A Polish start-up and a Romanian publisher.

Board&Dice is a board game publisher based in Wrocław, Poland. Its website says it “designs, develops, and publishes expert and escape room board games,” and it gives two founding dates, because the company today is the product of two publishers. The original Board&Dice was started in December 2013 by two partners the website names as Irek and Filip. The second, NSKN Games, had been founded in April 2011 by Agnieszka and Andrei, the website says.

The two joined forces in November 2018. ICv2 reported on 28 November 2018 that the Romanian publisher NSKN and the Polish publisher Board & Dice had merged, and that the combined business would continue under the Board & Dice name. Tabletop Gaming quoted the Board&Dice co-owner Filip Glowacz, writing on BoardGameGeek, that the two firms had “worked together on many fields” and wanted “to move to the next level in the board games industry” under “one refreshed Board&Dice brand.” The magazine reported that a refreshed logo for the enlarged company was revealed with the announcement.

The two catalogues were quite different. Tabletop Gaming described NSKN as known for the co-operative fantasy game Mistfall, the science-fiction game Exodus: Proxima Centauri and Teotihuacan: City of Gods, released that year. Board&Dice, in the magazine’s words, had put out “relatively smaller and lighter games,” including InBetween, 5 Minute Chase, Pocket Mars and a card game based on the video game Superhot. It had also just released Escape Tales: The Awakening, an escape-the-room card game, and Glowacz’s announcement promised a follow-up for 2019. The same plans named Inuit, World Shapers, Dust in the Wings and Sierra West, a new large game in the Exodus universe for Kickstarter, expansions for Teotihuacan and Dice Settlers, and an untitled “surprise” from Tascini.

Heavy strategy games with T names.

After the merger, Board&Dice became associated with long, demanding strategy games of the kind usually called heavy Euros. The starting point was Teotihuacan: City of Gods, which Tabletop Gaming described in 2018 as that year’s “weighty Essen hit,” co-created by Daniele Tascini, a co-designer of Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar. By October 2020 the American review site The Opinionated Gamers was describing Board&Dice as a company that “has become known for its complex strategy games.”

That review covered Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun, which it called the “highly anticipated fall 2020 release from Board&Dice,” designed by Tascini and Dávid Turczi. ICv2 reported in September 2021 that the game, set in Pharaonic Egypt around the building of the Amun-Ra temple complex at Karnak, was for one to four players, and that its first expansion, Time of Seth, would follow that October alongside Tabannusi: Builders of Ur, with Zapotec planned for the following year.

Tiletum came next. Meeple Mountain reviewed it in October 2022 as a Board&Dice game by Simone Luciani and Tascini, set among merchants of the early Renaissance, with artwork credited to Giorgio De Michele and Zbigniew Umgelter. The review placed it beside Tascini’s other heavy games, which, it noted, all begin with the letter T: Tzolk’in, Teotihuacan, The Voyages of Marco Polo and Tekhenu. Tekhenu and Teotihuacan are Board&Dice titles, and the company’s own list also includes Tabannusi, Tekhenu, Teotihuacan, Thebai, Tianxia, Tiletum and Trismegistus.

Nucleum brought Luciani and Turczi together. The company’s product page sets it in “the industrial boom of 19th-century Saxony,” for one to four players; reviewers describe an alternate history in which uranium powers the region’s homes and industry. Reviewing it in May 2024, Punchboard called it “a polished, well-produced, heavy Euro game,” while noting that the publisher’s heavy games share the costs of complexity and fiddliness. The company’s website lists four Nucleum expansions, including Australia and Gibraltar.

S3

The seven brands in this group are all board game publishers and accessory makers: Stronghold Games, Ultra PRO, Indie Boards & Cards, Kolossal Games, Board&Dice, Hachette Boardgames and Lucky Duck Games. Names in this trade sit at many different points, from small studios still run by the people who started them to labels that now belong to much larger toy, book or games groups, and a single game can pass through a designer, a publisher, a crowdfunding page and a distributor before it reaches a table.

A board game publisher’s identity is usually carried less by one box than by a logo on many boxes, a name and the kind of game it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, licensed its games abroad or had them manufactured far from where they were designed. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its games are actually made.

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

A publisher’s house style, by credit.

Today the company’s website lists its team by first name and role. Agnieszka, a co-founder of NSKN, is chairwoman of the board; Filip is product manager and leads the art department; Joanna is head of development; and Irek oversees sales and administration. The office address is in Wrocław.

Its catalogue has widened beyond new strategy games. The website lists “Deluxe Master Set” editions of Teotihuacan and La Granja, with one for Marco Polo announced; the Side Quest series, built on other companies’ worlds such as Frostpunk, Nemesis, 7th Sea and The Isle of Cats; the Escape Tales line, now including Children of Wyrmwoods and Low Memory; and family titles such as Windmill Valley and Mandala Stones. It also sells its own card sleeves, and its upcoming list includes Maestro, Entropy and Thessaloniki.

The house look is assembled title by title rather than set by a single designer. The Nucleum page, for example, credits illustration to Piotr Sokołowski and Andreas Resch, and graphic design to Zbigniew Umgelter, Zuza Kołakowska and Paweł Niziołek; Umgelter is also credited on Tiletum. The website itself credits its design and development to Smart-Agency.

For a design guide, Board&Dice shows how a merged publisher can carry one name across a catalogue of very different games, from short escape-room stories to long economic games. Compare Portal Games, another Polish publisher of strategy games, and Lucky Duck Games. For this guide we use a deep teal, an ochre and a board cream with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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