Studio Toriumi
I checked 50 well-known board games against the App Store to see which have a real digital version and how they monetise. 31 have apps. 29 of those 31 are paid up front — which runs directly against how the rest of mobile gaming works. Median price is $8.99.
See the full table JAOnly 2 of 31 are free, and neither uses ads or gacha — they sell expansions instead. This is closer to selling a boxed product than to a mobile game.
Free-to-play works by adding pressure outside the game: energy timers, gacha, paid shortcuts. A board game's rules are already complete and public. There is no gap to monetise without breaking the design. So the only option left is to make something good and sell it once.
Twin Sails has 7 titles, Dire Wolf Digital 5, CGE Digital 3. Small studios holding a few titles each, rather than one giant taking everything.
Catan Universe leads on review count (~31,000) but sits at 3.6 stars — people arrive on brand recognition and leave disappointed. The paid titles above it cluster at 4.5–4.9. Fewer users, far happier ones.
Pandemic, Dixit, Splendor and Azul — four of the best-known board games in Japan — return nothing. But this is a rights gap, not a technology gap. Most were built and then delisted, and the publishers still hold the licences. You cannot simply build them.
iTunes Search API, US and JP stores, matched on genre + title prefix + known board game publisher. "No app" means not found under those conditions — delisting and naming differences both hide behind that. Review counts stand in for scale because stores do not publish revenue.
The full sortable table and the analysis are written in Japanese, but every game title, publisher name and figure in the table is in English or numeric, so the data is readable either way.
We don't machine-translate pages and publish them as if they were written in English. When an English edition exists, it has been written in English. Until then, this page tells you honestly what is on the other side of the link.
Everything on this site is free and has no paywall, in either language.