FRG shuttering GtG?

I don’t have a lot of detail as not much is out there but a board game podcaster posted Flat River Group was shuttering GtG @giantbrain.co.uk on Bluesky

Darell Louder also posted this on Facebook:

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The company is almost entirely dependent on China for manufacturing their products, which is no longer a viable business model. I was wondering whether we’d see some official comment about where things were headed.

So is most of the board game industry. Given the uncertainty with the current President this just seems shortsighted. Hopefully more details come out.

Dammit, I had worried about this ever since I heard about the tariffs, but… what a stupid development. Everything about this political situation is stupid. What even is this timeline.

well, it’s been nice knowing you all

Well, I think most everyone who even wants to talk to me has me already friended on Discord anyways, but in case the forum goes down and anyone still wants to chat I’m the username you’d expect.

Christopher posted this on TLP discord

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I am crushed. This is the best community I’ve ever been a part of. I always wanted to join the Letters Page discord server but now I can’t. Is anyone considering creating a fan server?

The Realm of Discord (as in that is the server name) already exists and is fan-run, so it’s not going anywhere. And the LP server will still exist though who knows what’s going to happen with the Patreon part of it.

The official announcement, in case anyone missed it.

I’ve seen several people speculating that if FRG is closing down GTG this abruptly and with very little warning or solid plans already set to go for things like the crowdfunding and podcast, they might have already been looking for an excuse.

It’s certainly a slap in the face considering how trusting GTG was when the buyout first happened.

Update: While looking for how people were reacting to the situation, I came across people who work for FRG themselves also talking about being let go. Seems this wasn’t just GTG being downsized.

What a sad result stemming directly from an extremely dumb policy. And it sounds like the GTG team got very little warning. I hope those laid off had some reasonable severance, and I hope they are able to get back on their feet. (And maybe, eventually, that GTG gets back on its feet, too. But I suspect the whole industry is about to go through a lot of unnecessary pain, and there won’t be an opportunity for a return to operations in some time.)

I also hope that GTG (and FRG?) have trade groups and associations that they can take their story to, and then advocate to elected officials and the public. Getting these stories out is what changes minds, which could eventually lead to the policy and political change that needs to happen.

The overarching industry seems to be starting to rally around GTG, at least. I heard that the head of Leder Games was in the Spirit Island server offering to help any way he could.

And the story is already making its rounds among gaming stores, gaming groups, and ICv2. The Penny Arcade folks also reacted to it. And even people who aren’t big GTG fans specifically are having “oh geez if even Spirit Island isn’t enough to keep a company open, what chance do the rest of us have?” reactions.

So in short, if it gives you hope, the news is definitely making the rounds. And while I’d be a little surprised if GTG’s fanbase ever had very many Trump supporters to begin with considering the company’s ideals and the themes in many of the products… the people I’ve seen reacting to this definitely aren’t happy with him right now, that’s for sure. And it’s a lot of people.

I wonder if a gofundme is in order.

This is an absolutely rough one. I knew that the tariffs were going to start killing things, but I sure didn’t expect Flat River to jump the gun quite so hard or quite so fast and it sure seems like no one else at GtG expected it either. I’m still going to hope for this to turn around somehow, but right now it definitely feels more like mourning.

As for the podcast - I would guess it got shuttered because Trevor was one of the people who got laid off, so there’s no one to edit and produce the thing. It definitely doesn’t sound like it was primarily a C&A decision based on that post.

I guess what worries me about this is: They get $1600/month from the Patreon. That’s enough to give Trevor something for his time right now, and then start working on a long-term solution to fit production within the Patreon level of funds (Ads? Reducing the schedule? Monetizing it on YouTube?) And I find it hard to believe we wouldn’t be totally willing to, as El Nate says, do a GoFundMe type thing for temporary shortfalls until that gets ironed out.

FRG instead halting podcast production in a way that is clearly not making Adam happy (so decent chance Christopher’s not happy either) is just… odd. Like this obviously isn’t simply C&A’s choice to not record until the financials shake out. (And I doubt it’s Trevor’s choice either if it’s tariffs Adam is snarking about.)

Absolutely. What you’re proposing is something I would do.

But FRG is a distributor primarily. I would be deeply unsurprised if their leadership doesn’t really get how much the Sentinels community is at the root of their success, and thus sees the podcast as just being marketing for the products. And if there aren’t going to be products for a while, you pause your marketing.

edit Actually, this makes me wonder whether C&A’s reluctance to do episodes for parts of the setting that don’t have products coming out was less about them, and at least partially about directives or compromises with FRG. It’s definitely starting to look like FRG had more control than we thought.

Flat River Group is doing a lot more than shuttering GTG. All their imports and future products are on hold.

This quote in that post from the co-owner of Pandasaurus gets to the heart of the matter:

…The games will lose money overall, but the production cost is already been spent, so it’s about maximizing cash flow so that’s what we will do.

Everybody is probably playing really defensively right now. The worst off have to be the new Kickstarters who are waiting for boats and now suddenly have to pay a cost at customs that exceeds the production value of the games. I bet this breaks a lot of startup small businesses and a lot of crowdfunding campaigns go unfulfilled even with everything produced. More established companies have more resources, but still, nobody has margins in their cash on hand to absorb the import fees. I’m sure that FRG execs had a hard conversation about the upcoming release schedules from each imprint, when revenue comes in, and when costs are incurred. If they’re about to pay import taxes on things in route, and they retain any ability to make some profit from sales, they’re probably just playing a maximization game to survive.

As a distributor, FRG is also caught in a foreseeable Malachi Crunch if the tariff situation continues for any real period of time. The industry is probably headed for a massive contraction as publishers collapse or scale back to direct sales only, which will starve the distribution network, which in turn will lead to retail stores failing - especially if sales overall drop along with discretionary income as the rest of economy stutters. If that pattern goes on for long, even if things turn around who’s a distributor supposed to sell to? A few surviving stores, most of which will have gotten used to ordering direct from publishers? And how much will even be available to sell with many publishers gone for good?

I’ve worked through the sports card and comic book boom-and-bust cycles. Those were mild blips mostly caused by speculators and publisher overproduction compared to this idiotic trade war, and they still killed half the specialist shops that existed before the booms started. I’ll be amazed if one game store in five survives this mess, and one in ten might be more realistic unless it ends tomorrow.

All of this information lines up with my spotting direct FRG employees lamenting their own layoffs on the social medias.

Yeah, that’s my concern. They don’t realize the podcast is its own product we’re willing to pay for separate from the games.

(As for the political situation causing all this, it also gets infuriating realizing this could end tomorrow if certain elements were willing to take back their souls they sold out. They have plenty of options and the issue is lack of willingness, not lack of opportunity.)

That’s exactly why I was talking about trade groups, up above. You and I live in states where our representation is already convinced, so any noise we or our states’ Chambers of Commerce make doesn’t move the needle much. But Missouri… “arbitrary Administration policies directly killed a St. Louis small business” is a powerful argument to use to hold certain Senators’ feet to the fire, and it gets even more powerful when it comes from an association of business groups rather than just one.

Stonemaier is joining a lawsuit against the tariff policies. Not sure if it’ll have any result, but it’s good that they’re making some noise, and having such a popular company involved should get more eyes on this.

One of my buds messaged me about that just now.

His accompanying snark:

FRG: welp can’t do anything, we’re letting everyone go

Stonemaier: get in the car, losers, we’re taking this to court

Sorry to thread necro, but I couldn’t get my password to work for weeks for some reason. Anyway, just wanted to let folks know that the guys at Bloons TD6 threw some love our way. They added an Absolute Zero avatar that folks can display in game. Not much, but never forget, never forgive.

First Tuesday emails just arrived. Bare on details, no concrete steps forward. Still in informational limbo.

I wasn’t expecting much. It’s on FRG to give the details. At minimum I still don’t get why the RPG is held up since that’s printed in the US as far I know. While Trevor was let go, it also shouldn’t prevent C&A from recording more episodes but my best guess is a concern there is they divulge something they aren’t supposed to

Yeah, you hit upon what I mentioned in my email to FRG: That it seemed weird the RPG and podcast were also put on pause since neither have anything to do with tariffs. I don’t like how weird all this is, and the longer FRG doesn’t give more details (or allow C, P&A to do so) the shadier it feels.

The RPG getting suspended makes sense to me—if it even is. Most of the work that’s holding it up is either done by contracted writers (who can’t be “let go” as they’re not employees) or by Christopher. Not a lot of it seems to be actively being worked on by other full-time employees.

But also, the RPG isn’t making money. RPGs have razor-thin margins at best, due to the amount of work that goes into them, the price of books, and the diminishing returns you get on successive expansions on the same product. How much more investment would be needed to actually put out a product at this point? And what would the sales be? It was one thing to have people working on it in addition to other things, as a passion project, but from a corporate overlord perspective I can see why it wouldn’t make sense to continue.

And the podcast… that’s a good question. Trevor certainly could be paid as a freelancer, as he used to be, and as he certainly still is for Ludological Alchemy. The Patreon brings in enough money to pay him. But it likely doesn’t make much profit, if any, beyond breaking even. FRG may simply not want to be bothered. Especially since the podcast is effectively an investment in future content that FRG may be thinking they don’t want to make.

It doesn’t to me for the RPG when the tariffs are the only item really cited by FRG and you’ve got Adam, Christopher, and Paul now being paid by them with no work as far as I can tell. At the least I would think that means they have time to do work there as it’s not impacted by these inane tariffs. Those three may not be thrilled given what has happened but at least continuing some work they want to get done seems worthwhile. Unless they got them helping their other board game companies under FRG.

Sonvar covered the RPG weirdness, so I’ll say for the podcast that FRG isn’t bothered to begin with… it doesn’t require anything from them to just get out of C&A’s way on letting them keep doing it.

Especially since, as Sonvar notes, they seem to be paying C,P&A to do absolutely nothing at this point. Why not let them keep working on the RPG and podcast?

There’s gotta be something FRG isn’t telling us here that has nothing to do with tariffs. I increasingly find it bizarre to immediately shutter an entire company “because of tariffs” when AFAIK only Compile 2 and Disparation are actually immediately affected by the tariffs, and even purely locally produced things like the RPG and podcast are also on pause.

Medium box 2 is also affected right know, AFAIK. And possibly the zine?

I don’t think Paul and Adam have anything to do for the RPG as things stand. Paul never did any creative work on it. Adam’s work is either done for the foreseeable future or dependent on other artists. I’m sure there’s some writing for Christopher to do, but other than the history book, the next few things in the pipeline were stuck waiting for other people. Maybe they could take over some of that work, but in many cases there are contracts involved.

Then it makes even less sense for FRG to pause it, because their own employees are not involved and the money is already spent, as it were.

Adding in things I saw on other social media, this entire thing smells to high heaven. If this was merely about tariffs, then why blindside the GTG employees in ways that are making them unhappy even beyond “I got laid off” disappointment, why cancel things that are purely locally produced, why cancel things currently being done by non-GTG people in the first place, why not have an already-prepared plan to announce, the list goes on.

I suspect we were right all along about FRG, that FRG bought GTG always planning to eventually scuttle it and snatch the IPs, this is all just a convenient excuse, and the GTG folks just got duped unfortunately. Otherwise why be so shady and secretive? Especially with seeing things from the GTG folks that indicate they’re irritated, not merely just disappointed. That doesn’t say “this was an amicable situation that everyone knew ahead of time needed to happen” to me.

Anyone know if FRG’s other imprints have shipments in transit, or were expecting one soon?

Apparently FRG released publishing rights on any Cheapass Games that were under GtG

On May 20, 2025 , we received notice from our erstwhile licensees at Flat River Group, nullifying the deal under which their subsidiary Greater Than Games were the sole publishers of the Cheapass Games brand.

Interesting. Spreading the news elsewhere, which I haven’t seen previously.

Compile IP has been sold to Synapses Games

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Also we have this posted on BGG which indicates FRG is giving up on hobby game distribution. They’re splitting off that part into Lumas Imports which is under an umbrella of ACD Distribution thst also owns Synapses Games.

This is their Facebook post on it that is summed up in the article in the post from BGG. Flat River Games

Beat me to it. I’d just seen the BGG news.

Pretty much confirms FRG is just shopping the GTG IPs around and getting out, which probably bodes very poorly for all the KS fulfillment.

Flat River Group is owned by a private equity firm. This fits the playbook that private equity firms usually follow of aquire, canniblize and shut down.

oh god dammit >:(

Synapses Games has bought Get Bit and Medium Synapses Games Acquires Medium and Get Bit! | BoardGameGeek News

This BGG post is also how Dave Chalker found out about Get Bit being bought by them.

Also this tidbit

As for whether Synapses might acquire other titles from GTG or GTG’s owner Flat River Group such as Spirit Island or Sentinels of the Multiverse, I’ll quote this bit from the press release: “Both titles perfectly align with Synapses Games’ editorial focus on easy-to-learn, quick-to-explain games that bring family and friends together.”
Following the Compile deal, I had asked Synapases about future GTG acquisitiions directly and received a non-response response, but the “easy-to-learn, quick-to-explain” qualifier would seem to rule out these titles.

Jesus.

When this stuff started up, I had a little faith that at least it seemed like Flat River was doing okay by the creators, making sure that they were able to regain their works, and that this suggested that they still had plans for Sentinels and weren’t just rapacious assholes.

Any lingering embers of that have been snuffed out by the news this week.

There are significant reasons a publisher might not want to pick up Sentinels at this point, be it the card game or the RPG - notably, the expectation that whoever buys them has a moral (albeit not legal) obligation to fulfill their crowdfunding projects. The CG is apparently ready to print so it’s a little more viable in that regard and might actually make a profit if produced someplace that isn’t buried in tariffs. The RPG books that are due are largely pipe dreams and likely to sell worse than the CG if ever finished as well, so highly unlikely that will be bought up on its own. Selling either separately would open up a rat’s nest of IP rights questions, so if they do go I’d expect it to be as a bundle.

There might even be other issues if a new owner wanted C&A to help work on the games and there’s some kind of non-compete clause in their contracts with GTG-as-FRG-subsidiary.

Last I checked, Spirit Island is still creator-owned, so FRG probably can’t sell it off, period.

I’m not entirely clear on how the rights for Spirit Island work right now. Eric has seemingly indicated he owns the IP but there could be some publishing rights he doesn’t have.

Based off comments from Michael Yang it seems he found out Compile was bought out by Synapses Games shortly before the press release. FRG also caught all of GtG off guard when they halted production and laid off folks. So at no point in this process have they been transparent with their own workers. Now, I’ll say this doesn’t feel any different than the company I’ve worked for where there have been layoffs with no indication to the main workers that it was coming.

Does anyone have info on this? It’s the first I’ve ever heard that FRG is owned by private equity, and that seems like something that would have come up earlier.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200109005120/en/Guardian-Capital-Partners-Invests-in-Flat-River-Group

FRG’s own press release says more plainly, “Guardian Capital Partners, a private equity firm based in Wayne, Pa., has partnered with the executive management team at Belding-based Flat River Group LLC to acquire the company.”

Thanks. Gutting to see that was just before they bought GTG.

Mere speculation, but they probably didn’t have the money to do so prior to the GCP partnership. Heck, negotiations over acquiring GTG may have spurred that partnership.

Official press release on buying Get Bit and Medium given by Synapses Games https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xy6jbgpsomm7xdx4qddp2/EN_Press-Release_GetBit-Medium.pdf?rlkey=swtnnwsk775cbv4r853pczx61&st=pv0dvvld&dl=0

As far as I can tell, it does not provide any further info.

We look forward to working with their designers to honor their vision

Kind of have to let them know about it, first…

Also, the descriptions of the two games read like someone who doesn’t really understand how they work. Not encouraging. Although I suppose it could be a language barrier?

I’m not sure. I don’t know that Chalker has bigger plans for Get Bit so it may not matter much for him beyond compensation for his work but for Yang I hope he is able to get the resources he needs to continue work on the game.

Hopefully, Dave’s going to do a cooperative Get Bit expansion based on this…

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Yeah, Michael Yang is in the weirdest spot. Christopher, Braithwhite, and Matt Krull put a ton of work into Compile, and making stuff without them will be rough at best. Plus I’m sure they’ve at least begun work on a third set, and that could get really murky regarding who owns what parts of that copyright.

Yeah, I had a conversation with Matt about it a while back. If I remember correctly, when FRG closed the door on them, they had the third set drafted (and about ready for playtesters to see it), high-level concepts for the next done, and additional plans for some cool accessories in the works.

I have no idea how all of that falls out, now. But hopefully we’ll find out.

I got this email today indicating they are expecting restocks of the base Spirit Island and expansion Branch and Claw by the end of the month. With this extra comment

The remainder of the Spirit Island restock is just around the corner. We truly appreciate your patience and support over the past few months, thank you!

https://mailchi.mp/greaterthangames/warehouse-sale-2609642?e=cf56affe1b

Prioritizing best sellers, right? Somewhat anecdotal, but I know the FLGS owner and the circle of other retailers he gossips with say Spirit Island was by far the best seller GTG ever had, Sentinels notwithstanding.

Less universally, the Sentinels card game sales were better under the previous edition, and definitive hasn’t actually done all that well. I know the amount of play I’ve seen locally fell right off a cliff with Definitive, where it used to be effortless to get a game going before then. Bloom’s off the rose around these parts, it seems - or people were just content with the old game and don’t want to invalidate all the stuff they own to buy into an edition that feels quite incomplete by comparison.

Is that something you have seen numbers around? Or based on anecdotal info? Because from what I understand talking to GTG folks, DE was doing great, but I didn’t hear any actual numbers.

And in my experience, anyone who tried DE preferred it to EE. Ran into a guy at a FLGS last week who reiterated that to me, in fact. Said he really didn’t want to like it, as he had everything from EE, but he just couldn’t argue with how much better it is.

And we have some good news: Looks like we’re going to see Compile Main 2 at Gen Con!

Purely anecdotal or based on local observations, as I already said. That noted, you’ll excuse me if I’m more trusting of a couple of dozen store owners scattered around the USA than a publisher (any publisher) saying how wonderful sales have been on a product. If you think they’re dubious about DE - well, I’m not even going to repeat what they think of the RPG. It’s just depressing. Every store I know of wants Spirit Island first and foremost.

DE is a better game, but a lot of its target audience made the exact opposite decision of the guy you ran into - they saw EE as good enough and too big an investment to give up on. With the apparent end to new expansions (we might see Disparation yet, maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on a fourth box) they may have made the right decision. DE’s growth has been prematurely stunted, however good the material that came out was.

I just saw that over on BGG myself. Nice to see Compile doing well at a new publisher, and well away from FRG. One can only hope whoever winds up with the Sentinels IP does as well with it.

It’s a little early to say Compile is doing “well” at the new publisher. So far all they’ve had to do is print it out. We’ll see for real when they have to develop a new expansion without GtG’s help.

Today ‘s Disparation update from Christopher

Last week was Gen Con, and it was weird to not be there showing off Sentinels stuff. However, Flat River Group has indicated that we are finally moving forward, and that we hope to have an official announcement on that front later this month. Here’s hoping for good news!
I’ll continue to keep you informed each month with any updates I receive, and hopefully I’ll have cause to post an update between now and the first Tuesday of next month.
-Christopher

I can’t help but note that the RPG Kickstarter update has no such statement about “moving forward, more later this month” so this is strictly good(?) news for the card game, not the RPG with its far more overdue fulfillment issues. As Larry Niven put it, TANJ.

I think the difference is Disparation is ready to go and the RPG still needs work. The post is public so I’ll post it too since it’s a bit different.

Gen Con has wrapped up, marking the first time in 15 years (outside of the pandemic) without a notable Sentinels presence at the show. Normally, I’d be showing off photos from events, podcast recordings, games, and even the SCRPG Gen Con One-Shot, but this year has been… different.
Regarding making and releasing content for the Sentinel Comics RPG: there’s still no new information to share. There are still several SCRPG products that I’d like to be working on, but everything has been stopped, and I don’t know what the next steps are at this point.
I know this is frustrating. I’ll continue to update you each month with any new information I can, as soon as I have it. I heard from many people at Gen Con that the Sentinel Comics RPG is still being played and enjoyed, and I love to hear that. Here’s hoping for a future in which we can once again support the game and release more content for it!
-Christopher

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gtgames/sentinel-comics-the-roleplaying-game/posts/4451536

I was at Gencon, I ran into someone who was cosplaying Baron Blade. And he told me that he had run into Christopher. Apparently, Christopher was running around like crazy trying to some kind of deal made, was optimistic about it, but wouldn’t talk about it. It was hard for me to know if I should trust this random stranger, but the latest Disperation update seems to line up with it.

FRG has made it clear they want out of the board game space so Christopher trying to line something up at Gencon is plausible. Whatever the news I hope it leads to stability for GtG again.

On the other hand, Christopher is always trying to make deals at GenCon. He’s talking to everyone, all the time. So this isn’t necessarily saying much.

This screenshot was taken by @psychedelicchurro on a Compile discord from a FRG employee.

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The same person then commented this on RoD discord

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And they are legit, in case anyone is curious. This is the same person who responded to a couple of recent support requests I sent directly to FRG via their site.

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No update on what plans are for FRG with GtG but per the lastest backerkit update they are at least able to proceed with printing the Disparation expansion for Definitive Edition.

The RPG fulfillment is still in limbo though. Not going to bother linking to the update, it’s nothing but a check-in.

Oh great, the spambot invasion has arrived

They’ve been here for years. Just keep flagging them when you see them and getting the accounts killed.

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I also received an email on this too.
https://mailchi.mp/greaterthangames/webstore-news-2609685?e=cf56affe1b

This is very exciting news. I disdained the DE for years, but with my old physical copy destroyed, and no idea how long before Handelabra makes the digital version of even the core set a reality, I am definitely tempted to drop $150 that I can’t really afford (possibly more, since I’m only estimating the combined cost of tax, shipping, and buying a Visa gift card with their 10% overcharge, ballparking this at $40 when it could easily come to double that depending on just how borked the shipping situation is).

Sadly, it will be Saturday before I even might be in a position to make this happen, and probably not then, since rent and my therapy bill are due this week. I hold out little hope that the supply will remain by the next paycheck I get after that.

That was Backerkit update three months ago. Hoping for some more detail in a week or so as we enter the last quarter of 2025. Was $25 for the base level backing for one copy (Steam and mobile). Can’t find anything to pre-order at this point. But definitely sooner rather than later as they’ve shared some animation progress.

Christopher sent out a BackerKit update today. Disparation is actually starting printing for fulfillment in spring of 2026. Yay!

In speculative tea-leaf reading, I noticed that in this update and last month’s update, Christopher referred to FRG as if it was separate from him (“they say…” “they show…” rather than “we” or similar).

He did say at one point that he was no longer employed by them, right?

No. Christopher, Adam, and Paul are all still FRG employees (at the time of this post).

However, from this and the post he made about the RPG, it’s pretty clear he has no part in or insight into anything they’re doing. He can’t even access the RPG materials that were works in progress—which, I infer, means he’s not even allowed to talk to the freelancers who were working on a lot of it. So they might be signing his checks, but calling him “employed” by them might be a functional misstatement.

Specifically, the RPG update reads as follows:

Hey, folks;

I don’t have new dates or approvals to share this month. I’d love to be able to send you anything at all, but I don’t have access to any materials now, so I have nothing to show, though I’m still hopeful about the future and ready to spin up work whenever I’m able. This is not much of an update, but it’s the honest one. When anything moves, I’ll let you know. Would love to deliver a plan and schedule instead of vague reassurance.

-Christopher

Probably safe to assume that the zine spinoff game is in the same straits, even though it wasn’t originally part of the KS goals.

AFAIK, they’re not only all GTG employees (under FRG, of course), they’re also all of the GTG employees. Everyone else was let go when the subsidiary company was shuttered.

Hopefully if Disparation sells like hotcakes, things may develop more positively. They couldn’t afford to keep running this giant operation with lots of products under development constantly; if they’re able to dig themselves out of the hole and even make back some profit, then things may start to look up again.

I hope FRG just figures out whether they are or aren’t going to move on from GtG. They’ve basically have had GtG in a limbo since April and haven’t really been clear on their plans. Before it was announced Disparation was finally going to be printed and distributed, they sold off Compile and a few other items with a message saying they wanted out of the Board Game industry. In August, Christopher seemed to think he might have more news about GtG to share that month but never did.

The last two months of updates were written in a way that strongly suggests to me Christopher is under company limitations on what exactly he can share in public.

FRG owned a few other gaming imprints. Do we know what happened to those? Are they pulling back from everything tabletop, or just GTG?

It certainly looks like everything tabletop.

Flat River games sold Synapses Games and Luma Imports to ACD Distribution (and then sold Compile, Get Bit, and Medium to Synapse Games), which included having three employees that I think they hired as part of acquiring Luma leave to reform it under ACD. They also returned Cheapass Games to Crab Fragment Labs, so that’s out.

With those groups gone, I’m pretty sure that Greater Than Games is their only tabletop subsidiary. I went to see if there were any games under distribution that weren’t covered by the sales aside from Sentinels and Spirit Island, but the Greater than Games store page is still advertising Synapse and Cheapass games (presumably they have deal to sell off warehouse stock?) so the following information might be wrong.

In addition to GtG, Synapse, and Cheapass, the GtG webstore seems to have games from a variety of European publishers. I think those publishers are all under the Luma license, but I’m not actually sure. They’ve also got a handful of games from Darrington Press, but not their newer games, and a handful of distribution of American miniature games, which I have no idea if they’re still doing or not.

I believe FRG is just using the GTG online store front to unload things they want to get out from under (e.g., things they have in the warehouse but haven’t been able to get distributed to anyone for one reason or another), as it’s the only tool available to them to do so.

If FRG had any intention of possibly staying in the tabletop game business, they wouldn’t have sold off Compile. It’s wildly successful—not as successful as Spirit Island, yet, but moreso than Sentinels. I’m sure them offloading Sentinels and Spirit Island is a question of when rather than whether.

All you big spenders on the Patreon should just pool your savings accounts and go to FRG and say “here’s two million in cash, sell us all the Sentinels IP”. They might take it.

I’m not sure FRG has control of the Spirit Island IP. Thought that was still creator-owned, although I might have misunderstood.

Could be that FRG owns the publishing and/or distribution rights.

“IP” is not one all-encompassing thing. FRG owns the trademark “Spirit Island” in a board game context. It is possible that they do not own the copyright to the game design. I believe the copyright to the artwork is left with the artists (so they can sell prints, etc). And then there’s distribution rights.

Okay guys, maybe I’m dumb and this is nothing, it could just be a fan edit that happened a year ago and it’s meaningless and everybody knows about it…or I may have just stumbled on the answer to all this radio silence.

So this Marvel United game has apparently existed since last year, and the Fandom wiki about it has Baron Blade in it. Maybe FRG signed a deal with CMON, and/or even with Marvel Disney, to create Sentinels United? I have my doubts that the companies would refuse to say an official word about it, yet allow fans to edit a wiki with details, so I’m probably just being a moron…but at the very least it’s a strange coincidence that I found this while we’re all in limbo here.

It’s just a fan-made thing. I stumbled on it too a bit ago. At the very bottom of the page you link to is a link to this page:

Which clearly states that it’s only “A homebrew design.”

Oh well. It was nice to have hope for a moment.

Curiously, without any links to follow, that page claims to have 32 locations, which is almost a half dozen more than actually exist in all of Sentinels. I’m assuming they included a couple from DE Rook City and even Disparation, but even then, they must have some seriously deep cuts to exceed the current list of environment decks. I wonder if they chose any of the locations I’ve long thought needed a deck, such as the Citadel of the Sun, or The Sentinels’ Southwest.

Also odd is that they have four variant heroes, two of which are different Legacies, one is a wildly different Haka, and one is just Guise when he feels festive.

That is… a weird Baron Blade writeup. Lithuanian instead of Mordengradian, a Soviet super-scientist instead of the man who overthrew the Soviets and conquered his country, an orbital shrink ray… I wonder where they found it.

edit Oh, wait, I found it! Half of the writeup is about Baron Blade’s father, the golden age villain Fyodor Ramonat.

The locations are in the google drive link on that site.

It’s nothing that fancy - locations are much less elaborate in Marvel United, and you play six of them in a single game, so the makers of the fan expansion broke a bunch of environments into multiple smaller locations.

Mordengrad is a city state within Lithuania, close to the Latvian border, that’s established as canon somewhere.

Or, was, before Ivan made it independent.

I mean “within” Lithuania to mean “surrounded by”, not “a part of”.

Some words of hope from Adam

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Just curious if there’s some established code of meaning to the different colored hearts. Why more purple than green on one post but vice versa on the other.

It’s just discord reaction emojis and once you have one others can click an existing one to add another. So it’s not anything the GtG crew put on there so it’s not something to read much into.

Yeah, I always post green out of personal preference, and others post other colors. Some folks just click on whichever is already there.

Some people ascribe meanings to them, apparently, but I think it’s like flowers—people largely just choose whatever they think looks good.

Disparation got a final update. Can’t say this line thrills me a lot since it implies they plan on still holding onto the IP until the end of this year at least.

If you missed your chance to pick up Disparation, don’t worry, this isn’t the end. We are currently discussing a potential reprint in Q4, along with a stronger focus on international distribution when the next restock arrives. There will be more opportunities to experience Disparation in the future.

I will note they said “discussing a potential reprint in Q4” (emphasis mine), not “discussing reprinting it in Q4”.

Maybe someone else will be reprinting it? I can hope…

Sorry to nitpick, but they are currently discussing a potential reprint in q4.

Yeah, I figure that means they’re currently having discussions with someone to take ownership of the IP and allow them to reprint it, and the other party can’t get that done until Q4…

Meanwhile, the RPG kickstarter hasn’t had even a token update since Christopher’s last “no news” post in early December 2025. Although I do see there’s a new backer comment after a two month lull in the complaints, which I’ll quote here:

Anyone from FRG paying attention to this campaign at all?

Any bets on that getting a response?

That comment was from me and honestly I’m not expecting a response as I doubt anyone there even still realizes it exists.

Oh, I think they know it exists — and are purposefully not doing anything with it. They know they can’t complete those objectives without the people and there’s no positive way to spin the situation. I believe they’ve taken the money and completely backed away from it.

Personally, I feel like that makes it unlikely we’ll ever see those products.

I figured it was someone from this forum.

If we ever do, it will almost certainly be because someone unconnected to FRG does it as a goodwill gesture toward fans. Which, to be fair, has happened before. I backed one project that went through four different companies before fulfillment completed, and at least three of them never saw a dime off it AFAIK.

Wow. I imagine there were a lot of people complaining about paying for a thing multiple times.

If FRG gives up the IP and someone else is able to run with it, I hope they can find a way to fund these different books — but I hope they do them each individually.

The Rat Queens board game Kickstarter is going through this right now. They recently announced they’re going to have to do another project to raise the funds to make the game, as all the funds from the previous project were lost with the original company’s dissolution.

That wasn’t quite what happened. The guy/small business that created the original project overpromised on stretch goals, couldn’t handle them all, and wound up having a heart attacke that closed his business and saw him leave gaming altogether. A friend of his with a similar business agreed to step in and try to fulfill the project (in exchange for the rights to the figures and molds that had been done, which he hoped to sell at retail after the KS was finished. That led to partial fulfillment, but he overreached as well and wound having to admit he’d never finish everything, so another guy came along, picked up the rights, and did his best to continue fulfillment. That was the stage where i got everything I’d backed for, plus another pledge that someone sold me, plus some extras that I agreed to pay for to help Guy #3 pay postage on my stuff and some other pledges (by that point I figured we’d never see retail sales, so I wanted everything I’d ever need while I could get it). I only got everything because I was a merciless pest about it to three different people, and because i was willing to throw some actual outside-of-KS-funds money to speed the process up. I think there may be a fourth business involved now but I haven’t really paid attention. Last I was involved about 2/3rds of the backers had their stuff, and AFAIK none of them paid multiple times for their pledges - but I know a few did what i did and agreed to order some extra figs at retail to keep the engine sputtering along.

Convoluted as it sounds, it actually wasn’t the worst kickfailure I’ve been involved with, but it was the last of them. No more crowdfunding for me, no matter what.

Still haven’t painted all of the minis, but the ones I have finished are pretty neat, so there’s that, anyway.

That’s actually a really good story, to be honest.

I understand being done with crowdfunding. It’s infuriating how things can go, sometimes. I’ve been trying hard to limit myself. I actually have quite a few that are years old, at this point, but are still updating / being worked on. (I … made some poor choices during the early pandemic times… )

Given the number of actual, truly malicious kickscammers out there (many of them serial fraudsters with multiple fake projects they owe for) it’s actually kind of nice to see how often someone with zero responsibility to do so will step up and try to finish fulfillment when a creator blows it for one reason or another. Sometimes they’re backers themselves who are determined to get their stuff or die trying, sometime they’re folks in the same industry/hobby niche who can afford to make things better and maybe hope to take over the ready-made audience for future sales someday, and sometimes they just feel bad for the backers and the creator and enjoy playing fulfillment angel for both of them.

Sadly, I think you have to get really lucky for something like that to happen. Usually a kickfail is just a kickfail and ends badly for most or all of the people who backed.

FYI: Jaye Handel of Handelabra games posted this on Facebook. (Sonvar posted these screenshots on the Letters Page Discord.)

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…good news? In this economy thread?

Good news if it leads to the KS backers getting their missing books. Hopefully Flat River didn’t profit much from the ruination of GTG.