Asmodee, the giant board game company behind Catan, Ticket to Ride and Exploding Kittens, has been spun off from corporate owner Embracer Group in a larger move that effectively trisects the beleaguered Swedish holding corporation and leaves Asmodee holding €900 million of new debt.
Advertised as a “transformative step for value creation” by Embracer’s press release, the dissolution will create three business entities that will be separately and publicly traded on Nasdaq Stockholm, the country’s stock exchange. Embracer claims that such a plan will “enable the entities to unlock value in [their] high-quality assets” while owner Lars Wingesfors stays on as the largest shareholder and leader of a new ownership structure (he will control 20% of the total capital and 40% of votes).
Along with Asmodee Group, Embracer’s suite of independent and video game studios will be collected under the strangely named “Coffee Stain & Friends” - referencing the Goat Simulator and Satisfactory developer - while the licence for The Lord of the Rings joins Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider franchise (which has its own taletop RPG adaptation in the works), comics label Dark Horse and several other miscellaneous holdings as “Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends”.