A Quebec studio that took the name of its own imprint.

Next Move Games is the name under which the Canadian board-game studio founded as Plan B Games now presents itself. The company’s team page says that “Next Move, previously Plan B Games Inc., was founded in April 2016,” with a mission “to bring together exceptionally talented people to create exceptionally good games.” Independent reports differ slightly on the date: BoardGameQuest gave 2016 when it reported the company’s sale in March 2021, while BoardGameWire, in March 2024, said Sophie Gravel launched Plan B in 2017, after selling her earlier company, F2Z Entertainment, to Asmodee.

The studio’s home is in Quebec. An Asmodee Canada article of June 2024 says that Plan B Games, “part of the Asmodee Group,” is based in Vaudreuil, Quebec. The web addresses tell the rest of the story: planbgames.com now forwards to the Next Move site, nextmove-games.com, which is published in French, English and German.

The company says that, after it was founded, Plan B established a new imprint, Next Move Games, “welcomed Eggertspiele and Pretzel Games into the family, and founded Plan B Games Europe.” BoardGameWire describes Eggertspiele as Germany-based and Pretzel Games, like Next Move, as Canada-based.

Four-letter names and a game of tiles.

The imprint was announced in January 2018. ICv2 reported on 11 January 2018 that Plan B would launch Next Move that year to specialise in what it called “modern abstract” games — deep abstract strategy with a light layer of theme — and that every Next Move title would have a four-letter name. The first was Reef, by Emerson Matsuuchi, the designer of Plan B’s Century series, in which players grow an underwater reef; ICv2 said it would premiere at the Origins convention in June 2018.

Azul, which now carries the Next Move logo, also has a four-letter name. Designed by Michael Kiesling, it was released in 2017; English Wikipedia lists Plan B Games as its publisher and Philippe Guérin and Chris Quilliams as its illustrators. The game takes its name from the Portuguese word for blue and its theme from azulejo tiles: players draft sets of same-coloured tiles and place them on a five-by-five board. Next Move’s own page calls it “a captivating game of decorating Portugal’s Royal Palace,” in which players “collect magnificent tiles to embellish the walls and please the king.”

In 2018 Azul won the Spiel des Jahres, the German game-of-the-year award. The award’s own archive lists it as the 2018 winner, and its game page credits it to Next Move, a brand of Plan B, noting that the first edition appeared under the Plan B name. The jury, that page says, praised the contrast between the plain, functional board and the attractive mosaic that forms in play, and credited Kiesling with giving a simple selection mechanism enough depth to make players want to play again.

A family of games followed. English Wikipedia dates Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra to 2018, Azul: Summer Pavilion to 2019, Azul: Queen’s Garden to 2022 and the two-player Azul Duel to 2025; the Next Move site also lists mini editions and special editions of the 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.

A Plan B label inside the Asmodee group.

Plan B did not stay independent. BoardGameQuest reported on 11 March 2021 that the Asmodee Group had acquired Plan B Games, together with its labels Next Move, Pretzel Games and Eggertspiele; Asmodee has owned the business since 2021. In February 2024, BoardGameWire reported, Asmodee moved Camel Up, Village and the Great Western Trail series to its studio Lookout Spiele and folded Plan B’s German operation into Lookout. An Asmodee spokesperson told the site that “the studio is carefully managing Azul and Century, both published under the Next Move logo,” and that Plan B’s original team continued to steer it.

The same report said that Jean-François Gagné, previously at Panda Game Manufacturing, had become head of Plan B in August 2023, and that he had written of the Plan B and Next Move teams moving into Asmodee Canada’s office. The Next Move website now lists him as head of studio. Its team page also names an art director, graphic designers and a layout and pre-press specialist, and its newsletter terms refer to the companies of the Asmodee Group.

The label has also lent Azul’s look to other games. In a July 2020 interview with The Opinionated Gamers, Mike Young of Plan B said Next Move was preparing 5211: Azul Special Edition, a version of the card game 5211, and that he thought “the Azul aesthetic” would draw more players to it. Asmodee Canada’s June 2024 article placed Hey, That’s My Fish under the Next Move label too, as “an old favourite with new art.” The catalogue on the website today runs beyond Azul to games including Century, Pingouins, Cartagena and the cooperative card game Melodies.

For a design guide, Next Move Games shows a label defined by a naming rule — four letters to a title — and by a tile game whose look carries its logo. Compare Catch Up Games, another studio inside a larger group, and Asmodee, its owner since 2021. For this guide we use tile blue, navy and amber with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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