Magic's first $600m quarter, Fort Circle cuts back on Kickstarter, and Brushwood took sixteen versions to lose its beetles

SPIEL Essen closed on Sunday, and BoardGameWire, the trade site this desk checks first, has filed nothing since Monday 19 October. What came over the weekend came from elsewhere. This desk covers 23 to 26 October 2026, with two threads that start slightly earlier and are dated where they appear: Hasbro filed its third-quarter results on Tuesday 20 October, and Mugen Gaming's Sword World campaign opened the same day.

Hasbro's quarter shows where the category's money now sits. A small publisher has published the arithmetic of walking away from crowdfunding. And the fair's own players graded what they played.

Hasbro's third-quarter release leads with one line: Magic: The Gathering passed $600 million in quarterly revenue for the first time. 1

Company revenue rose 15% against the same quarter last year. Wizards and Digital Gaming grew 31%, and Magic inside it grew 34%. 1

That segment earned $367 million of operating profit at a 49% margin, while the whole company reported $517 million. 1 Hasbro credits The Hobbit and Reality Fracture for the Magic growth. 1

About $55 million of tariff refunds sit inside those figures. 1 With that tailwind, Hasbro lifted its full-year revenue outlook to 7-9% growth in constant currency from 5-7%, and doubled its share repurchase target. 1

The release's own risk list names the dependency. Hasbro warns of relying on "brands such as Magic: The Gathering in which we have seen an increasing concentration of our sales and profits". 1 Put those two profit figures side by side and the concentration is plain.

For a studio designing into this market, the figure that matters is the split. The growth sits in a card game with a set-release calendar, and chief executive Chris Cocks credits an "asset-light licensing model" that lets partner companies extend Hasbro's brands.

The people inside those teams go into two union elections in November, after Wizards declined voluntary recognition in October, a step this desk covered on 19 October. Rascal's account of the campaign, published 15 October, adds the contract clause worth knowing: Wizards contracts carry inventor provisions that let Hasbro claim creative work made in employees' own time. 2 D&D producer Vanessa Hoskins told Rascal the clause "has put a stranglehold on our creatives who don't feel like their free time is their own". 2

Kevin Bertram runs Fort Circle Games, which has raised $519,351 across six Kickstarter campaigns. 3 On 23 October, in a post on his Negotium Ludorum newsletter, he set out why he will use the platform less. 3

He still credits the benefits: a sales channel that brings its own customers, a time limit that creates urgency, demand forecasting for the first print run, and early cash flow. 3 Two things changed. Buyers now treat Kickstarter as a pre-order shop, and its reputation took damage from failures: Bertram names Mythic and CMON, which made crowdfunding "look more like a Ponzi scheme than a legit crowdfunding platform". 3

Then the tariffs. Fort Circle had three campaigns outstanding when the IEEPA duties landed, the emergency tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. 1 Bertram tried printing in Brazil, Vietnam, Poland and the Netherlands, then waited for the Supreme Court to strike the duties down in February 2026. 3 The company now pays 15% on its Chinese print run after losing a customs ruling, which it is appealing. 3

The bill lands in public. The Halls of Montezuma slips to early 2027; an ordinary campaign draws two or three refund requests, and this one drew almost two dozen. 3 Five one-star BoardGameGeek ratings sit on a game that has not shipped, one of them reading "Game does not exist. Fort Circle Games cannot be trusted." 3

His answer is three routes. Night Witches skips crowdfunding, because distributor demand can size the print run. Shakespeare's First Folio gets a small first printing, with a Kickstarter for the second printing around Shakespeare's birthday in April. Peace 1905 goes to Kickstarter only once it is 100% ready to print, with printing starting the day the campaign closes. 3 Bertram puts the floor at four months from print to delivery in the US. 4

His closing line is the one to keep: "The fantasy of Kickstarter being the place a plucky designer can go to get their game funded is dead. Now it's just business." 3

W. Eric Martin spent the four days at the fair for BoardGameGeek and filed 22 notes on it this morning. In meeting after meeting there, publishers raised the same plan unprompted: fewer releases in 2027 and 2028. 5 One publisher intends to come down from six games this year, expansions included, to four or five. 5 The fair carried 1,800 games, counting only publishers with a booth. 5

The second reading comes from the players. Fairplay magazine runs a booth at each SPIEL where attendees grade the games they played, five down to one. At the close of Saturday 24 October, Lucioles led the expert-games list at 4.7, and the next six titles sat at 4.3 and 4.2. 6 On the family list Very Big Monster held 4.6 against 4.2 to 4.0 for the eight behind it. 6 A game needs at least twelve ratings to appear, so each grade rests on a small sample. 6

The order under the list is worth a designer's attention. Positions two to four on the expert list are German editions of games first published in Japan: Nokosu Dice, Eternal Decks and Gibberers. 6 Fairplay also gave its À la Carte prize, a card-game of the year award it has run since 1991, to Take Time by Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière for Libellud. 6

Filippo Landini's diary for Brushwood, published on BoardGameGeek on 24 October, opens on a family walk in the Italian Alps in August 2021. 7 He wanted to rebuild that walk as forest cards laid side by side, and the core idea survived to the published game untouched. 7

Everything around it moved. Landini counts as many as 16 versions, and he describes his instinct as overloading the first one. 7 Beside the birds, mushrooms and squirrels that shipped, the early cards carried butterflies, beetles and bees. He also tried lumberjacks, rangers, scouts and explorers. All of it came out. 7

The berry system shows the same cut made twice. Berries first sat in pairs at the board's centre, one pair beside each card stack, and where the shared hiker stopped decided whether you took berries or the card beneath. 7 Landini liked the asymmetry that produced in how many cards each player finished with. The cost was constant refilling, and players weighing three cards and three berry pairs at once. 7

The second pass put a berry space between the cards: take a card, then one of the two berries at its left or right. 7 Paolo Mori simplified the collection further at an Italian designers' meetup, and that version went to SPIEL Essen in 2023. 7

The pitch worked. Almost every publisher he showed it to asked for a review copy, and Korea Boardgames was the fastest to offer a contract. 7 One of the others asked whether he could keep the prototype to play with his mother-in-law, who was over ninety and had liked it. 7

Production then cost a year, and art caused it. Development with Korea Boardgames left the mechanics nearly intact and kept circling the look. 7 The brief went to illustrator Matt Sanz: three or four background variants whose left and right edges connect in any order, with tree layouts that repeat across the deck without reading as copies. The game moved from Nuremberg in 2025 to the 2026 Nuremberg Toy Fair to get there. 7

Sixteen versions is the number to take from this diary. Landini's habit was to add systems first and let the table tell him which ones to strip, and the cost showed up as prototype cycles, which is the cheapest place to pay it.

Mugen Gaming's campaign for Sword World opened on 20 October on Backerkit, the crowdfunding site, with a goal of $19,890. By 24 October it had passed $2.5 million from more than 7,600 backers, with the campaign running to 20 November. 8

Sword World is a Japanese fantasy roleplaying game that Group SNE first published in 1989, and this campaign funds the first official English release of Sword World 2.5, localised with the original creators. 8 Checks and combat run on 2d6, characters develop across several classes at once, and the three core books pass 900 pages with more than 300 creatures in the monster manual. 8

Translated Japanese roleplaying games have crossed over for fifteen to twenty years, through Ryuutama, Tenra Bansho Zero, Shinobigami, Golden Sky Stories and Maid, and the pace has climbed. 8 Green Ronin's Nobunaga's Black Castle, licensed from the Japanese publisher CONOS and compatible with MÖRK BORG, closed on 8 October at $65,395 from 942 backers. 8

The two campaigns differ in what they were selling. Nobunaga's Black Castle sold a niche crossover to 942 backers, while Sword World sold a national line with a forty-year history, a replica sword and plushies stacked beside the rulebooks. 8 The library is the asset, and it took forty years to build.

Set the print schedule before the campaign date. Fort Circle works from four months between print and delivery, and its refund count shows what a missed date costs in public. 4

Take the cut. Brushwood lost its beetles, its lumberjacks and half its berry bookkeeping before Korea Boardgames signed it, and the game still reads as a forest walk. 7

Ask about next year's slate. Publishers raised smaller 2027 and 2028 line-ups unprompted at a fair showing 1,800 games, which means fewer slots for a debut and a fair question at your next pitch. 5