BGA Game licenses

What is a "licence"

Almost all games on Board Game Arena platform are adaptations of existing commercial "real" board games. To propose an adaption of one of this board game on a website, the right owners must grant a licence/authorization to this website.

Are all games on BGA licenced by their respective right owners?

Yes.

What if I start developing a game that is not on the "Available licences"?

We allow developers to start any project on the Studio. But when your project is going to be live on BGA, it will be rejected during the review process.

Exception: games on the public domain are of course not concerned.

Wow, I WANT to develop a game on this list!

Cool :)

But before creating a new project please takes some seconds to check if someone is not already developing this game. If this is the case, maybe you can propose to join the project?

Check the list of current projects

What has to be done to add a game on this list?

The right owners has to give an licence/authorization to BGA.

Publishers do not have to pay anything to BGA for this, they just have to give their "go". Most of the time, publishers wants to have a formal agreement and we signed a contract.

Important: you CAN'T take the initiative to ask a licence authorization on behalf of BGA, because the authorization has to be granted to BGA (read more below).

Why all best-sellers games I love are not on that list?

As you can imagine, the more popular a game is, the most difficult it is to have an agreement to host this game on BGA.

So if you think about a particular very popular game that is not on this list, the reason for this rather be "we asked and this was impossible" than "we did'nt think of this".

We are pretty lucky to have a very nice platform that convince the most prestigious publishers to host their games here, but of course we can't convince -everyone-.

I want my prototype/unpublished game on BGA

This is possible, BUT most of the time, we consider this is a bad idea for the following reasons:

• if your game has not been published yet, there is certainly a good reason - most of the time there is still some more work to do on the game itself. Publishing a game on BGA that is not 100% finalized won't help you to finalize it.
• as a rule of thumb, popular board games on BGA are games that are popular in the real world. As a consequence prototypes don't have a big audience on BGA.
• we also discourage you to develop your own game: we build better games adaptation with a designer that focus on the gameplay and a developer that focus on the realization.

So basically you can develop your prototype/unpublished game on BGA, but we encourage you to do it only if you are in one/several of the situation below:

• the game is going to be published in the near future.
• the game design process is really 100% done: the game is ready to be published in its current shape (ex: self-publishing game, game in a crowdfunding process...).
• you want to test a game with a big number of players to finalize some minor things ("balance").

What if I really want to develop a particular game that is NOT on the list below?

This is the most asked question, to please follow the instructions:

0:

In any case: please, do not contact publishers without asking us before. Please imagine you are a game publisher who just published a popular game: what would you do if you received 40 emails from 40 developers speaking about "BGA platform" and wanting to build an adaptation on it?

Continue to 1.

1:

At first, you should determine who is the owner of the electronic rights of a game. Most of the time, this is the original publisher of the game. The original publisher is not always easy to find, because in general board games are translated&published in each countries by a local publisher.

To find the original publisher:

• check in which country the game has been published first (ex: If it's in Poland, the original publisher is probably polish).
• check the copyright notice at the end of the rules, where the original publisher is mentioned almost all the time.
• very often, if two publishers are mentioned on a gamebox, the well-known publisher is the publisher from your country and the other one is the original publisher.

Particular case: if the game is themed with a prestigious licence (Star Wars, Lord of the Ring, some TV show, some well known novel...), you can stop here immediately: contracts between game publishers and prestigious licences owners are very restrictive, and there is 99% chance that an online adaptation on BGA is not welcome.

Continue to 2

2:

Read the publisher list from the "available licence" page to check if BGA already work with this publisher.

If YES, continue to 3. If NO, continue to 4.

However, if the publisher is listed as "not working with BGA", you can stop here immediately. It happens sometimes that some publishers are not convinced by online boardgaming and this is their right to think this. BGA team regularly meet new publishers during board games events to show them the platform, so we're working on this but -again- we cannot convince everyone.

3:

Is there already a game licenced by this publisher that has to be developed?

If YES: as a rule of thumb, we do not ask more than one game to a publisher at a time. When we ask a licence for a game, a publisher expect that the game will be developed and published online. So we develop and publish a game before asking for another. If you really want to develop a game from this particular publisher, the best option for you is to help to develop the game that is currently licenced and then to ask us to request the game you'd like to develop.

If NO: just ask us which game you want to develop and we would be happy to ask the publisher the authorization!

4:

We never worked with this publisher before.

If you have already developed a game on BGA, we would be happy to ask the publisher the authorization :)

If this is your first game on BGA, we probably advise you to start with a game already on the list. Why? Because unfortunately, some developers are asking us to request a licence, and don't finish the development afterwards. When we ask for a licence, we are more comfortable if you already show that you are able to realize an adaptation.

Particular case: if you already know the publisher PERSONALLY, or have some contact there, please tell us so we can help you to setup a contract to host a game adaptation on BGA.