Catch Up Games

Catch Up Games is a French board-game publisher based in Lyon, established in 2014. Its catalogue is notable for combining accessible rules with mechanisms that reward repeated play, and for working with designers and illustrators whose games have distinctive identities rather than following a single house genre.

One of the company’s early successes was Paper Tales, designed by Masato Uesugi and illustrated by Christine Alcouffe. This card-driven drafting game asks players to build a kingdom across four rounds while managing an aging system: units remain powerful only for a limited time, making the passage of generations an important part of each decision. The game’s concise format and expansion, Beyond the Gates, helped establish Catch Up Games internationally.

Catch Up also published Naga Raja, designed by Bruno Cathala and Théo Rivière, in which two players explore an Indian temple by laying domino-like tiles, collecting relics, and competing through tactical card play. The publisher later released Sobek: 2 Players, another Bruno Cathala design, co-created with Sébastien Dujardin. Its central system combines market manipulation, set collection, corruption management, and competitive timing within a compact two-player contest inspired by ancient Egypt.

The Loop, designed by Maxime Tardif, represents a different side of the catalogue. Released in 2020, it is a cooperative game about agents fighting Doctor Foo, a villain whose time machine creates dangerous temporal duplicates. Players move between eras, coordinate special abilities, and prevent cascading events from overwhelming the board. The game’s variable characters, modules, and scenarios give it a campaign-like sense of discovery without requiring a legacy structure.

Catch Up Games has also published Daimyo: The Empire’s Rebirth, a strategic game by Romain Macé and Théo Rivière set in a post-apocalyptic Japan, where players lead clans competing to rebuild influence through territories, resources, and alliances. Fédération, designed by Isra C. and Néstor Romeral Andrés, focuses on political maneuvering and resource allocation among space-faring factions. Orichalcum, by Bruno Cathala and Johannes Goupy, uses tile placement, exploration, and creature hunting in a mythic setting built around the fictional metal that gives the game its name.

Across these releases, Catch Up Games has developed a recognizable editorial profile: carefully produced strategy games, often approachable in presentation but dense in decisions, with strong thematic framing and substantial replay value. Its work spans drafting, cooperation, two-player competition, area control, and engine building while remaining closely associated with inventive, relatively compact tabletop designs.