in 2022 (my overview), the 2018 nominee was Twin It! by Nathalie Saunier, Rémi Saunier, and Thomas Vuarchex, and the 2017 nominee was Imagine, which was another Tokyo Game Market pick-up, having originally appeared in 2015 from designers Shingo Fujita, Shotaro Nakashima, Motoyuki Ohki, and Hiromi Oikawa through their ボドゲイム (Bodogeimu) publishing circle.
(Cocktail Games was one of the earliest Western publishers regularly scouting Tokyo Game Market for titles to license, with me running into Cocktail's d'Epenoux and Miguel Rodrigues at multiple shows.)
Cocktail Games finally landed the As d'Or in 2024 with its tenth nomination, another pick-up from Tokyo Game Market: Kaya Miyano's Trio, which first appeared in 2021 through Mob+ as nana. (D'Epenoux gave me a mock-up of Trio at SPIEL Essen 22 — write-up here — and he seemed incredibly excited by and confident in the design at the time. It was fantastic to see his enthusiasm finally rewarded on the big stage at Cannes.)
Cocktail Games then went on to win the 2025 Spiel des Jahres with Hisashi Hayashi's Bomb Busters, yet another Tokyo Game Market license, with Hayashi's OKAZU Brand having released Bomb Squad in 2020. (Yes, Pegasus Spiele was the publisher of the game's German edition, but Cocktail Games was responsible for the development work and presentation of this design.)
Maybe I'm focusing too much on games and honors, but from the interactions I had with d'Epenoux, what I saw most was his joy at presenting something new. His default mode seemed to be, "Let me show you this!" He was excited himself by what games offered and eager to share that excitement with the world. He seemed not to take things too seriously, while at the same time being focused on the business to ensure that it delivered the fun promised by the packaging.
All too often at conventions, I get to spend only a few minutes with people, talking about upcoming games because that's what I'm at the show to cover, but sometimes delving into personal activities, philosophical discussions, the absurdity of the universe, and so on. I did that a bit with Matthieu, but not nearly enough. My loss.
My condolences to Matthieu's family and all who know him and worked with him. He brought richness and fun to this world, which is a great thing to say about a human.
