One of the world's biggest board game companies has just done the equivalent of Sega selling Sonic to Nintendo

A band of survivors fight off a wave of zombies
(Image credit: Asmodee)

CMON started as CoolMiniOrNot.com before turning its hand to board game publishing, having an early hit with co-operative miniatures game Zombicide in 2012. A fast-paced dice-chucker, Zombicide was funded by a $781,597 Kickstarter that provided the model for CMON's subsequent releases—many of them Zombicide spin-offs, reskinning it as a western or fantasy or post-apocalyptic, or rebranding it with Marvel superheroes or, more recently, Monty Python's Flying Circus of all the things.

Which is why it's such a surprise to see CMON sell this tentpole of its business. While it's had success with other games (like Cthulhu: Death May Die, a more shotgun-to-the-face spin on Lovecraftian games like Arkham Horror), hearing that CMON has got rid of Zombicide is like hearing that Sega just put Sonic on the auction block.

Recently, fans have complained of crowdfunding rewards being delayed, and the US-China tariffs haven't helped. In April, CMON announced it was putting all future projects on hold and laying off creatives.

Asmodee, the publisher that bought Zombicide, is a European business that already has the rights to popular board games like Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, and Diplomacy. It's not as well-known for lovingly crafted plastic miniatures as CMON, though since its merger with Fantasy Flight Games it does technically have the Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game in its portfolio.

Asmodee used to have a noteworthy digital division, responsible for videogame adaptations like Gloomhaven, Terraforming Mars and Scythe: Digital Edition. As of April, Asmodee Digital renamed itself Twin Sails Interactive and went independent, so whether we'll get a Zombicide game on PC out of this deal is up in the air.

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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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