Spin Master has singed a 3 year licensing agreement with Warner Bros. Consumer Products for DC comics properties. The agreement covers games, puzzles, action toys, remote control and robotic vehicles, and water toys beginning in spring 2020.

PlayMonster (5 Second Rule, Yeti in My Spaghetti) is partnering with Audax Private Equity to finance additional expansion through “organic growth and add-on acquisitions.”

Goliath continues to grow, acquiring U.K. based Vivid Toy Group and moving in to the Italian market through a partnership with distributor MacDue. With the acquisition of Vivid, Goliath plans to launch 20 new games in the U.K. market next year.

Drumond Park has signed on with Tomy UK as exclusive distributor for all the former’s games in the U.K. and Ireland.

NSKN Games (Dice Settlers, Teotihuacan) and Board & Dice Games (Beet Empire, Dice Brewing) are merging. The combined company will continue operations under the Board & Dice name.

With the passing of designer Greg Stafford and earlier Stewart Wieck, of the games’ latest publisher, Nocturnal Media, the RPGs King Arthur Pendragon and Prince Valliant have been transferred again to Chaosium.

After a couple of messy PR situations involving insensitive or extremist material in game books, Paradox Interactive is stepping back from the publishing business but not abandoning the World of Darkness altogether. Instead, Paradox is moving to a licensing model and integrating White Wolf’s operations in to the parent company. Modiphius Entertainment, which was already handling distribution, is taking over development and publication for Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition. This will include production of various supplements (such as The Fall of London Chronicle and Players Guide), as well as oversight of other licensees (Onyx Path Publishing, Elderwood Academy, Dogmight Games, and others).

Impressions Game Distribution Services is being acquired by Flat River Group. The latter is a toy and game distribution company with business in e-commerce and crowdfunding fulfillment. Impressions founder Aldo Ghiozzi will continue with the combined company.

Scientific Games and Hasbro have extended their license agreement through 2025. The agreement covers the use of Hasbro properties, including Monopoly, Battleship, Clue, Yahtzee, and others for lotteries, slot machines, online gaming, and now also table games.

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Chaosium is joining the ranks of RPG companies offering hosted licenses for third-party publishing. As with the community content programs offered by WOTC, Mongoose, Monte Cook Games, and others, the Miskatonic Repository will allow members of the public to sell support material for Call of Cthulhu.

The program will be run by DriveThruRPG and provide art resources that contributors can use in addition to their own. They will, however, be required to use Chaosium’s style templates, which will be available for Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign. And though contributors will be able to set their own prices, a portion of any revenue will of course go to the host and Chaosium.

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Nostalgia continues to reign on Kickstarter. This time, it’s a reprint of old-school Runequest that’s ruling gamers’ hearts. The project has reward levels for PDF, hardcover, and leatherette versions of the book, which other than incorporating errata will be a straight-up copy of the classic second edition from 1979. Several stretch goals in the form of PDF supplements have also been added.

New school, Fate-based Mindjammer seeks to fund a series of sourcebooks, an equipment book, adventures, fiction, and more. Interestingly, a stretch goal already reached promises a Traveller version of the transhumanist RPG. How those will work together, I don’t know but I look forward to finding out.

Like Dominion did with the deck-building element of CCGs, Roll Player takes the character creation process of RPGs and turns it in to a complete game. The idea is to roll and draft dice to fill out the basic attributes, purchase equipment, and develop skills. Backstory and alignment are also factors. The winner is the player with best character as determined by reputation.

In Wongamania the players are business elites attempting to expatriate money while their native Banana Republic is under attack by literal financial monsters. It’s a game that Capital Gains Studios out of Singapore hopes will teach players the principles of economics and wealth management. It’s not supposed to promote draining a national economy for personal gain.

’65 is a tactical, squad-level, card-driven, hex-and-counter war game about the Vietnam War. The game comes with geomorphic map boards and a variety of historically-based scenarios. Many units in the game also have special capabilities, which can be activated when a card is drawn with the word “power” on it.

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Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen have returned to Chaosium. Greg Stafford, Chaosium’s founder, is the new president of the company. Sandy Petersen, designer of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, returns to the company as vice president. This announcement was made as an update to Kickstarter backers of the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition campaign. The campaign raised $561,836 in June, 2013, but has not completely fulfilled rewards. “My number one concern is seeing that the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition gets out to backers,” Sandy Petersen stated on yog-sothoth.com’s forums. “One way of looking at it is that the old Chaosium team is back again. Personally I think this is cause for rejoicing not worry.”

Mr. Stafford echoed those statements with a list of action items. The new management’s plans are to evaluate Chaosium’s current problems, ship the outstanding backer rewards for Chaosium’s September 2012 Horror on the Orient Express campaign, fulfill the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition‘s Kickstarter campaign, and “return to regularly making awesome new games”.

Mr. Petersen also said that the new management hasn’t been able to completely examine everything that has gone on with Chaosium, but his “hope and plan is that we do not lose ground with the takeover but in fact that the production is accelerated.” On Kickstarter, he also stated that he is “a big fan of transparency and communication and I expect to bring this to Chaosium’s campaigns as well.”

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