Catan, Ticket to Ride and Pandemic publisher Asmodee has launched a fiction division to turn its board games into books

The board game behemoth behind KeyForge, Dead of Winter, Catan, Pandemic, Arkham Horror and more is moving into the realm of the written word.

Asmodee – which owns countless studios from Fantasy Flight and Days of Wonder to Z-Man and Plaid Hat – has opened a new fiction imprint called Aconyte which will be dedicated to creating paperbacks and ebooks based on its ‘best’ tabletop universes.

Aconyte is part of Asmodee’s Entertainment division, which was launched early last year in an effort to work on movie, TV show and comic book spin-offs of games such as Legend of the Five Rings and Twilight Imperium.

Asmodee has previously put out novels set in the worlds of franchises including Arkham Horror – itself inspired by the stories of H.P. Lovecraft – and Android, the setting for now defunct living card game Android: Netrunner, among other titles.

As well as fiction based directly on its own games, Asmodee says that Aconute will also look at publishing third-party tie-ins, with the first releases due to arrive next summer.

Heading up Aconyte is Marc Gascoigne, who has previously designed RPGs such as the Judge Dredd Roleplaying Game and sourcebooks for Shadowrun, and worked on several Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, as well as White Dwarf and a number of Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer novels for Games Workshop’s Black Library.