From board games of mobile hits to a publisher of its own.

Lucky Duck Games is a tabletop game publisher whose operating company, Lucky Duck Games Sp. z o.o., is registered in Kraków, Poland, according to the legal notice on its own website. The company says it was founded in 2016 by Vincent Vergonjeanne, whom it describes as a games programmer and LEGO fan, and the artist Mateusz Komada. The trade press names Vergonjeanne as its founder: The Toy Book called him “Founder of Lucky Duck Games” in April 2024.

Its first product, the company says, was a board game based on the mobile game Vikings Gone Wild, designed by Vergonjeanne’s brother Julien and illustrated by Komada, which launched on Kickstarter in May 2016. Board games drawn from phone and tablet games became its early speciality. Tabletop Gaming reported in March 2019 that Lucky Duck had already put out tabletop versions of the mobile hits Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride and Vikings Gone Wild, as it announced a cooperative board game based on the tower-defence series Kingdom Rush, designed by Sen-Foong Lim, Jessey Wright and Helana Hope. The company dates that game, Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time, to 2019, and a follow-up, Elemental Uprising, to 2021.

The company says its team is based mainly in Poland, with a presence in France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, and that its own studio designs games in English, French, Polish and Italian. Its online shop is split into stores for the United States, for Polish- and French-language games and for the rest of the world, and the legal notice says the intellectual property on the site belongs to Lucky Duck Games, Inc.

A QR code on every card and an app to read it.

The idea most closely tied to the name is what the company calls the “Digital Hybrid” board game, in which play runs through both physical components and an app. Its first was Chronicles of Crime, which the company dates to 2018. The game was designed by David Cicurel, and in a review published by The Opinionated Gamers in May 2024 Dale Yu described its “Scan&Play” system: every location, character and item carries its own QR code, and the app decides, case by case, what scanning it reveals. Because the cards stay the same while the app supplies the story, the same box can hold many different investigations.

The company has built a family of games on that model. It says Chronicles of Crime was followed by The Millennium Series in 2020, by Destinies, a competitive story game it dates to 2019, and by The Dark Quarter, made in partnership with the publisher Van Ryder Games and announced in 2022. Its software team, it says, also made the companion app for Frosthaven, a game from Cephalofair Games.

Not every Lucky Duck game uses a screen. In 2021, the company says, it launched Lucky Duck Kids, a line for younger players that began with Kids Chronicles: Quest for the Moon Stones and Yummy Yummy Monster Tummy. It also releases games first published by others: English Wikipedia lists it, with Cardboard Alchemy and Gameology, as a publisher of Flamecraft (2022), designed by Manny Vega and illustrated by Sandara Tang, and the company describes a “Worldwide Publisher Program” through which it helps other publishers bring their games to other languages and markets. Its shop today also lists Food Chain Magnate, Andromeda’s Edge and Tranquility alongside its own titles.

As for manufacturing, the company’s legal notice refers to “manufacturing partners” and says it requires them to meet the standards of the International Council of Toy Industries; it says its products conform to the European EN 71 and American ASTM toy-safety standards. It does not name the countries where its games are printed.

Design and documentation.

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.

An independent studio inside a Dutch family games company.

In April 2024 Lucky Duck Games was acquired by Goliath, the family-owned toy and games company known for Rummikub, Triominos and Sequence, The Toy Book reported on 23 April 2024. The report said Vergonjeanne would continue to run Lucky Duck as an independent studio within Goliath, alongside his management team. Goliath’s chief executive, Jochanan Golad, was quoted as naming party games for adults and strategy games as the two main growth areas he saw in the business, and Vergonjeanne said Goliath’s “entrepreneurial spirit perfectly aligns with ours.” Lucky Duck’s own account calls the deal a complementary partnership, and the footer of its website now reads “part of Goliath B.V.”

The new owner has a long history of its own. Goliath says it was founded in 1980 by Adi Golad, that it began by distributing Rummikub, and that it is a family business from Hattem in the Netherlands; it says it bought the American games maker Pressman Toy Corporation in 2014. Goliath has owned Lucky Duck Games since 2024.

The name needs a little care online: the publisher’s own site is luckyduckgames.com, and its games carry the full name Lucky Duck Games.

For a design guide, Lucky Duck Games shows how a small studio built its identity on a format — the app-linked board game — more than on a single title, and kept that identity as a named studio after a family games group bought it. Compare Portal Games, another publisher from Poland, and CMON, a publisher built on crowdfunded games. For this guide we use duckling yellow, amber and night blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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