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Long time board game publisher Mayfair Games (English-language publisher for Settlers of Catan and many more) has shut down.
All of their games have been sold to Asmodee North America, who also own Fantasy Flight Games, Z-Man Games, Rebel, Edge Entertainment, and a host of other board game companies they've picked up over the years.
[Ed Note - Asmodee NA also picked up Lookout Games at the same time. Lookout was the publisher of Agricola and Caverna.]
Related: Asmodee Acquires Lookout Games and Mayfair Games
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Mayfair Games Closes After 36 Years of Board Games
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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday February 12 2018, @11:16AM (6 children)
I've enjoyed Pandemic and Dead of Winter a lot recently. Both are cooperative, so you have to talk to the other players to discuss strategy and you all share the enjoyment of winning or the frustration of the game defeating you (very common in Pandemic!). We got Pandemic Legacy for Christmas though, and it could really benefit from some computer assistance. The game is supposed to be played by sticking stickers to bits of the game, but then you can only play it through from start to end once (which took us about two days) and there's no replay ability. Instead, we used blutack to stick the things in and were able to reset the game to its initial state at the end and replay with friends (it turns out the two-player mode is a lot easier than four-player!) I'd love for this to come with an app for keeping track of most of the game state, rather than requiring all of the destructive operations.
[1] In the old fashioned meaning of the word, meaning involving interactions with other humans, not the new meaning of giving all of your personal data to marketing companies.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Interesting) by bobthecimmerian on Monday February 12 2018, @12:33PM (2 children)
Catan is as social as Monopoly or Rummy or many other games.
I have a lot of friends that play board games pretty often. So even with the wild popularity of computer games, I'm surprised by this. On the other hand, there is a lot of good competition. My kids and I play the Dungeons and Dragons parody board game "Munchkin" and a handful of its variants plus "King of Tokyo", "Quirkle", "Life", "Puerto Rico", and "Small World". Catan has a lot of competition, and I don't think any of those others are made by Mayfair games.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday February 12 2018, @02:19PM (1 child)
"Sheriff of Nottingham" yet another super fun game to play with the kids, and every dollar spent at Arcane Wonders is a dollar that did not keep Mayfair Games alive.
The barrier to entry for mid-level euro games is extremely low, so its a hard market to sell in, as shown by the failure of Mayfair.
In the long run I wouldn't be surprised to see kickstarter replace the concept of publishing house. How exactly would "Card Rogue" or more specifically the designers of the game, have benefited by working with Mayfair instead of going kickstarter? I've bought a lot of paper from J Evans Payne WRT Pathfinder RPG books, kickstarter works pretty well for that too. Everyone in the general field seems to be making a lot of money, well, except for the publishing houses...
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday February 12 2018, @08:07PM
Good point. I've only backed a few Kickstarter board game projects, but so far the results have been good. I remember Zeppelin Attacks! from Evil Hat Productions, I haven't played it much but it's fun when I do bring it out.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday February 12 2018, @04:37PM
No. Catan is all about trading commodities with other players and jockeying to build in prime locations on the board. If you're looking for a "single-player multiplayer" game, try Agricola sometime. You each literally have your own board and are just seeing who can optimize their farm for the highest number of victory points. Most SPMP ones like that have a common market that affects the value of everybody's commodities, but not all.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Monday February 12 2018, @08:05PM (1 child)
> (it turns out the two-player mode is a lot easier than four-player!)
Since it's a legacy game with a plot, it's also a lot easier if you already know what's coming. I know for a fact that there's things I'd do differently in both Seasons 1 and 2 if I played them again.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday February 13 2018, @10:06AM
sudo mod me up