Asmodee announced today that its digital board gaming platform, Board Game Arena, now has over 10 million user accounts. The platform also has over 900 games to play, with around 5 million hours played each month. According to the company, Board Game Arena (BGA) hit this milestone through its breadth of content and its accessibility — anyone can play on the platform as long as they have a device and a web browser.
Board Game Arena began as an online board gaming portal in France in 2010, and grew in popularity over the years, especially during the pandemic. Asmodee acquired BGA in 2021 and brought its own titles to the platform, including Catan and Ticket to Ride. GamesBeat spoke with Thomas Koegler, Asmodee’s deputy COO who oversaw the acquisition, about the new milestone and how far the platform has come.
According to Koegler, the platform is growing its audience at a rate of 30% per year. “When we acquired the company, there was the question of whether we were buying them at a peak, but we were convinced that it was not at a peak, and that the platform could still grow. And that is the case.”
One of the BGA’s strengths, he noted, was its large and company-agnostic catalog of games. The platform features games not only from Asmodee’s 22 studios, but also hundreds from other companies. Koegler said that this was a matter about which the company felt strongly: “We’re going to demonstrate to you that we have the best interest of the industry at heart, because anything that’s positive for the industry is positive for us. There is no point in being exclusive or isolating oneself, just centered on our own products. I mean, other publishers publish fantastic products, so it should be part of the global ecosystem.”
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Koegler also mentioned how BGA fits into the broader board game community, saying the community as a whole is very welcoming. Asmodee and BGA held its first World Championships of AZUL, one of the platform’s most popular games, earlier this year — Tung Yat “Sunny” Cheng of Hong Kong won. The tournament featured over 4,000 players with the finals taking place in Lisbon. He added, “I would also invite hobby shop owners to look into BGA and how they could use it to animate their local community — maybe by holding a mix of online and in-person events.”
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