A lithographer, a workshop in Giesing and a dice game.

Schmidt Spiele traces its origins to 1907, when the lithographer Josef Friedrich Schmidt founded the firm Schmidt & Söhne in Munich, according to English and German Wikipedia. From its early years the business concentrated on making and selling board games.

Its defining product came in 1914: Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, the race-and-capture dice game whose name roughly means “don’t get annoyed.” Wikipedia says Schmidt developed it in a small workshop in Giesing, a working-class district of Munich. The company’s own history page tells the same story in its own words: it describes Schmidt as a man from Amberg who invented the game in a small garage in Giesing, and says the game has been given a place of honour in the Haus der Geschichte, the German history museum in Bonn.

The publisher grew through the twentieth century into a broad games house. Wikipedia lists among its titles the dice game Kniffel, the partnership game DOG and, in 1984, the role-playing game Das Schwarze Auge, published together with Droemer Knaur. The company’s headquarters for many years were at Eching, near Munich, and its main production plant was in Ingolstadt.

Insolvency, Berlin and a new owner.

The Munich company did not survive intact. In 1997 Schmidt Spiele got into difficulty and filed for insolvency, according to English and German Wikipedia. In August 1997 the head office at Eching was closed, and the main plant at Ingolstadt went to Ludwig Scheer GmbH, a company from Lower Franconia.

The rest of the business — above all the Schmidt Spiele brand and the rights to most of its games — was bought by the Blatz group of Berlin, which today trades as Good Time Holding GmbH. Good Time Holding has owned Schmidt Spiele since 1997, and Wikipedia says the group also includes sister companies Kiddinx Media and Kiddinx Studios. The new owner kept the far better-known Schmidt Spiele name, and the publisher is now based in Berlin-Neukölln, German Wikipedia says.

The range has since been extended by acquisition. In 2008 Schmidt Spiele bought the rights to Drei Magier, a children’s games brand founded in 1994, and since October 2017 the wooden-toy maker Selecta has been part of its group of brands, according to Wikipedia. Today the company sells board and card games, puzzles, plush and wooden toys, and it shows its new releases at the SPIEL fair in Essen and the Spielwarenmesse toy fair in Nuremberg. Its classics have moved onto screens as well: German Wikipedia says Kniffel has been available as a mobile game since 2011, and a Mensch ärgere Dich nicht app followed in 2024.

Some of its best-known board games came from elsewhere. The Spiel des Jahres jury’s own database records that Wolfgang Kramer’s Auf Achse, its Game of the Year for 1987, was first published by F.X. Schmid — a different company — and that a revised edition has been published by Schmidt Spiele since 2007. The same database lists Qwirkle, by Susan McKinley Ross, and Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg, by Wolfgang Warsch, under Schmidt.

The puzzle trade.

The seven brands in this group are all jigsaw puzzle makers: Clementoni, Educa, Schmidt Spiele, Piatnik, Trefl, Wentworth and Liberty Puzzles. Puzzle brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to larger toy and games groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a toy shop to a museum gift store.

A puzzle brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single picture than by a box, a name and the way its pieces are cut, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its puzzles 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 puzzles are made and how its boxes have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Puzzles, licences and a grass-fibre board.

Puzzles have become a large part of what Schmidt Spiele sells. German Wikipedia says the company markets them under the label of “six-star quality,” a phrase covering a wide variety of piece shapes, accurate cutting, a specially developed board and high-quality printing. Its motifs mix landscapes and animals with licensed artwork; Wikipedia names licences from Disney and Universal and the paintings of the American artist Thomas Kinkade, which often appear in combination with Disney motifs.

The material itself has also been part of the story. At the Spielwarenmesse in Nuremberg in 2025, Schmidt Spiele presented NATPAX, a puzzle board that Wikipedia describes as made from waste paper and grass. Wikipedia also says the company has recorded the carbon footprint of its sites with ClimatePartner since 2022, and that it increasingly closes its packaging with paper-based adhesive dots instead of shrink wrap; those are the company’s reported measures rather than independent audits.

The brand also reaches puzzlers directly. Wikipedia describes an annual Schmidt Puzzle Championship, a speed-puzzling event held with local partners in several German states, open to entrants from the age of five, in which everyone starts on the same puzzle at the same time and the motif stays secret until the day. Championships and tournaments are also held for Mensch ärgere Dich nicht and Kniffel, Wikipedia says.

Visually, the company’s own history page describes the Mensch ärgere Dich nicht packs as “bright red,” and the scowling man in a black suit on the box as a figure everyone in Germany knows. No official typeface or colour specification is published.

For a design guide, Schmidt Spiele shows how a games publisher can keep one century-old title at the centre of its identity while its range moves into puzzles, licences and new materials; compare Piatnik, the Viennese card and games maker, and Clementoni. For this guide we use a game-box red, black and cream with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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