South of Nancy, a factory will launch the production of board games in a few months. The project is led by French publishers.
The pawn on the starting square, “Game in France” starts the game. In Lorraine, a consortium of companies is preparing to launch within a few months the manufacture of thousands of board game boxes in a new factory near Nancy. A large majority of board games sold in France are today manufactured in Germany, Poland and China: while certain companies produce cards or boxes on French soil, “no factory is capable of producing a game from A to Z”, says Timothée Leroy, co-president of the publisher and distributor Blue Orange.
Blue Orange teamed up with the Occitan publisher and designer Abeilles Éditions – a founding team complemented by the regional press group Ebra, a subsidiary of Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale – to put the factory project on track, as had been previously reported L'Est republican and France Bleu Sud Lorraine.
After two years of development, this project materialized with the creation of the company Game in France in July 2024. “We want to start production in September or October 2025”, hopes Timothée Leroy, specifying that the total amount of the The investment represents 5.5 million euros, for the start-up of the factory alone.
“Several million boxes”
Fundraising should make it possible to collect 1.5 million euros, two thirds of which are already secured at the moment. “We are on track to finalize the fundraising in March 2025, and we will be able to purchase the machines at that time,” he emphasizes. An industrial building has been rented in the municipality of Houdemont, south of Nancy, where a dozen full-time equivalent jobs will be created. For its first cautious steps, the factory set itself the objective of achieving an annual production of a few hundred thousand boxes.
Ultimately, “we hope to quickly reach several million boxes,” says Timothée Leroy.
The French are fond of board games. Sales continue to climb from one year to the next, and the health crisis has further invigorated the French craze. Driven by hundreds of new products presented each year, the sector recorded a turnover of 550 million euros in France in 2023, up 7% compared to 2019, according to data from the NPD Epos panel for the Cannes International Games Festival. With 27 million boxes sold in 2023, France is the second largest European market for board games, behind Germany.
Standardization strategy
In a country which has several global heavyweights, including the giant Asmodée, and dozens of independent publishers, the promise of “made in France” is attractive. “Several French publishers are interested” in entrusting their games to the future Lorraine factory, confirms Timothée Leroy. “Secondly, we will look for other European publishers,” he adds. The Houdemont site will be dedicated to the manufacturing of boxes, cards and cardboard parts, and will subcontract the minority manufacturing of parts made from other materials, such as wood or plastic.
But if they want to definitively convince publishers, “we will have to manage not to be too expensive,” he notes. To achieve this, the factory is relying on a standardization strategy, a line already followed by other promoters of 'made in France' to control production costs, particularly in the textile industry. Standard box formats, the most used for board games, will be offered to publishers. “This will allow us to move to large volumes,” he assures, and thus “to offer attractive prices for products made in France.”
Jérémy Bruno Journalist BFMTV
