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| Type | Aktiengesellschaft |
|---|---|
| Industry | Puzzle, toy |
| Founded | May 7, 1883 |
| Headquarters | |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Owner | Maier family, private company |
Ravensburger AG is a German game and toy company, publishing house and market leader in the European jigsaw puzzle market.
The company was founded by Otto Robert Maier in Ravensburg, a town in Upper Swabia in southern Germany. He began publishing in 1883 with his first author contract. He started publishing instruction folders for craftsmen and architects, which soon acquired him a solid financial basis. His first board game appeared in 1884, named Journey Around the World.
At the turn of the 20th century, his product line broadened to include picture books, books, children’s activity books, art instruction manuals, non-fiction books, and reference books as well as children’s games, Happy Families, and activity kits. In 1900, the Ravensburger blue triangle trademark was registered with the Imperial patent office. As of 1912, many board and activity games had an export version that was distributed to Western Europe, the countries of the Danube Monarchy as well as Russia.
Before the First World War, Ravensburger had around 800 products. The publishing house was damaged during the Second World War and continued to produce games in the years of the reconstruction. The company focused on children's games and books and specialized books for art, architecture, and hobbies, and from 1962 grew strongly. The company started to produce jigsaw puzzle games in 1964, and in the same year opened subsidiaries in Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In 1977, the company split into a book publishing arm and a game publishing arm.
Today there are approximately 1800 available books and 850 games as well as puzzles, hobby products, and CD-ROM titles at Ravensburger and its subsidiaries, which include Alea for "hobby and ardent game players" and F.X. Schmid for games, playing cards and children's books. Ravensburger products are exported to more than fifty countries.
Under the label F.X. Schmid, Ravensburger produces one of the only two packs of true Tarock cards in Germany: a 54-card pack of the Bourgeois Tarot pattern with genre scenes and used for playing the game of Cego, popular in the Black Forest region.
In September 2010, Ravensburger broke the world record for the largest jigsaw puzzle, with one designed by late pop artist Keith Haring titled "Keith Haring: Double Retrospect". [1] Built from 32,256 pieces, it measured 17' × 6' (5.18 m x 1.82 m) and came with a hand truck for transportation. [2] Ravensburger has since released larger puzzles, with their largest being "Memorable Disney Moments" and "Making Mickey Magic" having 40,320 pieces each, however they have also since lost the world record to a 51,300 piece puzzle released by Kodak. [3]
Swedish toy train company BRIO was acquired by the Ravensburger Group on 8 January 2015. [4] In 2017, Ravensburger acquired American game company Wonder Forge. [5]
The company's North American division, Ravensburger NA, is based in Seattle, Washington and releases approximately 25 games per year, the most successfully of which so far is Villainous, based on various Disney properties. [6] Ravensbuger NA sold about 3 million copies of games in 2018. [6]
Ravensburger Interactive Media GmbH was a video game and software subsidiary of Ravensburger which published and distributed various games in Germany. The company had two brands; Ravensburger Interactive, which published family-friendly games and educational software, and Fishtank Interactive, which published games for mature players.
In May 2002, Ravensburger Interactive was sold with Fishtank Interactive to JoWooD Productions. [7]
Ravensburger Film + TV GmbH is a former motion picture and television subsidiary of Ravensburger.
In late 1998, Ravensburger split off Ravensburger Film + TV as a separately operated company and was renamed to RTV Family Entertainment AG. [8] Ravensburger remained a shareholder in RTV, holding 90% of its shares, and continued to license the "Ravensburger" brand. The company launched a Ravensburger TV block on Super RTL in June 2001. [9]
In 2005, Ravensburger sold all their shares in the business, and in mid-2006, the company rebranded as Your Family Entertainment AG. [10]
Games sold under the "Ravensburger" imprint:
Games sold under the "Alea" label:
Games sold under the F.X. Schmid label:
Games sold under the "Ravensburger Digital" label:
Western Publishing, also known as Western Printing and Lithographing Company, was a Racine, Wisconsin, firm responsible for publishing the Little Golden Books. Its Golden Books Family Entertainment division also produced children's books and family-related entertainment products. The company had editorial offices in New York City and Los Angeles, California. Western Publishing became Golden Books Family Entertainment in 1996. As of 2013, Little Golden Books remains as an imprint of Penguin Random House.
A puzzle is a game, problem, or toy that tests a person's ingenuity or knowledge. In a puzzle, the solver is expected to put pieces together in a logical way, in order to arrive at the correct or fun solution of the puzzle. There are different genres of puzzles, such as crossword puzzles, word-search puzzles, number puzzles, relational puzzles, and logic puzzles. The academic study of puzzles is called enigmatology.
Parker Brothers was an American toy and game manufacturer which in 1991 became a brand of Hasbro. More than 1,800 games were published under the Parker Brothers name since 1883. Among its products were Monopoly, Clue, Sorry!, Risk, Trivial Pursuit, Ouija, Aggravation, Bop It, Scrabble, and Probe. The trade name became defunct with former products being marketed under the "Hasbro Gaming" label with the logo shown on Monopoly games.
Bandai Co., Ltd. is a Japanese multinational toy manufacturer and distributor headquartered in Taitō, Tokyo. Its international branches, Bandai Namco Toys & Collectables America and Bandai UK, are respectively headquartered in Irvine, California and Richmond, London. Bandai is a subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings and is the parent company's core toy production division. From 1981 until 2001, Bandai produced video game consoles.
Brio is a wooden toy company founded in Sweden. The company was founded in the small town of Boalt, Scania, Götaland in 1884 by basket maker Ivar Bengtsson. For a long time the company was based in Osby, Scania, in southern Sweden. In 1908 Ivar's three sons took the company over and gave it the name "BRIO", which is an acronym for: BRöderna Ivarsson (in) Osby. In 2006 BRIO moved its headquarters to Malmö, Scania. It is best known for its wooden toy trains, sold in Europe since 1958.
Edel SE & Co. KGaA is a German independent media company based in Hamburg. As a label and publishing group, it also operates marketing and sales for artists and smaller music labels. The repertoire of the Edel labels includes dance, rock and pop music to classical music and a children's catalogue. In addition to the development and marketing of music, the group also deals with the production, logistics and distribution of CDs, DVDs, vinyls, and books at the production site of the subsidiary optimal media GmbH in Röbel/Müritz as well as with services in the online and book business.
Avalon Interactive Group, Ltd. was a British video game distributor based within Europe that formerly traded as the video game publishing and distributing division of British conglomerate the Virgin Group.
Disney Interactive Studios, Inc. was an American video game developer and publisher owned by The Walt Disney Company through Disney Interactive. Prior to its closure in 2016, it developed and distributed multi-platform video games and interactive entertainment worldwide.
BL Publishing was a division of Games Workshop, and was split into three sections:
The Adventure Company was a Canadian video game developer and a former publishing division of DreamCatcher Interactive. It was sold to THQ Nordic GmbH in 2011 following DreamCatcher's parent assets being sold after entering administration.
For over a century until 1996, F.X. Schmid was an important German manufacturer of playing cards, board games and puzzles. It was considered one of the major European manufacturers. In 1995, its turnover was 67 million DM and there were around 250 employees.
Alan R. Moon is an author of board games, born in Southampton, England. He is generally considered to be one of the foremost designers of German-style board games. Many of his games can be seen as board game variations on the travelling salesman problem.
JoWooD Entertainment AG was an Austrian video game publisher that was founded in 1995. JoWooD went into administration in 2011 and all assets were purchased by Nordic Games.
Fishtank Interactive was a German publishing label and was a division of Ravensburger Spieleverlag's Ravensburger Interactive. It was founded in 2000 to try to expand the horizons of Ravensburger Spieleverlag by publishing more mature games than the rest of the mostly pre-school oriented games of the company, without sullying its reputation. Its releases were usually action games, or real-time strategies, and were known for low production values highlighted by the lack of important features like multi-player playability. The division alongside its parent were sold in May 2002 to JoWooD Productions.
ASS Altenburger is since 2003 the trademark of the German playing card manufacturer Spielkartenfabrik Altenburg, based in the town of Altenburg. The firm is owned by Cartamundi, of Turnhout, Belgium. ASS claims to be the market leader in Germany for playing cards. Every year almost 40 million packs of cards of many different types are manufactured in Altenburg.
The tabletop game industry is the economic sector involved in the development, marketing, and monetization of games that fall within the scope of tabletop games, which includes dice and card games. According to Statista, the tabletop game industry had an estimated market of approximately 7.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2017 and is expected to increase by 4.8 billion U.S. dollars within the next 6 years.
Trefl S.A. is a Sopot, Poland-based family-owned jigsaw puzzle, board game and toy manufacturing and distributing company, Poland's largest and one of the leading European jigsaw puzzle companies. The Trefl group includes also Studio Trefl, which produces animated television series, Wydawnictwo Trefl, which publishes children's books, and Baltic Media Group, a media company which produces commercial and advertisement videos. The sporting division of Trefl includes Trefl Sopot and Trefl Gdańsk, professional men's, respectively, basketball and volleyball teams. Trefl widely licences popular brands such as Disney characters, Hasbro and Mattel, to feature them on their products.
Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag (NSV) is a German playing card manufacturer and board game publisher based in Nuremberg. It was founded in 1989 after outsourcing from the publishing house of F.X. Schmid and builds on the "Heinrich Schwarz Playing Card Factory, Nuremberg" founded in 1948. The company produces playing cards and dice games s and, especially in recent years, increasingly proprietary games from various game authors.
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