Catan, Pandemic and Ticket to Ride owner set to be sold for €2 billion
Following previous acquisition by investment company in 2018.
Asmodee, the owner of several popular board game series such as Catan, Pandemic and Ticket to Ride, is set to be sold once again.
The news was shared by Stephen M Buonocore, a founder of Terraforming Mars studio Stronghold Games, via a tweet which claimed that Asmodee was being sold. The purchaser is currently not yet known, with Goldman Sachs - the largest investment bank on the planet - set to broker the deal.
According to an article from a French tabletop website called Gus & Co, other potential handlers of the deal include Natixis Partners, a French acquisitions company, as well as another US investment bank called Advent International and CVC Capital Partners, which is apparently one of the ten largest private equity funds in the world.
The seller of Asmodee is PAI Partners, a French investment fund which bought the tabletop gaming company back in 2018 for 1.2 billion euros from a different investment fund that had previously purchased Asmodee for around 143 million euros. The latest sale of Asmodee will be the most expensive one yet, with PAI Partners apparently asking for around €2 Billion, or $2.35 billion/£1.71 billion, for the board game giant.
Asmodee is the parent company of several major board game publishers such as Catan Studios, Days of Wonder - the studio responsible for family board game series Ticket to Ride - Pandemic publisher Z-Man Games and Fantasy Flight Games, which is best known for releasing Arkham Horror and Star Wars: X-Wing.
Earlier this year, Asmodee announced that it had acquired Plan B Games, the studio behind beginner board game Azul, alongside its partner companies Next Move, Pretzel Games and Eggertspiele, thereby increasing the number of tabletop gaming studios now under its banner.
Dicebreaker has reached out to Asmodee for comment on the pending sale.
Edit: Goldman Sachs is not the company buying Asmodee, it is one of the companies vying to manage the sale - alongside the others mentioned in the story - with Stephen M Buonocore tweeting about the story, not breaking it. This story has since been updated to reflect this.