Fantasy Flight Games

History

Christian T. Petersen founded Fantasy Flight Publishing in Minnesota in 1995. Its first game product, the sprawling space-empire board game Twilight Imperium (1997), set the house style: big boxes, lots of plastic and cardboard, long play times and heavy theme. The company adopted the name Fantasy Flight Games and, during the d20 boom, published Legends & Lairs, a line of supplements for D&D's third edition under the Open Game License, from 2000 to 2008.

In the 2000s it became one of the leading hobby board game publishers. It licensed A Game of Thrones for a strategy board game (2003), video game properties for Doom: The Boardgame (2004), World of Warcraft: The Board Game and StarCraft, and revived classics including Cosmic Encounter and Arkham Horror. Kevin Wilson adapted the Doom engine to fantasy for Descent: Journeys in the Dark (2005), in which up to four heroes fight through a dungeon while an Overlord player springs traps and monsters: a grown-up, hobby-market answer to HeroQuest. Its world, Terrinoth, also hosted Runebound and Runewars.

In 2008 Fantasy Flight made a deal with Games Workshop to publish games in the Warhammer worlds. It produced a revised fourth edition of Talisman (December 2008) with many expansions, a boldly different third edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (2009) with custom dice and cards, and several Warhammer 40,000 RPG lines. The partnership ended in 2016. The company invented the "Living Card Game," an expandable card game sold in fixed packs rather than random boosters, beginning with A Game of Thrones and Call of Cthulhu in 2008; The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (2011) and Arkham Horror: The Card Game (2016) followed. In August 2011 it won the Star Wars license, producing the hit miniatures game X-Wing and roleplaying games with narrative dice. In September 2015 it bought Legend of the Five Rings from AEG, relaunching it as a Living Card Game (2017) and a new RPG (2018).

In November 2014 Fantasy Flight merged with the French publisher Asmodée Éditions. Under Asmodee it opened, then closed (2020), a digital studio, and moved its roleplaying lines to Asmodee's Edge Studio and its miniatures games to Atomic Mass. Asmodee itself was bought by Embracer Group in 2022 and spun off as an independent company listed in Stockholm in February 2025. Fantasy Flight continues in Roseville, Minnesota, focused on board, card and dice games.

Notable work

Twilight Imperium, A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, Arkham Horror, Descent and its app-driven Legends of the Dark (2021), Runebound, the revised Talisman, WFRP third edition, X-Wing, and Living Card Games including Android: Netrunner, The Lord of the Rings and Marvel Champions.

Legacy

Fantasy Flight made the big, thematic, component-rich board game a mainstream hobby product in the 2000s, and its campaign-driven dungeon crawls and app-assisted cooperative play helped prepare the ground for Gloomhaven. Its Living Card Game model offered collectible-card depth without the lottery of random boosters, and its care with licenses, from Middle-earth to Star Wars, showed how a fan property could become a deep game.