Board game company Fantasy Flight Games opens video game studio

The long-running board game company Fantasy Flight Games has opened a new studio to focus on developing games of a more digital nature. 

The new studio, Fantasy Flight Interactive, is set to be headed up by former Human Head CEO Tim Gerritsen and will take on the tasks of both adapting the board game publisher’s existing games as video games and creating entirely new games based on Fantasy Flight’s existing properties.

While Fantasy Flight Games will continue to dabble in board games with a digital element, the studio notes that its new interactive branch will focus on purely digital projects for Steam and potentially other platforms down the line. 

The crossover between video game and board game design is one of the topics covered in a Gamasutra interview with Fantasy Flight Games earlier this year. During that live-streamed chat, three members of the X-Wing Miniatures development team shared their experience crafting the mechanics for the tabletop game and talked about how those same principles can apply to video game development. 

That same outlook is what Fantasy Flight explains it is bringing to its interactive branch, for both board game-inspired and original game projects based on its catalog of existing brands.

“We’re incredibly excited to be bringing Fantasy Flight Games’ best game properties to life as amazing video game experiences,” said Gerritsen in a press release. “Fantasy Flight Interactive is made up of developers who love both tabletop games and video games and we are striving to create games that capture the best aspects of both media to entertain our fans.”