A Walloon printing background turned to games.

Sit Down! is a board-game publisher based in Longchamps, in Wallonia, Belgium. French Wikipedia, citing a 2023 report in the regional daily L’Avenir, says it was created there in 2011, and the company’s website carries the line “Publishing boardgames since 2011.” Its legal notice states that Sit Down! is a trademark owned by Megalopole SRL, a Belgian limited company with its head office in Longchamps, and names Didier Delhez as publication director.

The company tells its origin story in practical terms. Its “Who We Are?” page says Sit Down! “was born from a natural evolution”: the people behind it had a background in prepress and graphic production, grew attached to board games, and realised they already had the in-house skills to move from production work to full publishing. It describes itself as an independent Belgian publisher with an international outlook, and as a general-audience house that occasionally takes on more gamer-oriented titles when the design calls for it. “We are not looking to follow trends or replicate existing successes,” the page says; what matters is whether a game “brings something new, surprising, or emotionally engaging to the table.” It adds that the company keeps no rigid long-term manifesto and prefers to work one project at a time.

Its first game, French Wikipedia records, was Wiraqocha in 2011, by the designer Henry Kermarrec. The same catalogue credits him with Sushi Dice in 2014 and Ekö in 2015, the latter illustrated by Lucy Mazel.

Magic Maze and the hourglass.

That changed in 2017 with Magic Maze, designed by Kasper Lapp and illustrated by Gyom. The Spiel des Jahres jury’s page for the game lists it under Sit Down! and Pegasus Spiele and describes a co-operative game for one to eight players aged eight and up, lasting about fifteen minutes: everyone plays at once, each player may move the heroes only in the directions shown on their own action tile, talking and gesturing are forbidden, and a three-minute sand timer can only be turned at certain spots. A player who misses that others are waiting on them gets a “do something” pawn placed in front of them — a phrase the company now prints on a Magic Maze T-shirt. In its rationale the jury wrote of a “magical labyrinth” of rooms and corridors in which odd movement rules and time pressure build real excitement, with an introductory campaign that raises the difficulty step by step, and said the game’s gripping, hectic pace leaves no one unmoved.

Magic Maze was nominated for the 2017 Spiel des Jahres, the German game-of-the-year award, alongside The Quest for El Dorado; Kingdomino won. Sit Down! calls the nomination “a major turning point” that marked “the beginning of broad international recognition,” and French Wikipedia credits the game with most of the publisher’s growth.

The game became a family of titles. French Wikipedia lists the Maximum Security expansion in 2017, Hidden Roles and Magic Maze Kids in 2018, and Magic Maze on Mars in 2019, all by Lapp with Gyom’s art, followed by Magic Maze Tower in 2024; the company’s store now adds Magic Maze Pocket. Lapp also designed Gardeners for the label in 2023.

Read the system.

The seven brands in this group are all board-game publishers: Deep Water Games, Sit Down! Games, Funforge, Tasty Minstrel Games, Brotherwise Games, 25th Century Games and CMYK. Publishers of this kind sit between the people who design games and the people who play them: they choose which designs to back, commission the art, the box and the components, and arrange for the finished game to be manufactured, translated and sold.

Many of them work across borders. A game designed in one country is often licensed to publishers elsewhere and sold under a different title in each market; in July 2024, for example, the Spiel des Jahres jury in Germany gave its Kennerspiel des Jahres to “e-Mission (Daybreak),” a game sold in Germany by Schmidt and in English as Daybreak by CMYK, according to the award’s website and BoardGameWire. Crowdfunding is another route to market: CMYK, for one, took its first game, Monikers, to Kickstarter in June 2014, Kill Screen reported.

For a publisher, identity is carried less by a single product than by a name, a logo and the look its boxes share on a shelf, while each game keeps its own title, art and designers. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started each company, who owns it now, and where it is based.

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

Three people, two games a year.

Beyond the maze, the catalogue has widened in several directions. French Wikipedia lists Bad Bones by David Flies and Space Bowl by Stéphane Brachet in 2019, Dive in 2021, and Fairy Light, Topic and Tiwanaku, by Olivier Grégoire, in 2022. In 2024 came Maps of Misterra, Open Season and Redwood, a nature-photography game by Christophe Raimbault, which the company has since expanded with Into the Wild and a Big Box edition. Its newest releases include Tricky Twist, Tolleno and Octocube.

The company is open about how small it is. Its website says Sit Down! is run by a three-person core team — Marie as art director, Michael on game scouting and development, and Didier on project management and international business — working with freelancers project by project, and that it publishes around two new games a year plus reprints. It says it looks for original or unconventional mechanics and for projects that are hard to publish because of their materials, and that it generally passes on children’s games, very heavy gamer titles and variations on existing games.

On production, the company says its games are manufactured in China and distributed internationally, that it tries to keep plastic to a strict minimum in favour of cardboard and, where relevant, wood, and that it prefers one exclusive distributor per territory where possible. It also sells direct from its own web store, which offers shipping across the European Union.

For a design guide, Sit Down! shows how a single breakout game — and a rule as memorable as “no talking” — can carry a small publisher’s name abroad. Compare Czech Games Edition, the Prague publisher of Codenames, and Horrible Guild, the Italian publisher of Potion Explosion and Railroad Ink. For this guide we use a maze violet, an hourglass gold and an exit teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sit Down!’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.