STUDIO TORIUMI / RESEARCH · 日本語版
For 50 well-known board games, I checked the App Store for whether a real iOS app exists and how it charges. The result runs opposite to almost every convention of mobile gaming. And one more thing — the more famous a game is in Japan, the less likely it is to have an app at all.
This was the biggest surprise of the survey. Most mobile game revenue comes from free-to-play plus in-app purchases, but digital board games sit entirely outside that model.
Only 2 titles are free — and even those use neither ads nor gacha. They are free to download with expansions sold separately: closer to how a boxed product sells than to a mobile game.
Prices run $3.99–$10.99, with a median of $8.99 — about ¥1,350. That is expensive for a mobile app, but a physical board game costs ¥5,000–8,000, so from the buyer's side it is cheap. That price gap is what makes the model work.
Free-to-play is designed to keep you playing, then charge you partway through: energy timers, gacha, time-savers, limited-time events. All of it works by adding pressure outside the game itself.
A board game's rules, however, are already complete — and public. Bolting monetisation onto them breaks the original game. There is no gap to exploit without wrecking the balance — that is the structural reason.
The result is a market where the only viable move is to build something good and sell it once. For solo developers, that is arguably friendlier terrain.
By publisher: Twin Sails Interactive has 7 titles, Dire Wolf Digital 5, CGE Digital 3 — the top three account for 15 of the 31. This is not a market where one giant takes everything; small studios hold a few titles each.
Catan Universe leads on review count (~31,000) but sits at just 3.6 stars — the classic pattern of people arriving on brand recognition and leaving disappointed by the execution. The top pay-once titles, by contrast, cluster at 4.5–4.9 stars: fewer users, far happier ones.
I searched the App Store (US and Japan) and judged an app to be the genuine article only if its genre is Games, its title matches, and it is published by a company that releases digital versions of board games. Review counts are from the US store.
The "Buy physical" link on each row goes to an Amazon search results page. As an Amazon Associate, this site earns from qualifying purchases. Which titles are listed, and how they are judged, has nothing to do with referral income — it is decided purely by the App Store data. Titles without an app carry the same links.
Pull out the games whose names everyone knows, and the holes in the market become obvious.
Most of these four disappeared because they were delisted. They were not left unbuilt — they were built, then shut down. The rights all sit with the publishers.
What you are looking at is a rights gap, not a technology gap. You cannot build the same thing and ship it yourself. Misread this, and you will end up deleting your own finished game.
With the rights wall taken into account, three realistic paths remain. Roughly in order of practicality:
Go, shogi, chess, backgammon, hanafuda, karuta, dominoes, mahjong. Rules carry no copyright, so you can build any of these freely.
"There are already hundreds," you will say — and most of them are ad-stuffed and dated. As the survey above shows, customers in this genre already have the habit of paying up front. There is still room for a well-crafted, ad-free version.
The major publishers (the Asmodee group) digitalise in-house, so there is no way in there. But individual and small-press designers have no means of producing a digital version at all.
Japan's indie board game scene (around the Game Market convention) is full of intriguing titles that have never sold more than a few hundred copies. Your odds of closing a revenue-share deal there are far better than with a major publisher.
Rules are not protected — but names, art, settings and proper nouns are. Turned around, that means studying a mechanism and building it around your own theme is perfectly legal.
Plenty of today's best-selling board games are in fact built on the mechanisms of earlier ones. Copying wholesale is out; learning the mechanism is the accepted path — standard thinking inside the board game industry, too.
Using an existing game's name as-is, reusing its art, or branding yours "in the style of ◯◯" so people mistake it for the original — all of that is infringement.
A takedown from the store would be the mild outcome — your entire developer account can be terminated. There is no coming back from that.
Numbers quoted without context breed misunderstanding, so here is exactly how the survey was built.
I searched the iTunes Search API across both the US and Japanese stores, and only counted a hit as the genuine article if it met all three conditions: (1) genre is Games, (2) the title matches as a prefix, (3) published by a known board game publisher, or an exact title match. 50 titles × 2 stores.
It may have been delisted, renamed beyond recognition, or simply slipped past the matching conditions. All that can be said is: "not found on the current App Store under these conditions."
Stores do not publish revenue. Review count is a proxy for scale, not revenue itself — and free apps collect reviews more readily than paid ones.
Google Play has no official search API, and its HTML structure changes constantly. I stopped at confirming package names. The figures here are iOS figures.
The BoardGameGeek API currently answers with a 401. The 50 titles were therefore chosen by hand, weighing BGG's top rankings against name recognition in Japan. This is a sample, not a census.
App Store data as of 2026-08-30. Prices and availability both change. If you quote these figures, include the date.