Amigo (game publisher)

AMIGO Spiel + Freizeit GmbH
legal form	GmbH
founding	1980
Seat	Dietzenbach , Germany
management	Uwe Pauli, managing director
Number of employees	approx. 50
sales	23 million euros (2007) Portions of this article appear since 2007 is out of date to be . ; Please help to research and insert the missing information .
Branch	Toys
Website	www.amigo-spiele.de

The AMIGO Spiel + Freizeit GmbH is a game company with headquarters in Dietzenbach in Hesse Offenbach district in Germany .

history

Beginnings

AMIGO was founded in 1980 by Rudolf Jansen together with Günther Voigt in Rödermark, whereby the name is derived from the Hotel Amigo in Brussels , where the decision was made to found the publishing house. From the very beginning, the company mainly published small card games and the first game in the program was the card game Zac . The company became known with Rubik's Snake and the German distribution of the UNO card game for the former American company International Games . As a result, more games were added to the program and in 1985 the game Campus by André Francois was nominated for Game of the Year . In 1991 the family game Tutti Frutti by Haim Shafir was released , which was soon renamed Halli Galli due to the television show of the same name .

Slump in sales and restructuring

With the takeover of International Games by Mattel in 1992, the UNO game has been distributed by Mattel itself since that year, resulting in a major financial slump at Amigo. The founders Jansen and Voigt sold the publishing house to the Berliner Kapitalbeteiligungsgesellschaft and Uwe Pauli was appointed as the new managing director who worked for the logistics company Company for Business Developments GmbH (CBD), and the publishing house was relocated to Dietzenbach. CBD took over the logistics for Amigo until 2009, since then the publisher has been working with VVA arvato GmbH in the Bertelsmann Group as a new logistics partner.

Further developments

Magic: The Gathering

In 1995 the trading card game Magic: The Gathering was introduced as the first game of its kind by Amigo in Germany (until 2006, since then Universal Cards ). In 1998, the publisher received the Game of the Year award for the board game Elfenland by Alan R. Moon and came third at the German Game Award . In the 1990s, several card game classics such as 6 Takes! , Wizard and Bohnanza , which were later expanded into series in further editions and games based on them. In 1999, Amigo also received the German license and distribution rights for the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and expanded the trading card offering to include the Pokémon trading card game . In 2004 the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading card game from Konami and since 2015 Amigo has also had the Force of Will trading card system in its range.

With its own event department founded in 2009, Amigo started various tournament series for the games Wizard , Set , Saboteur , Bohnanza , 6 Takes! and since 2017 also for ICECOOL . In addition to its own products, the publisher now sells products from various sales partners such as Spin Master , Crayola and Ultra PRO as well as PiNAO Sports . The company currently employs around 50 people. In 2018 the publisher announced that with AMIGO Games Inc. it would start an independent company in Austin , Texas , for the American market.