A Lyon publishing house with no fixed range.

Catch Up Games is a board game publisher based in Lyon. It was founded in 2014 by Clément Milker and Sébastien Kihm, according to Hachette Livre’s announcement of May 2023 and reports the same day in the French book-trade press, Livres Hebdo and ActuaLitté.

The company’s own website introduces it less formally, as “a Lyon publishing house founded in 2014 by Clément and Seb,” two “inveterate players.” Their stated aim is to publish the games they enjoy, without being held back by “constraints of product lines, types of game or box formats.”

By the time of the Hachette agreement, ActuaLitté and Livres Hebdo put the catalogue at around twenty games, distributed in France by Blackrock Games. The titles both singled out were Sobek 2 joueurs, Cubirds and The Loop; Hachette’s own news page added After Us and Mind Up in a photo caption.

A journey scored backwards.

One of the studio’s recent games is Faraway, by the designers Johannes Goupy and Corentin Lebrat. Catch Up Games lists it in its catalogue, and its German edition appears on the website of the Spiel des Jahres jury, published by Kosmos, with a Kennerspiel des Jahres 2025 nomination — the jury’s award for players with more experience. The jury lists it for two to six players aged ten and up, with a playing time of about 25 minutes.

The jury’s description shows why the game is easy to remember. Over eight cards, players travel from left to right through imaginary landscapes, meeting creatures that promise points for particular collections of symbols or regions. The twist is that scoring runs in reverse: the last card of the journey is scored first, and only the cards already revealed on the way back count towards each next score. “With Faraway everything seems so simple and logical,” the jury wrote, before adding that the backwards scoring soon demands a great deal, and praising the game for its elegance and for focusing on essentials. Its unusual structure, the jury added, forces players to think along new paths, while a small dose of luck in drawing the right cards rounds off the trip.

The rest of the catalogue is broad. Cubirds, The Loop and Sobek 2 joueurs are the titles the 2023 announcements named. The company’s website lists more than two dozen games in all, from Château Combo and Paper Tales to Sapiens and Sylve, without grouping them into families or lines — which matches its stated wish to avoid “constraints of product lines.” Some themes recur all the same: three titles on the list — Cubosaurs, Gods Love Dinosaurs and Dinosaur Island: Rawr ’n Write — carry dinosaurs in their names, while others, such as Rivages, Lucioles and Sylve, take short French nature words as titles.

The announcements of May 2023 described the company as an independent French publisher up to that point — “société française indépendante d’édition de jeux de société,” in ActuaLitté’s words — and Hachette’s own announcement said it had recorded strong growth since its founding. What the brand rests on, in its own description, is the founders’ judgement as players: a short line on the website, and a catalogue chosen game by game.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all board-game publishers: Fowers Games, Alley Cat Games, Dire Wolf, Rebel, Ludonaute, Catch Up Games and Next Move Games. Board-game publishers in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small studios still run by the people who started them to labels that now belong to much larger games groups, and a single name can appear everywhere from a hobby-shop shelf to a department-store toy aisle.

A publisher’s identity is usually carried less by a single box than by a logo on many boxes, a house style of art and graphic design, and the games it becomes known for, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, merged its studios or moved its production far from where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its games are designed and 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.

Hachette’s eighth studio.

On 25 May 2023 Hachette Livre announced that it had signed an agreement with the shareholders of Catch Up Games to acquire a majority stake in the company. The announcement said the founders would continue to run it and that it would stay in Lyon, joining Hachette Boardgames, the group’s board game division led by Isabelle Jeuge-Maynart. Hachette said the move confirmed “its strategic commitment to continuing to grow its board game publishing business.”

Livres Hebdo reported that Catch Up Games became the eighth studio in Hachette Boardgames, alongside Funnyfox, Studio H, Sorry We Are French, Le Scorpion Masqué, Hiboutatillus, La Boîte de jeu and Gigamic. The same report noted that Blackrock Games, the French distributor of the Catch Up catalogue, had itself been acquired by Hachette Livre in 2019, so the publisher and its distributor ended up in the same group. According to Livres Hebdo, the founders were to keep running the studio “in the creative autonomy specific to the brands of the Hachette Livre group.”

The announcement kept three things in place: the Catch Up Games name, the Lyon base and the two founders at the head of the studio. Hachette Boardgames already grouped several French labels under their own names, among them Gigamic and La Boîte de jeu, and Catch Up joined them on the same terms.

For a design guide, Catch Up Games shows how a publisher with no fixed lines can still be recognisable through the games it chooses. Compare Hachette Boardgames, the division it joined, and Ludonaute, another small French publisher. For this guide we use violet, cream, saffron and teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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