A distributor that started making its own games.

SmartGames is the puzzle brand of a Belgian company that trades as Smart Toys and Games. English Wikipedia, citing a company profile from the business information service Trends, gives the official company name as Smart NV, its establishment date as 7 December 1992 and its headquarters as Kontich, near Antwerp. The company’s own website names its founders as Rolf Vandoren and Ariane Van den Bossche, and Vandoren was described as Smart’s global chief executive in a 2022 report by Total Licensing.

The company did not begin as a games designer. Its “Our story” page says the founders started out as a distribution company, choosing toys and games from other makers that were meant to be fun and to let people grow. English Wikipedia describes the same period, saying Smart first distributed other educational toy brands and began developing its own products in the mid-1990s.

The company says the change was prompted by a shifting distribution market. With an in-house design team, the founders developed what Smart calls a “one player multi-level logic game”. The mechanics were simple: a child placed pieces — roads, boats or penguins, in the company’s own examples — onto a game board to solve a set challenge, and the challenges grew harder level by level.

Early customers were small toy shops. Smart says it sold its own range to smaller retailers and demonstrated the games in store, letting shoppers try the multi-level puzzles for themselves. According to the company, those demonstrations showed that the games held people’s attention, and the single-player puzzle became the brand’s core.

From one puzzle line to a group of brands.

The SmartGames format is consistent from title to title. The company says each game comes with a set of rules and a booklet of challenges arranged by difficulty, so that a player moves on to harder puzzles as their skill grows. Titles named on English Wikipedia, citing Toy World, include Penguins on Ice, Squirrels Go Nuts! and Quadrillion. The company says that while the brand is known mainly for single-player logic games, it is moving towards more multiplayer and digital games.

Smart has added further brands around the puzzles. It describes SmartMax as magnetic discovery toys for toddlers and pre-schoolers and GeoSmart as magnetic construction toys for older children, and English Wikipedia also lists Happy Cube, IQ Games and The Genius Square among the company’s lines. Smart says most of its toys and games are developed by its own in-house design team at the Kontich headquarters.

Since 2022 the company has also grown by buying other businesses. Total Licensing reported on 14 July 2022 that Smart Toys and Games had acquired The Happy Puzzle Company, a puzzle business based in Hertfordshire, England. English Wikipedia says Smart bought the online retailer All Jigsaw Puzzles in 2023. The adviser Entrepreneurs Hub announced on 21 May 2024 that the British preschool toy brand WOW Toys had been acquired by Smart Industries NV, trading as Smart Toys and Games, and described Smart as headquartered in Belgium with subsidiaries in the UK and the USA. Entrepreneurs Hub said it had acted as sell-side adviser to Nadim Ednan-Laperouse, the founder of WOW Toys.

The most recent purchase reached across the Dutch border. English Wikipedia, citing Toy World in February 2026, says Smart had acquired Recent Toys International, a Dutch company founded in 2001 that specialises in mechanical brainteasers and puzzle products, with the transaction completed in the fourth quarter of 2025 and announced in January 2026.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all toy names: Djeco, Janod, Tegu, Kapla, SmartGames, goki and Le Toy Van. Toy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s idea to labels that now belong to larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a small independent shop to a department store.

A toy brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single object than by a box, a name, a colour and a way of drawing, 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 toys are actually 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 toys are made and how its boxes and logos have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A design award for puzzles aimed at adults.

One SmartGames range has been recognised by Belgium’s design establishment. The website of the Henry van de Velde Awards, the Flemish design awards, lists the SmartGames IQ Deluxe Editions as a Bronze winner at the Henry van de Velde Awards 26, with Smart Toys & Games as the agency. The entry describes a collection of separate logic puzzles produced by plastic injection moulding in materials including ABS, polycarbonate and PMMA, and mass-produced on a large scale.

The award page explains why the range stood out. The IQ Deluxe Editions were aimed at adults rather than children, and the jury noted that the design and materials addressed a new audience for the company — older people — so that they too could keep exercising their minds. In its answer on the same page, the company says it had found through market research that parents liked to carry on puzzling alone after playing with their families, and so created a collection meant specifically for adults, while keeping what it calls the DNA of SmartGames. The Kontich company presents the brand to an international audience: in October 2026 its website offered Dutch, English, French and German versions.

For a design guide, SmartGames shows how a single, repeatable format — a board, a set of pieces and a booklet of graded challenges — can become a brand in its own right, and how a distributor can turn into a maker. Compare it with HABA, the German maker of children’s games, and with Djeco, the French toy and games brand. For this guide we use a puzzle blue, piece red and challenge yellow palette with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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