Magic: The Gathering is adding Star Trek to its collaboration lineup, with Wizards of the Coast confirming a full Universes Beyond set built around the franchise’s 60th anniversary. The set launches on MTG Arena November 10 and hits tabletops worldwide November 13, following a prerelease window at local game stores from November 6-12.

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The product line covers nearly every price tier Magic offers. Play Boosters run $6.99, Collector Boosters $37.99, standard Commander Decks $74.99, and a Collector’s Edition Commander Deck $159.99. A “Beam Me Up Bundle” runs $99.99 and includes two randomly selected promo cards from an eight-card set. Four Commander decks anchor the release, alongside a Beginner Box aimed at Star Trek fans who’ve never touched a Magic card.

The chase cards are seven hand-signed collector cards pulled from Collector Boosters, limited to 250 printings each, featuring actors who played the characters on screen. Wizards has confirmed Captain Kirk and Captain Janeway so far, with five more to be revealed. Thirty Stardate cards reprint powerful existing Magic cards under Star Trek branding, including Sheoldred, the Apocalypse reissued as “Khan, Engineered Evil,” styled after the Kelvin-timeline Khan. Twenty-nine LCARS frame cards and ten LCARS shock lands recreate Starfleet’s interface styling directly on the cardboard, and twenty-four Classic Enterprise cards borrow the painted look of vintage Star Trek movie posters.

Three new mechanics arrive alongside two returning ones. Assimilate lets a player seize an opposing creature, slap a +1/+1 counter on it, and turn it into a Borg artifact creature that loses its other creature types. Federation rewards players for fielding a wide spread of non-Borg creature types. And Face a Dilemma names something Magic has done for years, spells and abilities that force a player to choose between multiple modes, on cards like Set Phasers to... and Seven of Nine. Whether Wizards intended it or not, longtime Star Trek fans will recognize the name. Decipher’s original Star Trek Customizable Card Game, which ran from 1994 through 2007, built an entire card category called Dilemmas around away teams having to face obstacles before completing a mission. The overlap in name and concept sits close enough that it’s worth noting, even without confirmation from Wizards that it’s a deliberate homage.

This is Magic’s fourth major outside-IP crossover in as many years, following Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, and Marvel, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles already announced for later release. Wizards’ own head designer has been public about leaning on outside franchises to keep the game’s card pool and player base growing, and Star Trek fills a demographic gap the previous crossovers hadn’t fully reached. A company built on twenty planeswalkers and its own multiverse increasingly finds its biggest sales moments come from licensing someone else’s.

Whatever the reason behind the strategy, there’s something to it as a product on its own terms. Signed Kirk and Janeway cards, a Borg mechanic that actually turns your opponent’s creature into a Borg, and a nod to a twenty-year-old license game’s card category are the kind of details built for people who grew up on both franchises at once. Wizards is borrowing other people’s universes because Magic’s own well has run dry of surprises. That doesn’t mean the result isn’t worth a look on November 13.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: How Star Trek: The Customizable Card Game Went From Brilliant Innovation To Complete Failure

Decipher, Inc. built the second-biggest trading card game business in America on the back of Star Trek and Star Wars, then watched a company vice president siphon millions out of the register while the games he was supposed to be steering grew too complicated for their own players to track. The Star Trek Customizable Card Game outlived its publisher by nearly two decades because a volunteer fan committee refused to let it die. Getting to that ending means walking through where Decipher came from, how it built the game, and how the company fell apart around it.

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From Puzzle Boxes to Pente

Warren Holland founded Decipher in Norfolk, Virginia in 1983 as a puzzle company. The first product carried the company’s own name: a jigsaw puzzle called Decipher, built around four embedded cryptograms and a cash prize for solving them. A sequel followed. The final puzzle in that line, Decipher III, has never been solved. From puzzles, Holland moved the company into party games with the How to Host a Murder line, then picked up the Pente license from Parker Brothers. By the early 1990s, Decipher was a small, established name in party and abstract strategy games with no card game pedigree at all.

That changed because of two former Pente world champions. Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh had watched Magic: The Gathering take off and pitched Decipher on a new idea: a customizable card game built on licensed media instead of an invented fantasy setting. Decipher approached Paramount, and in December 1993 acquired the rights to Star Trek: The Next Generation. The game previewed at Gen Con in August 1994 and released that November as Star Trek: The Next Generation Customizable Card Game.

Expansion, Success, and the Seeds of Bloat

The TNG game was supposed to run three years and five sets. It did well enough that Paramount renegotiated in November 1996, handing Decipher the rights to every live-action Star Trek property: the Original Series, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and the films. The card game’s name shrank to match its new scope: Star Trek Customizable Card Game. A month later Decipher had already applied the same formula to Star Wars, licensing the property from Lucasfilm in December 1995. Both games ranked among the top five CCGs on the market for most of their runs, with Star Wars regularly trailing only Magic itself.

Growth on this scale came without a governor. Star Trek CCG launched with three factions (the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans) plus a catch-all Non-Aligned slot, and nine card types. Within a few years that had grown past seventeen card types, spread across new affiliations for the Kazon, Vidiians, and Hirogen introduced through Voyager. There was no unified point-cost system governing what a card was allowed to do relative to its price. Instead, Decipher patched the rules set after set, layering fix on top of fix rather than rebuilding the foundation. The community’s own oral history of the era, preserved on fan wikis, names the Voyager expansion as the start of what players still call “the Time of Breaking,” when specific cards (the Holy Hexany and Vic Fontaine among them) broke the game’s balance badly enough that organized play never fully recovered from the memory of it. Sales dipped through the final sets built around the films and holodeck scenarios, and Decipher itself took note.

Chasing Younger Players, Losing the Big One

1999 brought two moves in opposite directions. The Phantom Menace convinced Decipher its two flagship games were too dense for younger players chasing Pokémon, so it built the simpler Young Jedi Collectible Card Game around the prequel era. In the same year, Decipher tried to extend its card-game brand into party-game territory with an Austin Powers Collectible Card Game tied to The Spy Who Shagged Me. The property never found its footing as a card game and production stopped after the initial release.

Then came the loss that mattered. Star Wars was Decipher’s biggest earner, and at the end of 2001 the license came up for renewal. Wizards of the Coast, freshly folded into Hasbro alongside Hasbro’s existing Lucasfilm relationship, took the rights out from under Decipher. All three Star Wars card lines Decipher had built stopped cold. Decipher had already hedged by picking up the Lord of the Rings film license that same year, timed to release one month ahead of Peter Jackson’s first movie in November 2001, but the loss of Star Wars was still the loss of the company’s flagship product.

The Reboot, the RPGs, and the Kids’ Market Again

2002 brought Decipher’s attempt to fix what seven years of unmanaged growth had done to Star Trek. The company relaunched the game as Second Edition, keeping the mechanics that had made the original popular while adding the point-cost system the first version never had. The same year, Decipher bought most of the design staff from the collapsed Last Unicorn Games and used them to build licensed Star Trek and Lord of the Rings roleplaying games on a new system called CODA. 2003 saw another swing at the youth market that Yu-Gi-Oh! now dominated, with card games built on .hack and Beyblade. The Beyblade line died quickly. The .hack//Enemy game lasted years and won an Origins Award. 2004 added a Mega Man NT Warrior card game and Decipher’s first original, non-licensed card game, WARS, built on the same underlying system that had made the original Star Wars CCG work.

The Rot Nobody Could See

None of that diversification could offset what had already happened inside the company’s own finance office. Rick Eddleman, Warren Holland’s brother-in-law, had been Decipher’s Vice President of Finance since 1993, the same year Braunlich and Tesh first pitched the Star Trek game. Beginning in 2000, Eddleman began writing company checks to himself and running personal expenses through company credit cards. The theft continued until his resignation in 2001, and by the time it was fully accounted for in a civil suit, Decipher’s claim against him totaled $8.9 million. Eddleman pleaded guilty to twelve counts of embezzlement covering more than $1.5 million of that total and was sentenced in July 2009 to six years and five months in federal prison.

The money was gone years before anyone outside the company knew it. Decipher’s fan community has long pointed to the embezzlement as the root cause of the company’s collapse, and Holland himself built a public accounting of the fraud after the fact. The mechanics of the fraud are less important here than the timing: a company burning through licensing fees, print runs, and payroll on the belief that its books were sound had a multimillion-dollar hole in exactly the accounts it needed to weather a shrinking hobby market.

2005: The Year It Broke

2005 delivered every remaining problem at once. The .hack and Mega Man cartoons lost their audience, forcing Decipher to cancel both card lines. WARS never found players without a built-in media brand behind it and went on indefinite hold. Decipher shut down its roleplaying game division. The broader collectible card game industry was contracting on its own, and layered on top of an embezzlement loss the company was only now fully reckoning with, Decipher laid off as many as 40 employees. Warren Holland kept the company out of bankruptcy, but the staff left behind could not keep pace with the release schedule for the two properties still generating revenue: Star Trek and Lord of the Rings.

The result was a death spiral with a name among Lord of the Rings TCG players: the Hunters block, originally due in November 2005, arrived seven months late with what the game’s own community still calls the least playtested, least balanced set Decipher ever printed, full of overpowered cards and combinations nobody had time to catch before print. Delays fed retailer distrust, distrust fed falling sales, and falling sales fed more layoffs, in a loop that left a single employee doing the work of an entire studio to finish out the final sets.

Two Licenses, Two Endings

The Lord of the Rings license expired on schedule in 2007, and Decipher released its last expansion, Age’s End, rather than losing the property outright. Star Trek ended differently. On December 12, 2007, Decipher announced the current expansion, What You Leave Behind, would be the Star Trek CCG’s final set. The company spent that holiday season teasing a “player revolution coming in 2008” on its homepage, which turned out to be Fight Klub, a combat card game licensed across disparate action-movie properties like Rambo and Chuck Norris. It released in February 2009 and did not revive the company’s fortunes.

The Fans Who Refused to Let It End

What happened next is the part of this story that gives it a different shape than most dead trading card games. Within days of Decipher’s December 2007 announcement, a group of players organized the Star Trek CCG Continuing Committee to keep producing new content on a volunteer, non-profit basis. By the account of the game’s own longtime players, the Committee has since released more sets of cards than Decipher ever did, distributed as free print-and-play files. In 2010 the Committee issued a set of Modern Rules, including a ban list, specifically to correct the balance failures that had accumulated across the original run, the same power creep and rules bloat that had made the game harder to learn with each passing set. Star Wars got the same treatment years earlier: after losing that license in 2001, Decipher donated more than a million dollars in product and financial backing to help fans form the Star Wars Customizable Card Game Players Committee, which still runs tournaments today.

The game Decipher built in 1994 introduced ideas that no card game before it had tried: missions instead of an open-ended win condition, an away-team structure that made every card in the deck function as a role rather than just a stat block, a dilemma pile that punished careless deck-building as much as it rewarded clever construction. Two volunteer committees have now kept that design alive for longer than the company that built it managed to keep it running honestly. Was the game undone by its own ambition, by a corporate parent that never controlled its own bloat, or by the man inside the building who was stealing from it the whole time?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Tired of What They Did to Your Favorite Franchise? Here’s the Fix!

Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering Arena development team voted 79 to 16 on June 23 to certify United Wizards of the Coast, the first union in the company’s history. The National Labor Relations Board tally covered 102 eligible workers across animation, art, design, engineering, and QA at the company’s Renton, Washington office. It also arrived under a shadow the Hasbro-owned publisher built for itself three years earlier, when it sent Pinkerton agents to a fan’s front door over a leaked pack of cards.

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The organizing drive began in late April, when Arena senior software engineer Damien Wilson announced the effort on behalf of the Communications Workers of America. “At Wizards, we’re organizing for a say in layoffs, accountability that runs up and down the chain, and a living wage that actually lets people build a life,” Wilson said in a statement to press. The union asked Hasbro for voluntary recognition by May 1. Wizards let the deadline pass. The company’s public statement said it was “committed to fostering a workplace where every person feels heard, valued, and supported” and pointed to its “direct relationship” with employees as the reason a union was unnecessary.

Behind that statement, the NLRB case filing showed Wizards had retained Fisher Phillips, a law firm that markets an “interactive union organizing activity map” to clients and has built a national practice advising companies on how to defeat organizing campaigns. Arena team members later told reporters the company followed up with mandatory meetings, letters sent to employees’ homes, and a daily email campaign aimed at the bargaining unit before the vote. None of it moved the needle. The election closed 79 to 16 in the union’s favor.

For workers watching the fight, the company’s history made the tactics land differently than a standard anti-union playbook. In April 2023, a YouTuber known as oldschoolmtg posted unboxing videos of an unreleased Magic set, March of the Machine: The Aftermath, after unknowingly buying the product early from a reseller. Pinkerton agents showed up at his home the following Saturday morning, demanded the cards back, and raised the subject of jail time to him and his wife. Wizards confirmed to Polygon and Kotaku that the agents were part of its investigation into the leak. Gizmodo reporter Linda Codega found the 2023 incident was not the company’s first recourse to the firm: a source described a similar Pinkerton deployment in 2017 over a leaked Ixalan foil sheet.

Pinkerton’s name carries a specific weight in American labor history that has nothing to do with card games. Founded in 1850, the agency spent the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the enforcement arm of choice for industrialists fighting organized labor. Henry Clay Frick hired 300 Pinkerton agents to break the 1892 Homestead Strike at Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill; the ensuing gun battle killed several strikers and agents and triggered a national outcry that led Congress to pass the Anti-Pinkerton Act the following year, barring the federal government from hiring the firm. Pinkerton agents were also deployed against striking coal miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. The company has spent decades since rebranding into corporate risk management, but the union-busting reputation followed it into the present: Amazon hired Pinkerton to monitor warehouse workers for union activity in 2020, and Starbucks brought on a former Pinkerton employee for its own anti-union effort in 2022.

Wizards never had to invoke Pinkerton by name during the Arena union drive. The company didn’t need to. A publisher that had already sent private investigators to a fan’s home over cardboard packaging chose Fisher Phillips and a saturation email campaign instead, and workers who had followed the 2023 story took the pattern as confirmation of where the company’s instincts sit when it feels ownership of something threatened, whether that something is a leaked rare or a bargaining unit. The vote count suggests it didn’t work.

United Wizards of the Coast now moves to contract negotiations, the stage where voluntary recognition fights and certification elections stop being symbolic. Wizards will have to bargain in good faith under federal law, though the timeline and substance of that bargaining remain open questions the company controls as much as the union does. Does a company with three documented decades of anti-union legal strategy behind it approach that table any differently than it approached the leak, or does Fisher Phillips simply become this year’s Pinkerton?

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: BoardGameGeek’s Activist Crowd Tries to Cancel Kingdom Come: Deliverance: The Board Game Over Gamergate

Czech Games Edition announced Kingdom Come: Deliverance: The Board Game this week, a licensed adaptation of the popular medieval RPG designed by Tomáš Holek, creator of the hit eurogame SETI, and Vlaada Chvátil, the designer behind Codenames and Galaxy Trucker. It is an epic adventure game set in 15th-century Bohemia, planned for debut at Essen SPIEL in October 2026. Within days, a thread appeared on BoardGameGeek titled “Concerns regarding the license and the studio’s background.”

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Games Workshop published new Horus Heresy artwork on June 8 showing MkIV Tactical Legionaries deploying alongside a Sicaran Battle Tank. One Space Marine in the foreground has six fingers on his bolter hand. The hobby community noticed within hours.

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Wizards of the Coast is heading toward a union election it did not want, in a culture war it manufactured, over a workforce it spent years reshaping in its own ideological image. The results of the Magic: The Gathering Arena union vote will be announced June 23. The chaos leading up to it tells you everything about where the company is right now.

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Paizo Publishing announced Wednesday that it is laying off 12 employees and scaling back its Organized Play programs, the direct result of losing nearly $2 million in 2025 to the ongoing fallout from Diamond Comics’ bankruptcy.

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The collapse of Diamond, which had served as Paizo’s exclusive bookstore distributor, set off a chain reaction the Pathfinder publisher is still paying for eighteen months later. When Diamond declared bankruptcy in early 2025, JP Morgan Chase moved to claim a lien on all inventory sitting in Diamond’s warehouses, including roughly $10 million in Paizo books and games shipped on consignment. Paizo sent the product, never got paid, and couldn’t retrieve it. A judge eventually terminated Paizo’s exclusive distribution contract with Diamond earlier this year, allowing the publisher to sign with Independent Publishers Group. Diamond immediately appealed, stalling recovery.

The practical result: Paizo is cutting staff, reducing Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society scenarios from four per month to two starting in October, and pausing Foundry VTT modules for organized play until the company can rebuild margins. CEO Jim Butler announced the layoffs in a post on the Paizo website Monday evening, noting the decisions were negotiated with the United Paizo Workers union. Affected employees received 20 days’ notice and 18-month recall rights.

The mechanics of the disaster are real. Diamond’s bankruptcy wiped out cash flow that Paizo had counted on. JP Morgan’s claim on the inventory was legally defensible under bankruptcy law even though the stock belonged to Paizo. The litigation has ground on for over a year with dozens of other publishers stuck in the same position.

But the financial catastrophe arrived at a company that had spent the previous several years shrinking its own audience before any bankruptcy hit.

Pathfinder was built on a specific promise. When Wizards of the Coast abandoned Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 in 2008 and replaced it with a streamlined fourth edition that bore little resemblance to what players had known, Paizo stepped in. Their Pathfinder system kept the complexity, the crunch, and the classic fantasy feel that the D&D 3.5 community loved. It worked. Pathfinder outsold D&D for stretches of the early 2010s, built a tournament organized play infrastructure, and established a loyal base of players who had nowhere else to go.

Those players were predominantly the same demographic that built the hobby: gamers who wanted rules depth, classic fantasy adventure, and escapism without a lecture attached.

Paizo spent the next decade replacing them in the messaging if not the rulebook. The company’s public-facing content shifted toward Pride Community blog posts celebrating every LGBTQ+ identity imaginable, canonical trans and nonbinary characters spotlighted in official blog entries under headers like “Trans Pride, Trans Power, Trans Rights,” deity entries specifically designed around sexual liberation, and a running organizational identity that told its core audience their values were unwelcome.

The second edition Remaster in 2023 stripped out the alignment system that had been a cornerstone of classic fantasy RPG design since Gary Gygax. The reasons given were mechanical. The subtext was not hard to read.

In January 2025, Paizo’s Director of Games posted on social media that Vice President JD Vance should “send his books back” and declared there was “no space for fascists in our game.” When conservative players and gaming figures pushed back, the director blocked them. Mark Kern, a former World of Warcraft lead developer, was blocked. The Paizo business account itself joined in blocking critics. It became a viral demonstration of exactly who Paizo had decided its customer was, and who it had decided to eject.

The layoffs are expected to be finalized by the end of June.

Are you still playing any Paizo games?

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NEXT: CMON Has $14 Million In Unfulfilled Crowdfunds And Just Spent $2.1 Million On An NFT Company

CMON Limited, once one of the most successful crowdfunding-based board game publishers in the hobby, announced in April that it is investing $2.1 million to acquire a stake in Blissful Link, the company behind Capverse, a “Web3 play-to-earn game using blockchain technology.”

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The financial context makes the decision extraordinary. CMON reported losses of $19.9 million in 2025, following $3 million in losses in 2024. The company holds more than $14.3 million in unfulfilled crowdfunding obligations across eight outstanding campaigns. It ceased development on all new games in April 2025. It sold its flagship Zombicide IP to Asmodee to generate cash. It sold Cthulhu: Death May Die to Asmodee for the same reason. Its auditors raised going-concern doubts in its most recent annual report.

The undelivered campaigns include DC Super Heroes United, which raised over $4.4 million from backers, and DCeased, which raised over $2.5 million. Both were originally due to be delivered in 2025. CMON now expects to deliver them in Q4 2026. Also outstanding: Dune Desert War, the Assassin’s Creed Role Playing Game, and several others. One backer posted to BGG: “They have 8 outstanding crowdfunding projects, 7 unfulfilled pre-order campaigns. How can Kickstarter, Gamefound, or Backerkit even entertain allowing them to start another campaign.”

The Capverse company CMON is investing in generated revenue of $409,000 in 2024 against losses of $197,000, a company that loses money on under half a million dollars in revenue, funded by CMON, which itself loses tens of millions annually.

CMON’s board justified the investment by stating that integrating its board games with “Web3 technologies would enhance the long-term commercial value of the group’s portfolio” and that “participating in Web3 projects, the Company can demonstrate its commitment to social responsibility and sustainability.”

The NFT boom peaked in 2021 and collapsed by 2022. CMON is making a play-to-earn blockchain investment in 2026.

The company has also announced it plans to return to crowdfunding later this year, despite the eight campaigns already overdue. No Rerolls, a board gaming commentary site, described the situation plainly: “A publisher with eight overdue campaigns and millions in unfulfilled liabilities doesn’t relaunch crowdfunding because it’s ready. It relaunches because it has no other reliable way to generate cash.”

CMON was founded in Hong Kong in 2008 and built its reputation on premium Kickstarter campaigns for miniature-heavy games. Zombicide raised $781,000 in its original 2012 campaign and spawned one of the most successful board game franchises in crowdfunding history. Blood Rage, Rising Sun, and A Song of Ice and Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game followed. The company was genuinely innovative in its field. Its downfall was the same combination that has ended other ambitious crowdfunding operations: too many campaigns running simultaneously, manufacturing delays compounded by tariffs and COVID logistics, and an inability to deliver at the scale the crowdfunding success demanded.

The NFT investment is not a strategy. It is what a company does when it has run out of legitimate options and needs to tell shareholders something. The backers who funded DC Super Heroes United in 2024 and are still waiting for their games are watching the company that owes them $4.4 million spend $2.1 million on a blockchain startup.

Do you have outstanding CMON campaigns, and has this news changed your confidence in receiving them? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: BoardGameGeek Just Fired a 20-Year Employee for Citing Demonic Possession as Grounds to Reject an Ad

BoardGameGeek fired its advertising manager of nearly 20 years today after an email exchange with a game publisher went viral on Reddit. The story broke this morning and is the most discussed item in the tabletop community right now.

Falling Whale Games submitted an ad campaign to BGG on May 7 for their Gamefound crowdfunding project Possess Me, Satan, a social deduction game for five to sixteen players in which one participant is secretly possessed by the ghost of a murderer. The premise is standard social deduction territory with hidden roles, ghost hunting, group accusation, and a horror theme and a provocative title.

After hearing nothing for over a week, Falling Whale followed up on May 15. What came back was not a standard rejection. Advertising manager Chad Krizan wrote that he could not “in good conscience” approve the ads, explaining that his personal firsthand experiences with demonic possession made the subject matter impossible for him to promote. He wrote, in part, that he had seen Jesus heal people from severe occultic abuse, that the theme of the game depicted a terrible reality, and that he would urge the developers to consider pulling the entire project.

Falling Whale published the email exchange. Within six hours, BGG founder Scott Alden posted on the forums: “Due to a situation in which BGG’s Advertising Manager responded inappropriately in a business email to a designer, I have decided to let him go.”

The story has predictably split the tabletop community. Critics of Krizan call the email unprofessional, intrusive, and a misuse of a business correspondence channel to evangelize a client. His defenders point out that a man with two decades of service to the hobby was fired within six hours of a Reddit post because he expressed a sincere religious conviction in a private email and declined a campaign on personal grounds.

Both of those things can be true simultaneously, and the speed of Krizan’s firing says something worth noting because of the way Board Game Geek has traditionally caused problems for Christians and conservatives. A man who spent twenty years building advertising relationships for the largest board game database in the world was terminated in less than a business day because his email went viral on Reddit. BGG did not investigate, consult legal counsel on a measured response, or issue a warning. The mob moved fast and BGG moved faster.

Possess Me, Satan has raised just over $14,000 from approximately 250 backers on Gamefound and has 30 days remaining in its campaign. The controversy has almost certainly helped its numbers.

This is not a surprise from BoardGameGeek. The platform has spent years banning users for expressing right-of-center or Christian viewpoints in forum discussions, while its moderation culture reflects the progressive consensus of its staff without apology. A user on BGG who questions gender ideology in a game’s promotional materials gets banned. A user who expresses concern about occult themes in hobby content gets banned. The pattern is documented and consistent. BGG does not treat religious conviction as a protected perspective deserving accommodation. It treats it as a problem to be managed.

Under US employment law, religious belief is a protected class. A company that terminates an employee for acting on sincere religious conviction faces real legal exposure. Krizan’s email was unprofessional. Whether it constituted terminable conduct under employment law, or whether BGG simply moved fast because the social media pressure was loud, is a question his attorneys are probably already asking.

The hobby community that lectures the industry about inclusion and treating people with dignity had a Christian man’s twenty-year career ended before lunch. The game that triggered it will sell more copies by the end of the week than it would have without the controversy.

What does it say about BoardGameGeek’s stated values that a twenty-year employee’s career ended in six hours because he expressed a sincere religious belief? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: WotC Is Becoming A Brand Licensor And The Justice League TTRPG Is The Latest Proof.

Brazilian publisher D20 Culture and Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products announced last week that Justice League Unlimited: The Roleplaying Game — the first official DC universe TTRPG in almost two decades — will launch on Gamefound in July 2026, co-authored by Mark Waid. It is rules-light, narrative-focused, and set in a post-Absolute Power DC universe.

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The story here is not the game itself. It is what the game represents in the broader context of where Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast are positioning Dungeons & Dragons.

The trajectory over the past three years is consistent. In January 2023, WotC attempted to revoke the Open Game License that had allowed third-party publishers to build businesses around D&D for over twenty years. The backlash was immediate and severe. Pathfinder publisher Paizo launched the ORC license as an alternative. Kobold Press, one of the most prolific producers of D&D-compatible content, began developing its own independent system. Hundreds of creators who had effectively advertised D&D for free walked away. The OGL attempt drove companies toward creating their own systems, fragmenting the ecosystem WotC had built.

The personnel losses followed the reputational damage. WotC’s end-of-2023 layoffs cut 20% of the global workforce, gutting the D&D writing and creative team. Swen Vincke of Larian Studios, accepting Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Game of the Year award, noted that “of the people who were in the original meeting room, there’s almost nobody left.” WotC President Cynthia Williams resigned in April 2024. Additional layoffs hit the D&D team again in October 2024.

Larian Studios walked away from Baldur’s Gate entirely, leaving Hasbro holding the rights to the most commercially successful D&D game ever made with no developer capable of continuing it. Hasbro’s internal response was to lay off most of the people who built the BG3 relationship in the first place. WotC announced it would find a new developer for Baldur’s Gate 4. That developer has not been publicly named. The game remains years away.

What WotC has done effectively in this period is licensing. The estimated $90 million in licensing fees from Baldur’s Gate 3 became one of the few genuine bright spots in Hasbro’s financial reports during a period of broader company losses. Magic: The Gathering licensing deals with Fortnite, Stranger Things, and assorted pop culture brands generate consistent revenue with minimal creative output required from WotC staff. The Hasbro financial reports increasingly lead with licensing revenue rather than publishing output as the engine of WotC’s profitability.

The Justice League TTRPG is not a WotC product. It is being built by a Brazilian publisher, D20 Culture, under a Warner Bros. Discovery license. WotC’s fingerprints are nowhere on it. That is the point. The TTRPG space that D&D once dominated through the OGL ecosystem, where WotC set the terms and third parties built around them, is now producing major licensed games entirely outside of WotC’s system. Justice League Unlimited is running on its own ruleset. So is the upcoming Invincible RPG. So is the MCDM RPG. So is Pathfinder 2E, which gained market share directly from WotC’s OGL debacle.

The speculation in the TTRPG community, which is documented as early as mid-2024 in D&D Beyond forums and elsewhere, is that WotC intends to stop being a publisher of D&D and become a licensor of D&D. In that model, the brand is leased to external studios, the creative output is outsourced, and Hasbro collects fees while running a leaner internal operation. The layoffs of the D&D creative team, the failure to secure a BG4 developer, the pivot toward digital platforms, and the reliance on licensing revenue all point in the same direction.

D&D as a brand remains powerful. The 2024 core rules revision sold, the Ravenloft and Arcana Unleashed 2026 release slate has genuine product to offer, and the 50th anniversary in 2024 drove measurable engagement. But the company that defined the TTRPG industry for fifty years is quietly exiting the business of making the game in favor of monetizing the name.

The Justice League TTRPG is a fine product. D20 Culture does good work — their Foes of Middle-earth funded in under ten minutes. Mark Waid co-authoring gives it legitimate creative pedigree. None of that changes what it represents: another major TTRPG launched in a space WotC once owned, built entirely without WotC’s involvement, succeeding on the strength of a license WotC no longer controls.

Is Wizards of the Coast still a game company, or is it becoming a brand management operation? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: Mass Effect Board Game Designer Eric Lang Is Telling Gamers Not to Support Companies With “Bigotry”

Eric Lang posted to Facebook this week with a message that had a specific target.

“I also encourage not financially supporting games or Kickstarters from creators with a public platform and history of bigotry,” Lang wrote. “Especially transphobes, in the year of our lord 2026. F--- TERFS always.”

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Lang did not name FryxGames or designer Jacob Fryxelius directly. He did not need to. The post arrived in the context of a years-long boycott campaign against Terraforming Mars, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed board games ever published, targeting the company’s CEO Enoch Fryxelius over social media posts from 2020 that included sharing content from gender-critical activist Posie Parker and expressing support for Sweden Democrat leader Jimmy Åkesson. Enoch deleted the posts and issued a general apology. The boycott calls have continued regardless.

Lang calling for a financial boycott of companies with “a history of bigotry” while positioning himself as the industry’s moral arbiter is worth examining given his actual track record.

Fandom Pulse has covered Lang’s career extensively. He leveraged his identity for career advancement at Cool Mini Or Not, where he eventually had to step down. In October 2024, Lang co-designed the Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz board game and added pronoun designations to the character sheets. When players left negative reviews on BoardGameGeek citing the pronoun inclusions, Lang publicly called them “f---ing manbabies” who “can’t handle looking at pronouns on a character sheet.” BoardGameGeek subsequently removed the negative pronoun-related reviews from the ratings. Lang then posted on Bluesky: “I’m so proud of Mass Effect, and so endlessly tired of the F---ING MANBABIES who try and tank our BGG rating because we took 10 seconds to add pronouns to the squadmates?” He deleted the X post but left the Bluesky version up, writing: “Deleted the stupid post because, well, you know why. I hate deleting posts that I stand behind, but f--- it. Twitter sucks so f---ing much.”

More recently, Lang was accused of using Chinese slave labor in his manufacturing chain. His response to the designer who raised the accusation: “Consider kissing every square inch of my Black a**.”

Lang posted on Facebook last week warning gamers about tariffs: “Hey, Maybe don’t come at game industry people demanding education about tariffs RIGHT NOW.” The man lecturing the hobby about ethical purchasing decisions was telling his own customers to stop asking questions about where the products are made.

The campaign against FryxGames and Terraforming Mars follows a familiar pattern. Enoch Fryxelius expressed opinions in 2020 that were standard center-right Swedish political positions: skepticism of transgender ideology, support for a mainstream conservative party, and defense of a commentator popular in that country. He was not Jacob Fryxelius, who designed Terraforming Mars. He was not the game’s artist. He was the CEO of the family business. The posts were deleted. An apology was issued. None of it mattered to the boycott crowd, which has continued circulating the screenshots at every opportunity.

Terraforming Mars remains one of the highest-rated board games ever made. The audience for the game has, in the majority, separated the product from a CEO’s social media activity from six years ago. That is a reasonable position. It is the same position the gaming press takes toward designers on the left who express political opinions in public, including Lang himself, whose pattern of insults toward customers and accusations against competitors does not appear to have affected his career opportunities.

Lang is entitled to his opinions. He is also entitled to encourage people not to buy products he disagrees with. The audience is equally entitled to note that the designer calling for boycotts based on “bigotry” is the same person who called his own customers manbabies, told an accuser to kiss his behind, and leveraged his race for industry positions.

Do Eric Lang’s calls to boycott FryxGames carry credibility given his own track record with the hobby community?

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NEXT: The $900 Fake Magic Card: How a Facebook Marketplace Scam Exposed a Vulnerability Every Collector Faces

Bill Fridge, a Magic: The Gathering content creator and streamer, went live recently to walk his audience through one of the more painful collector stories in the MTG community — a near-perfect counterfeit card purchased for $900 from Facebook Marketplace that hit every failure point in the peer-to-peer collectibles market at once.

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Fridge had been pursuing the card for approximately nine months. It had been rising in value since its September release, and he’d done what any speculator does: identified an asset he believed would appreciate and moved when the price looked right. “If I sell these Magic cards I can afford to buy this at a very good price,” he explained on stream. “I thought I made a good investment. And since I got it, it went up like $200 in price.”

The seller looked clean by every available check. His Facebook profile showed years of activity, personal photographs with his girlfriend, and a professional LinkedIn presence. The platform’s AI vetting system flagged him as a trusted seller with multiple five-star reports and 17 years of account standing. “When I saw it, I pulled it out. I looked at it, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a beautiful card,’” Fridge said. “Based on everything the guy had on his Facebook page, I had no reason to think any otherwise.”

They met in person. The seller provided an address. The exchange happened face to face.

The counterfeit only revealed itself under close examination after the transaction. Fridge found three separate tells. The first was physical: the edges where the card was die-cut showed slight upward curling characteristic of proxy printing machines rather than Wizards of the Coast’s manufacturing process. “They kind of cut up right and that happens in proxy cards the way they die cut them. Very, very barely see it.”

The second was ink density. Held against legitimate cards from his collection, the printing was measurably lighter. The third and most definitive was a jeweler’s loupe test on the card’s back design — specifically the letter T. “There’s like some red dots that are on the green dot on the back. You can see the red dots if you like do a jeweler’s loop and zoom in. I use my phone to zoom in on the T and the T on the back will have these little ridges on the bottom of the T and all the other cards had them clear as day and this one was not clear. It was very muffled.”

The quality of the fake made it worse. “It looks so real, too. It’s like very well done. It’s the worst part about it.”

Fridge messaged the seller explaining his concerns and asking whether the seller knew the card’s authenticity was questionable. The response was immediate: the seller blocked him and removed him from the conversation.

“I was like, ‘Oh, he must know. He must know what happened,’” Fridge said.

Fridge contacted the payment platform to report the fraud and open a dispute. The platform suspended his account instead. The account held significantly more than the $900 transaction.

He had sent money through a friends and family transfer — the same feature he uses to pay his mother, sister, and roommates. That habit extended, fatally, to a Facebook Marketplace exchange with a stranger. Friends and family transfers carry no buyer protection. There is no dispute mechanism. The money moved and didn’t come back.

“I did friends and family like a dumbass,” Fridge said. “I just felt like everything lined up and I could trust the guy and I just wasn’t thinking.”

The fraud investigation is more complicated than a typical online scam because Fridge is not dealing with an anonymous seller. He has the man’s name, LinkedIn profile, apparent employer, and the physical address where they met. He looked this person in the face.

“I have the dude’s information. Like, I assumingly know where he works. I found his LinkedIn. I found everything,” Fridge said. “Which wise it doesn’t add up that he would scam like that.”

The ambiguity is what makes it so hard. The seller claimed to have obtained the card from a local game store, Mox Boarding House. If true, the seller may not have known the card was fake, and the counterfeit entered the chain of custody somewhere upstream. The immediate block when Fridge raised the issue suggests otherwise.

Filing a police report is the logical next step. Fridge acknowledged it while questioning its practical value: “I have the dude’s information and stuff, but even that feels like a lot — am I wasting police time doing it?” Interstate fraud at $900 falls under federal jurisdiction when conducted across state lines, which peer-to-peer marketplace transactions frequently do. A report creates a paper trail whether or not it produces immediate results.

MTG counterfeits have become sophisticated enough that fakes pass casual inspection from experienced collectors. The card Fridge bought required a jeweler’s loupe and direct comparison against authenticated copies to identify. Visual inspection alone gives buyers near-zero protection against high-quality proxies.

Platform AI vetting systems assess behavioral patterns and account history — not the authenticity of what’s being sold. A seller who has conducted dozens of legitimate transactions before pivoting to counterfeit cards passes automated screening cleanly every time. The 17-year account standing that reassured Fridge was real. It said nothing about the card in the seller’s hand.

Friends and family payment transfers remain the sharpest vulnerability in private transactions. Sellers who request this method explicitly are eliminating the one mechanism buyers have for recourse — which is exactly why they request it. That request should function as a hard stop. Legitimate private sellers accept payment methods with dispute mechanisms because they’re confident in what they’re selling. Sellers who insist on friends and family are pricing in the possibility of a problem.

Fridge closed the stream hoping his account would be restored after identity verification. “My whole life is messed up,” he said. “I took a risk picking this up the way I did. I thought it was a calculated risk. I was wrong.”

What protections should peer-to-peer marketplace platforms be required to provide collectibles buyers?

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NEXT: Games Workshop’s Female Custodes Are Sitting on Shelves and the Store Data Shows Why

Games Workshop’s decision to introduce female Custodians into the Adeptus Custodes produced one of the hobby’s most sustained community controversies. Months after release, a YouTube investigation attempted to answer the question engaged players have been asking: are the models actually selling?

The video By The 40K Empress, titled “90% REJECT THEM: Investigating The Femstodes Retail Reality,” comes from a 40K content creator who spent several weeks gathering community reports, running polls across YouTube and X, and obtaining store-level sales data from industry source Chainsword 40K. The creator acknowledges throughout that without official numbers from GW, everything stays in the territory of informed inference. What the investigation produces is the most systematic community-level attempt to answer the question available.

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A supermajority of Magic: The Gathering Arena developers announced their union last week, affiliated with the Communications Workers of America. They called themselves United Wizards of the Coast. They gave Hasbro until May 1st to voluntarily recognize it. Hasbro said nothing.

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Disney Lorcana launched at Gen Con in August 2023 with two-hour lines and sold-out shelves within hours. Ravensburger had underestimated demand badly enough that the first set, The First Chapter, was nearly impossible to find at retail for months. Scalpers moved product at double and triple the manufacturer’s suggested price. Local game stores couldn’t stock enough to run organized play events. The game was everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

By early 2025, Lorcana had sold over one billion cards. The launch was the most successful product debut in Ravensburger’s history. The First Chapter booster box topped TCGPlayer’s sealed product sales chart for December 2023 by dollar volume. Lorcana hit number three overall in TCG sales in its debut year, an extraordinary achievement for a brand-new game entering a market dominated by decades-old franchises. Then the speculators left.

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Wizards of the Coast debuted Magic: The Gathering’s upcoming Hobbit crossover set at MagicCon: Las Vegas this past weekend. Within twenty-four hours, the flagship card of that reveal, which is a a new version of The One Ring illustrated by veteran MTG artist Dan Frazier, was confirmed as a traced copy of artwork created by artist Marta Nael for the 2023 Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth set.

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Frazier and WotC issued a joint statement on May 2. The artist did not soften it.

“I made a mistake, and I feel awful,” Frazier wrote. “I especially feel for Marta, whose work I adore. In trying to create an iconic version of The One Ring, while looking at references online, I ended up using Marta’s Ring as a reference and painted over it to try to depict the item fans hold dear to their hearts. In doing so, I didn’t make it my own. I’m reaching out to Marta privately to apologize artist to artist. I love creating art for Magic, I’ve loved being a part of this artist community for more than 30 years, and I’m sorry I’ve let my fans down.”

WotC’s portion of the statement acknowledged its own review process failed to catch the issue before the card was shown publicly: “Dan Frazier is a titan of the art industry and of Magic: The Gathering. He has created so many iconic pieces of art for the game that he will forever be a part of our game, and we value his contributions tremendously. With that in mind, we’re disappointed our review process didn’t catch the issue. Like Dan, we have already reached out to apologize to Marta Nael for not catching the use of her art in this piece. None of this was intentional, but we’re going to make it right as much as we can. On digital versions of the card, we will credit both Dan Frazier and Marta Nael. We will also make sure Marta is compensated for her work here.”

Note the qualifier: digital versions. The physical cards have already been printed. Nael’s name will not appear on them.

The community’s reaction came fast. Donato Giancola, one of the most respected fantasy illustrators working today and a longtime MTG contributor, posted on Facebook: “Wizards of the Coast just released a very sorry excuse for the most important card in their upcoming Hobbit set. They just digitally sampled the previous One Ring card from the Lord of the Rings set and flipped and deleted the Elvish Runes. I doubt Dan Frasier had any real say in how this came about. So much for the One Ring being unique. Welcome to Wizards of the Coast’s Digital Only Universes Beyond, photocopied art.”

Former MTG podcaster Joey Pasco was direct: “This is pretty messed up. As pointed out by Donato Giancola on FB, it seems the new printing of The One Ring is just a flipped cutout of a previous borderless printing (artist credit: Marta Nael) with the runes removed, then plopped onto a Dan Frazier background.”

Frazier’s agent confirmed that the artist was not shown the final version after several requested changes were implemented, which raises a question WotC has not answered: if Frazier did not approve the final card, who did? And how did an image that is visibly a mirrored, rune-stripped version of a three-year-old card pass through an internal review process at a company that made the original set?

Frazier has contributed art for 188 cards over the years, including the original five Moxen in Alpha. His standing in the MTG art community is not in dispute. The statement makes clear he bears responsibility for using Nael’s work as a direct reference. It also makes clear WotC’s review process is broken, because a company that produced Tales of Middle-earth in 2023 should have recognized its own card’s ring when a new version of it arrived for The Hobbit set in 2026.

The first major takeaway is that WotC’s team somehow did not catch this, despite having made a set based on the same franchise three years prior, and it made it all the way to being displayed at a major event within months of the set’s release.

The second takeaway is structural. WotC’s remedy is digital credit and compensation for Nael, which is more than nothing. But the physical cards carry only Frazier’s name. Every copy of The One Ring from The Hobbit set that moves through the secondary market will do so without acknowledging the artist whose work made it possible.

This is not the first time the MTG art pipeline has produced a situation that damaged a creator. It likely will not be the last. The review process that failed here is the same one responsible for approving every card that ships to print. WotC called this a moment to recognize that humans make mistakes. That is true. It is also a moment to ask why a company with thirty-plus years of experience and a review team specifically tasked with catching problems like this one sent a traced card to a major convention reveal without anyone noticing.

Does WotC’s response make this right? Or does Marta Nael deserve better than a name that will never appear on a physical card?

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NEXT: Daggerheart Is Building a Romantasy Campaign Inspired by Tabletop BDSM Smut With the D&D 2024 Team at the Helm

Darrington Press this week unveiled the cover for Daggerheart: Hope and Fear, the first major expansion for Critical Role’s tabletop RPG. It ships August 25. But the expansion itself is not the story. The story is what Darrington Press is building around it, and who is building it.

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The biggest story in tabletop this week has been framed as a triumphant defection. Acquisitions Incorporated, the 17-year-old actual play series that predates Critical Role and built its reputation running official Dungeons & Dragons content at PAX conventions, announced at PAX Unplugged 2025 that it is abandoning D&D entirely. The new campaign runs on Daggerheart, the TTRPG published by Critical Role’s Darrington Press. The TTRPG community celebrated. What most of that coverage missed is who is running Daggerheart.

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Jeremy Crawford and Christopher Perkins are the lead designers on Daggerheart at Darrington Press. Both men left Wizards of the Coast in mid-2025. Both were the primary architects of D&D 2024, the edition that drove Crawford to declare the game needed to be less white, removed orcs from the Monster Manual because depicting them as monsters was deemed racist, gender-swapped Dryads and Hags away from their traditional mythological depictions, and added a safe space mechanic to the Dungeon Master’s Guide requiring players to make an X with their arms to halt any game session that made them uncomfortable. That last feature was pulled directly from BDSM community safe word practice and inserted into a tabletop roleplaying game aimed at teenagers.

Fandom Pulse covered Perkins’ and Crawford’s departure from WotC last June. Crawford said at the time, “I’ve always believed that great games invite everyone to the table, and that’s exactly what excites me about joining Darrington Press.” Perkins said joining felt “a bit like coming home.” Neither addressed what they were leaving behind. Both left as the 2024 edition’s failure in the market was becoming impossible to ignore.

The problems they left behind at WotC are documented. Under their stewardship the game lost its core players. White male gamers, historically the plurality of D&D’s fanbase, were told by executive producer Kyle Brink in 2023 that “guys like me can’t leave soon enough for this hobby.” Brink is now gone too. The 2024 edition’s sales did not recover the ground lost from the 2023 OGL betrayal, when WotC attempted to revoke the open license that had made D&D the foundation of the entire TTRPG ecosystem for twenty years.

Now those same designers are building Daggerheart. The system launched in May 2025. It has a growing roster of actual play shows, a PAX presence, and this week the prize of Acquisitions Incorporated using it as its campaign platform. Crawford is GMing the first arc. Perkins takes over after that.

WotC launched its own actual play response the same week. Dungeon Masters, which premiered April 22 on YouTube, features Jasmine Bhullar as the GM. Bhullar’s casting, as Fandom Pulse noted in our April 21 article on the show, tells you everything you need to know about who WotC built this show for. The cast skews toward the same ideological demo that drove the 2024 edition’s design. The prior WotC actual play series, Dice, Camera, Action, collapsed in 2020 after cast controversies. The lesson WotC took from that was apparently to launch another one with a similar casting philosophy.

The real story underneath the Acquisitions Incorporated announcement is not that D&D players are finding a better home. It is that the people who damaged D&D have taken their brand relationships and their design philosophy to a new address and are building the same house again. Crawford and Perkins did not leave WotC because they had a change of heart about what tabletop gaming should be. Perkins said explicitly that Darrington Press felt like “coming home.” Critical Role’s audience is exactly the demographic their D&D 2024 decisions were designed to court. They are not escaping the ideology. They are doubling down on it with a fresh IP and a roster of actual play partners who were already aligned with them.

Daggerheart may well be a better-designed system than D&D 2024. That is a low bar. But players considering whether to follow Acquisitions Incorporated onto the new platform should know who set the table they are sitting down at.

Does the Daggerheart team’s D&D 2024 track record change whether you’d try the game?

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NEXT: Wizards of the Coast Launches Official D&D Actual Play Series, And The Cast Tells You Everything You Need To Know

Wizards of the Coast announced Dungeon Masters on April 16, premiering April 22 on YouTube. The show is WotC’s first official long-form actual play series, set in Ravenloft, and designed to preview content from the June sourcebook Ravenloft: The Horrors Within. New episodes drop weekly. Content from each episode goes on sale through D&D Beyond immediately after it airs.

The cast: Jasmine Bhullar as Dungeon Master, with players Mayanna Berrin, Christian Navarro (13 Reasons Why), Neil Newbon (Baldur’s Gate III), and Devora Wilde (Baldur’s Gate III).

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The official Cyberpunk Trading Card Game Kickstarter closed April 17 at $26,953,978 from 47,676 backers. That makes it the most-funded tabletop campaign in Kickstarter history and the third highest-funded project in any category the platform has ever seen. The two campaigns above it are a UV printer ($46.7 million) and Brandon Sanderson’s four secret pandemic novels, which raised $41.7 million in 2022 and still hold the all-time Kickstarter record. In the tabletop world specifically, nothing has come close. The Cosmere RPG, also based on Sanderson’s work, held the prior tabletop record at $15.15 million. The Cyberpunk TCG passed it on April 1 and nearly doubled it by the close.

WeirdCo, the Seattle-based publisher behind the game, developed it in direct partnership with CD Projekt Red. The campaign launched March 17, hit its $100,000 goal in minutes, and spent the following month smashing every tabletop milestone on record.

The game that almost wasn’t

To understand why 47,000 people handed over an average of $565 each for a card game, you need to understand what CD Projekt Red spent five years rebuilding.

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