INSIDE THE SECRET BOARD GAME MAKER

We throw back the curtain on the unsung manufacturer responsible for producing some of the most acclaimed tabletop titles of the last decade – and a name you’ve probably never heard before

Words by Matt Jarvis

If you’re at least a passing fan of board games (a likely guess given you’re reading this magazine), you can doubtless name a dozen designers whose work you enjoy – Matt Leacock, Rob Daviau, Richard Garfield, Jamey Stegmaier, Corey Konieczka, Vlaada Chvátil, Uwe Rosenberg… the list goes on. What’s more, you can probably rattle off at least a handful of your favourite publishers: Z-Man, Bezier, Plaid Hat, Portal and maybe even niche start-ups discovered through Kickstarter or in the corner of conventions. Yet, even if you’re a more studious follower of the industry, you’re unlikely to have come into contact with the company that actually turns many of these creators’ ideas into the printed wood and card that ends up on your table.

In a business still populated by supercentenarian game makers such as Ravensburger, Kosmos and Hasbro (alright, Hasbro’s ‘only’ 94 years old, we’ll admit), Panda Game Manufacturing is a relative infant, having first appeared a decade ago as the result of now-CEO Michael Lee engineering a single project he discovered on BoardGameGeek in 2007. Lee quickly brought on his brother, COO Richard, and committed to Panda full-time. The very next year, in 2008, Panda was responsible for producing two titles whose popularity and influence endures today: Ultimate Werewolf and Pandemic.

“The game that we have probably produced the most of in terms of quantity, and that is most well-known, is Pandemic,” Panda’s vice president of business development Brent Kinney tells me. “Pandemic has become a crossover hit and has landed in big box stores.”

Panda’s Brent Kinney.

In the years since, Panda has grown to a team of over 50, split between offices in North America, Canada and Germany and its factories in China. The company now manufactures hundreds of games every year, with 2016 landing it contracts for such success stories as Scythe, The Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, Pandemic Iberia, Tiny Epic Western and Islebound, to name just a few.

Many of the games go on to be lauded by critics and players alike, with Panda-made projects placing among the best of BoardGameGeek’s hallowed rankings. Component and printing quality often play a major role in the overall experience and acclaim of a title, yet players are quick to shower publishers, rather than manufacturers, with praise – and no wonder, with publisher badges gaining more and more prominence on the front of packaging and knowledge of game authorship increasingly reaching outside of exclusively enthusiast crowds. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to tell whether a specific game you own was made by Panda at all, if you didn’t know where to look.