Viktor Peter, Richard Amann and a magician’s theatre.

Mindclash Games is a board-game publisher from Hungary. Meeple Mountain, which visited in April 2025, describes it as headquartered in Budapest, in an office on one floor of a house just outside the city centre, with a team of eleven. The company’s own website names Mindclash Games GmbH in Nuremberg, Germany, as the business behind it, and lists sixteen staff, led by Viktor Peter, its CEO and lead game designer.

The company grew out of a single game. In a Meeple Mountain interview published in September 2023, Peter said Trickerion: Legends of Illusion began as a card game he came up with on a ski trip with Richard Amann, who became its co-designer. It started as a game about swindlers before taking on a stage-magic theme inspired by the film The Prestige, and Peter said the pair did not at first think of publishing it. He recalled that in 2013 they had no idea how to do business, and that around the Spiel fair in Essen in 2014 they felt they could leave their day jobs and concentrate on the game. The Hungarian news site Telex reported in August 2024 that the team showed the game at Essen and built a mailing list there, which it used to tell players when its crowdfunding campaign opened.

Trickerion was released in 2015 and became, in Telex’s words, the company’s first big success. The game set the pattern for what Meeple Mountain calls Mindclash’s “highly thematic Euro-style strategy games” with a strong focus on worldbuilding. In 2025, ten years on, the company returned to it with a crowdfunded anniversary edition and a new expansion, Arcane Arts, designed by Dávid Turczi.

Crowdfunding, exosuits and a space 4X.

Crowdfunding is the company’s method rather than an occasional tool. “All of our core games have been crowdfunded,” Peter told Meeple Mountain in 2023, and the company’s website describes crowdfunding as its primary business model, paying for the first print run, shipping and marketing and drawing backers into creative decisions. Telex reported in 2024 that the company had settled on running one or two large campaigns a year.

The second core game, Anachrony, came from outside. Peter said in the 2023 interview that Dávid Turczi brought a design called Paradox Factory, about a time-travel factory, and that Mindclash built the theme and story around it. In the finished game, which Sprites and Dice reviewed in August 2017, a cataclysm has turned the planet into a wasteland; players lead factions whose workers need exosuits, powered by energy cores, to reach the best actions, and can borrow resources from their own future selves at the risk of paradoxes. Peter also credited APE Games with helping Mindclash into retail.

Later titles followed the same pattern. Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles was planned as four episodes, and Peter called it the company’s “magnum opus.” Voidfall, a space 4X game for one to four players designed by Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi with artwork by Ian O’Toole, according to its Gamefound page, opened on Kickstarter on 28 September 2021; Peter said it had been in development longer than any earlier Mindclash game. Meeple Mountain reported in 2025 that a Voidfall spin-off, Revenant, was due in 2026, alongside Septima in the core line.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all board-game publishers: Allplay, Button Shy, Flatout Games, Keymaster Games, Mindclash Games, Red Raven Games and Grail Games. A publisher’s name sits on the box beside the names of the designers who invented the game and the artists who illustrated it, and a single title can pass from one publisher to another as rights are licensed, new editions are made and older editions go out of print.

A board-game publisher’s identity is therefore carried less by one product than by a logo on the box, a run of illustrators and a promise about the kind of games it makes, because the company behind the name may change its partners, its owners or the places where its games are printed. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who runs or owns it now, and where its games are made.

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

One art director, two lines and a family of worlds.

Much of the Mindclash look comes from one person. Peter told Meeple Mountain in 2023 that the artist and graphic designer Villő Farkas had been with the company since the beginning, and that her hand-drawn, classical style grew alongside its design philosophy; the 2025 profile names her as art director and lead artist on most core titles, credited with giving them a consistent “Mindclash feel.” Some games bring in outside artists, as Voidfall did with Ian O’Toole.

The company now runs two lines. Its website describes the Mindclash Games core brand as home to ambitious, deeply thematic games that are often crowdfunded, and Mindclash Play as a sub-brand for shorter, more accessible games that do not rely on crowdfunding. Astra, built around star constellations, was the first Play release, and Ironwood followed, Telex and Meeple Mountain reported. The core games are typically offered in retail and deluxe versions, and Telex noted that most backers choose miniatures over cardboard tokens when given the option. Meeple Mountain names Panda Game Manufacturing as the company’s logistics partner on its projects.

The games travel through partners. Telex reported that the company’s best-known titles have appeared in several languages and needed repeated reprints, while Meeple Mountain noted that most are not printed in Hungarian at first. The company’s website lists retail and localisation partners including Albi, Skellig Games, Korea Board Games and Yoka Games. In 2023 Peter put the team at ten people, able to handle three or four projects at once.

For a design guide, Mindclash Games shows how a small studio can make a heavy strategy game read as a world first — a theatre, a wasteland, a starfield — and keep a family resemblance across titles through one art director’s hand. Compare Red Raven Games, another crowdfunding-led publisher built around one artist, and Grail Games. For this guide we use illusion violet, brass gear and curtain red with a capital serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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