A Paris publisher of “premium” board games.

Funforge was a French board-game publisher based in Paris. French Wikipedia gives its founding year as 2008 and names Philippe Nouhra as its founder and director, and the company’s own website, as archived in July 2025, said the same thing in its own words: “Depuis 2008,” it wrote, it had been forging innovative, replayable games of the highest production quality, calling itself “un éditeur de jeux de société premiums,” a publisher of premium board games. The French games site Gus&Co later summed up the firm’s life as 2008 to 2025, seventeen years in all.

Nouhra stayed at the centre of the business throughout. When BoardGameWire interviewed him in October 2024 it described him as the company’s chief executive and also as its creative director and art director, which makes Funforge an unusually personal case among publishers: the man who ran the company also oversaw how its boxes looked. Its English-language trade coverage often styled the name “FunForge”; the company’s own French site used “Funforge.”

Its catalogue mixed two kinds of work. French Wikipedia describes Funforge as both a creator of original games and a localiser that brought foreign games to French players. Gus&Co lists French editions of Agricola, Nemesis, Brass: Birmingham, Patchwork and Isle of Skye among the games it carried, alongside its own titles.

Tokaido, the slow road to Edo.

The game that defined Funforge was Tokaido, published in 2012. It was designed by Antoine Bauza and illustrated by Naïade, the pen name of Xavier Gueniffey-Durin, French Wikipedia says. Funforge followed it with the expansions Crossroads in 2013 and Matsuri in 2016, and the line later grew to include the two-player Tokaido Duo and the related game Namiji. When the American retail trade paper ICv2 reported on the line’s sale in October 2024, it called Tokaido one of FunForge’s “flagship brands.”

Its other original titles, as listed by French Wikipedia and Gus&Co, included the space strategy game Quantum in 2013, Samurai Spirit and Monumental, a civilisation-building game designed by Matthew Dunstan. The website’s last archived form sorted games for families, for experts and for two players, and in January 2025 it announced Tapas, a “duel gourmand” in what it called its “gamme gourmande,” a food-themed range. Nouhra had described that direction to BoardGameWire in 2024: smaller boxes with substantial content, and a line of themed abstract games for “foodies” that also took in Happy Garden and Donuts.

Funforge also took on licensed work. BoardGameWire named Far Cry: Escape From Rook Islands, a board game based on the video-game series, among its releases in 2024; a crowdfunding campaign for a second Far Cry game, Far Cry: Beyond, was stopped after a day, Gus&Co reported in July 2024.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all board-game publishers: Deep Water Games, Sit Down! Games, Funforge, Tasty Minstrel Games, Brotherwise Games, 25th Century Games and CMYK. Publishers of this kind sit between the people who design games and the people who play them: they choose which designs to back, commission the art, the box and the components, and arrange for the finished game to be manufactured, translated and sold.

Many of them work across borders. A game designed in one country is often licensed to publishers elsewhere and sold under a different title in each market; in July 2024, for example, the Spiel des Jahres jury in Germany gave its Kennerspiel des Jahres to “e-Mission (Daybreak),” a game sold in Germany by Schmidt and in English as Daybreak by CMYK, according to the award’s website and BoardGameWire. Crowdfunding is another route to market: CMYK, for one, took its first game, Monikers, to Kickstarter in June 2014, Kill Screen reported.

For a publisher, identity is carried less by a single product than by a name, a logo and the look its boxes share on a shelf, while each game keeps its own title, art and designers. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started each company, who owns it now, and where it is based.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its best-known games and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Kickstarter, a sale and a liquidation.

The company’s last years were shaped by crowdfunding. In 2020 Funforge ran a Kickstarter campaign for a reprint of Monumental together with a new expansion, African Empires, backed by more than 4,200 people, Gus&Co reported; delivery had been promised for April 2021, and the games were still not delivered when that article appeared in July 2024. BoardGameWire reported that Funforge had absorbed the extra costs that followed the Covid-19 pandemic rather than pass them on to backers, and in 2024 it halved its team from eight people to four, according to both BoardGameWire and Gus&Co. Nouhra told BoardGameWire the company would not return to Kickstarter, that it would rely on freelancers rather than rehire, and that it would concentrate on Monumental Duel, a two-player version announced in February 2024, rather than on large boxed games. His main concern for Tokaido, he said, was the “legacy” of the series rather than money.

In autumn 2024 Funforge sold the Tokaido line — Tokaido, Tokaido Duo and Namiji — to Stonemaier Games, the American publisher of Wingspan; ICv2 reported the deal on 3 October 2024, after Stonemaier announced it in a newsletter and at Spiel in Essen, and said Stonemaier would publish its own editions and was exploring a new game in the series with Bauza. “Yes, it saved the company because it allowed us to clean everything,” Nouhra told BoardGameWire, which reported that the sale let Monumental finally ship, with European backers receiving copies from September 2024. He also called Tokaido a “golden cage,” because the team had kept producing Tokaido products.

It was not enough to keep Funforge open. The company was placed in redressement judiciaire, French court-supervised receivership, on 20 February 2025, and judicial liquidation was pronounced on 23 July 2025, Gus&Co reported in August 2025; French Wikipedia gives the same liquidation date. By then Stonemaier had already begun production of its own edition of Tokaido, ICv2 had reported.

For a design guide, Funforge shows how a small publisher could be defined by one illustrated travel game, and how that game could outlive it. Compare Stonemaier Games, which bought the Tokaido line, and Space Cowboys, another French publisher. For this guide we use a deep red, gold and paper tones with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Funforge’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.