The board game market - Germany

In contrast to other European countries, such as France, where the popularity of board games has varied over the decades, Germany has always been a country with a high consumption of board games and participates in their renewal from the 1990s onwards. Indeed, family gatherings around a board game are very frequent, so that German board game publishers have been very successful economically. The famous British weekly magazine The Economist even went so far as to declare that "Germany was to board games what Belgium was to chocolate" (The Economist, German recreation: An affinity for rules, 08/2018). Today, however, the German market seems to be growing at a slower pace, whereas the world market is growing by 13% per year. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has sparked new interest in the German market, with a strong increase in turnover and new consumer trends that could last for years to come. The main players on the German market are multinational publishers and distributors of games and toys such as Mattel or Hasbro, German human-sized board game companies such as Amigo or Haba, small, highly successful foreign publishers such as Asmodee or Jumbo, or board game resellers such as Vedes and Smyths.