Codenames goes to Netflix, an agency for publishers with no distributor, and Games Workshop's 150 new paint pots

The desk covers 2 to 5 October 2026, and three of those four days were a weekend. That leaves the trade news front-loaded: two BoardGameWire stories filed on the Friday afternoon after the previous edition went out, one retail column from Monday morning, two designer diaries, and the week's campaign list.

Codenames Party is live for Netflix subscribers now. It plays on the television, with phones used as controllers, and it adds a party mode for up to ten people competing as individuals rather than as two teams. 1

The arrangement behind it is the part a designer can study. Netflix approached Czech Games Edition, the Prague publisher behind Codenames, about licensing the game. After playing CGE's existing mobile app, the streaming company changed tack and asked the publisher to develop the digital version itself — paying CGE for the build and paying ongoing licence fees on top. 1

That makes CGE the developer as well as the licensor, which is a different position from the one Asmodee has taken with its own catalogue. Netflix holds exclusive global rights to Ticket to Ride across film, television and other formats, and took the first screen adaptations of Catan; there the publisher hands the property over and stays out of the build. 2

The scale is what brought Netflix to the door. Codenames has sold close to 20 million physical copies, and the game with its spin-offs accounts for about 80% of CGE's annual sales. 1 CGE marketing manager Ondřej Skácel told the Czech business outlet CzechCrunch that money from the streaming version sits well below what the tabletop game brings in, and that the first approach looked like a hoax. 1

The new look drew its own questions, with some players asking whether the art had been made with generative AI. CGE's answer to BoardGameWire was flat: "There are no AI assets in the game or in marketing materials. The new art style was made by illustrators and graphic designers who spent countless hours on it." 1

CGE has been taking Codenames digital for years: a free browser version in 2019, then a mobile app from its CGE Digital team in 2024 that added asynchronous multiplayer, matchmaking, progression and new modes. That app is what the Netflix team tested. 1 The publisher says it would weigh more platform deals if a game and a platform fit each other. 1

Anjuli Smith left MyMiniFactory at the end of September to run Tabletop Growth Partners full time. MyMiniFactory runs a marketplace for 3D-printable files, and Smith there held the head of marketing and brand role. 3

The agency's main line is marketing, digital growth and business development for the roleplaying and wargaming sectors, those first two letters standing for tabletop roleplaying games. 3 The second line is the one board game designers should read twice: business development for smaller board game publishers, which means introducing them to distributors Smith already knows, approaching new distribution partners, and booking their meeting schedules around a trade fair. She will sit in on the meetings where a publisher wants the extra help. 3

She is already talking to three board game publishers about working with them at Spielwarenmesse, the Nuremberg trade fair, next February. One of them is Acolyte, a new Canadian publisher making co-operative and semi co-operative games that wants distribution in the UK and Europe. 3

Smith's argument for why a publisher pays for this is the interesting half. "An available network is a huge blocker for many smaller and newly launched publishers," she said, adding that more than 5,000 new board games release each year and that matching the marketing budget of a Flip 7 is out of reach for most. For a small publisher, flights, hotels and a booth already cost a great deal, and time spent at a show talking to people is time not spent selling. 3

Her background is worth knowing before hiring her. Smith worked as a purchasing assistant at Asmodee UK, moved to Aconyte Books, Asmodee Entertainment's fiction imprint, and at MyMiniFactory handled business development that brought established tabletop properties into 3D printing, including Steamforged Games' Warmachine and Modiphius Entertainment's The Elder Scrolls. 3 She is based in the UK and has shifted her hours to cover US mornings, expecting most of the agency's clients to be American. 3 The agency has also signed on as an ambassador for Soulcrafted, MyMiniFactory's campaign for human-made creative work. 3

Games Workshop has a new paint line, Tone Pro, landing in stores in late October or early November. The range is 30 paints with five shades of each hue, which adds 150 pots to a retailer's wall, plus accessories. 4

The distribution is the story. Games Workshop picked the stores already stocking the full Warhammer Colour line and sent them signage and a rack for the new range without asking first. The racks are metal, about 18 inches wide and a little over six feet tall. Stores got roughly three days' notice, and the news arrived by email rather than through the usual weekly preorder window that closes at 5:30pm on Tuesday. 4

The company's reasoning, as the column lays it out, is that these stores already carry the complete paint range, so they will want this one, and that demand will be strong enough to make early ordering worthwhile. Hundreds of those shops were already ordering, with orders due in mid-October. 4

Scott Thorne, who owns Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and teaches marketing at Southeast Missouri State University, expects the paints to sell. Customers are already asking about them, and by his reading they cover dark primer better than the current Warhammer Colour line, level better, and carry thicker pigment with better adhesion to primer than the current P3 line, the range being replaced. His complaint is procedural: "I just would have liked to be included a bit more in the decision." Thorne discloses at the end of the column that he is a Games Workshop shareholder. 4

Julian Steindorfer, the publisher at 1 More Time Games, tells the story of Fadenfroh out of order and lands on the point anyway. He first saw the game on Alexander Pfister's table at the Austrian game design meeting in June 2025. A week later the two played it at 11pm; the start player marker was a glue cap, because the prototype did not have one. Steindorfer went home with the prototype in his backpack, and five days after that the contract was signed. 5

The game is Jordy Adan and Pfister's, a card-laying game that Steindorfer describes as abstract at its core, with an interactive selection mechanic and the A/B/C/D scoring system that structures both Isle of Skye and Cartographers, where a different set of conditions scores each round. Its brief was accessibility, with Azul and Splendor as the argument that abstract games can be warm, and Castle Combo and Faraway as the argument that a small box can carry a real game at a price people will still pay. 5

Two production notes are worth carrying off. The first is legibility. The design needed nine icons across three categories that had to work on three different card backgrounds, so illustrator Julia Beutling built a test display to see every combination as the player would, and the team went through 113 versions of it before the display worked. The second is cost. Steindorfer wanted the heavy, clickable tokens that Wolfgang Warsch's Figment uses, and as a small Austrian publisher he had one dial to turn: "We only have one wheel to adjust and it's our own profit margin." The final version uses 5mm wooden discs with UV printing rather than greyboard, and Strom Manufacturing, which produces for Gloomhaven and most of CMYK's catalogue, mapped out what was possible within the budget. 5

"Triangulation was designed in three years and four hours." Peter Hayward's diary is about what filled the three years. His first version, called Hash, tried to build a teacheable Decrypto and failed — two clues for any word in the world is too much to ask, and the four-step flow was too much work for a party game. 6

The fix was arithmetic. In the original two-clue version, the opposing captain chose which of your clues your team saw. When Hayward tried cutting that step by letting the player shuffle and reveal one at random, players happily took a 50/50 chance of revealing the good clue instead of engaging with the choice at all. Three clues changed the sum: you reveal two before your own team guesses, so the chance the good clue happens to be the one still hidden drops to 33%, below the threshold where chancing it looks attractive. 6

The general lesson is the sentence worth keeping: "90% of design [is] fighting against this human impulse, and ensuring the engaging, fun way to play your game is also the winning path." 6

Two further choices sit inside the finished game. Every answer is a proper noun, which Hayward says sets it apart from other guessing games beyond the charades family, and the word list took hours of work from John Brieger, Jeff Fraser, Breeze Grigas and Joe Wiggins. 6 The game also closes off its own loophole: when a word comes round again you cannot reuse the perfect clue set you found last time, because everyone at the table now knows it, and the opposing team guesses first. Allplay publishes it, with art by Kwanchai Moriya. 6

Two campaigns worth a look from the seven days to 3 October, the span the weekly Crowdfund Quest roundup covers — which starts earlier than this desk's own window, at 26 September. 7

Defenders of the Realms: Definitive Edition brings Greater Than Games back to the co-operative classic it is known for, on Gamefound, with the base game reworked and a large amount of new content added. 78

Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones Origins is the other one, also on Gamefound. Chaosium's roleplaying brand takes a competitive asymmetric turn here: two to four players each command a faction devoted to a different Mythos deity, and the pitch is about out-adapting your rivals rather than surviving together. 9

Codenames Party is live on Netflix now, so the two-clue habit is worth ten minutes of study before you design a digital or single-screen version of anything. Tone Pro reaches paint racks in late October or early November, which is the point to look at what those 150 pots do to shelf space in a shop that carries your game. And the agency is hiring itself out to publishers who already have a game and no route to a distributor; its first three clients will be at Nuremberg in February.