Flip over a copy of Pandemic or Carcassonne on our shelves and you'll find the same small logo on the box: Z-Man Games. It's a name most players recognise without necessarily knowing the story behind it — and it's a genuinely good one, involving a defunct card game, one of the best-selling co-op games ever made, and a publisher that somehow got bought, sold, and folded back into itself over the course of two decades.
From a Defunct Card Game to a Publishing House
Z-Man Games was founded around 1999–2000 by Zev Shlasinger, and — fittingly for a publisher that would go on to define modern co-op gaming — it didn't start with a grand plan. Shlasinger set the company up primarily to republish Shadowfist, a collectible card game that had gone out of print. It was a small, almost accidental beginning for a company that would go on to become one of the most recognisable names in the hobby.
The Game That Changed Everything
Everything changed in 2008, when Z-Man published Matt Leacock's Pandemic. A cooperative game about racing to cure four diseases before the board overwhelms you, Pandemic was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in 2009 and went on to sell several million copies worldwide. It's still one of the games most credited with pulling cooperative play out of niche hobbyist circles and into the mainstream — and it turned Z-Man from a small publisher into a name every games shop needed to stock.
Becoming the English Voice of the Euro Boom
Off the back of that success, Z-Man became the go-to publisher for bringing major European designer games to English-speaking audiences — a role that shaped the modern hobby just as much as Pandemic did. It took on the English-language publishing rights for Carcassonne, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's tile-laying classic, and in 2013 became the English and French publisher of Terra Mystica, Helge Ostertag and Jens Drögemüller's dense faction-based strategy game, originally released in Germany the year before. For a long stretch of the 2010s, if a serious Euro game was crossing the Atlantic, there was a good chance Z-Man's logo was on the box.
A Company That Changed Hands Twice — Sort Of
Here's where the story gets genuinely strange. In 2011, Shlasinger sold Z-Man to Sophie Gravel, owner of the Canadian distributor Filosofia, and the combined company was rebranded F2Z Entertainment. Shlasinger stayed on for a few more years before leaving in 2016 to run board game operations at WizKids.
That same year, F2Z Entertainment — Z-Man, Filosofia and fellow studio Plaid Hat Games included — was acquired by Asmodee, the French conglomerate that by now owns a striking share of the modern hobby. Gravel left shortly after the sale and, almost immediately, founded a brand-new publisher: Plan B Games, home to breakout hits like Azul and the Century series.
Then, in 2021, Asmodee acquired Plan B Games too — and put Gravel back in charge of Z-Man Games as Head of Studio. As the company's own history records, she ended up running the same publisher twice, by way of two entirely different acquisitions a decade apart. It's the kind of full-circle story the hobby doesn't get very often.
Shlasinger, for his part, didn't stay away from publishing for long either — in 2023 he teamed up with Stronghold Games founder Stephen Buonocore to launch a new studio, Play to Z.
Z-Man Games Today
Z-Man now sits inside the Asmodee Group alongside dozens of other studios, but its identity has stayed distinct: still the publisher of record for Pandemic and its many spin-offs, still the English voice for a run of major Euro imports, and still one of the most trusted names on a shelf like ours. It's a rare thing in this industry — a publisher that's changed ownership more than once and still feels exactly like itself.
The catalogue has also grown by picking up classics along the way. Z-Man publishes Bruno Faidutti's Citadels, the bluffing-and-city-building favourite now in its Revised Edition, and in 2018 it acquired the rights to Love Letter, Seiji Kanai's pocket-sized deduction game that started life with Alderac Entertainment Group and has since become one of the most-copied designs in the hobby.
Come Try Their Games
Pandemic — the game that made Z-Man's name, and still one of the best entry points into cooperative play.
Carcassonne — the tile-laying classic Z-Man has carried in English for over a decade, and still one of the easiest "yes" recommendations in the store.
Citadels Revised Edition — bluff your way to the throne one secretly chosen role at a time, then try to guess what everyone else picked.
Love Letter Classic (Eco Box) — a whole game of bluff and deduction in sixteen cards, small enough to carry anywhere.
Come have a play in-store; we'll happily walk you through any of the four.
We believe the best moments happen around a table, and it's always worth knowing a little about who actually made the games you're playing on it.