Mayfair Games
game publisher
Mayfair Games was an American publisher of board, card, and roleplaying games that also licensed Euro-style board games to publish them in English. The company licensed worldwide English-language publishing rights to The Settlers of Catan series between 1996 and 2016.
History
Mayfair Games was founded in 1981 by Darwin Bromley in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The company was created to publish Empire Builder, a railroad game designed by Bromley and Bill Fawcett. In 1982, Mayfair Games expanded its focus to include Role Aids, a line of role-playing game supplements.
In 1993, Mayfair was sued by TSR, Inc., who argued that Role Aids violated their 1984 trademark agreement, being advertised as compatible with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The court found that some of the line violated the trademark, but the line as a whole did not violate the agreement, and Mayfair continued publishing the line until the rights were bought by TSR.
In 1996, Mayfair Games became the publisher of The Settlers of Catan in the US. The company shut down for financial reasons in 1997 but was subsequently bailed out by Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE), who purchased most of their assets and restarted operations as Ironwind, Inc. This new company operated publicly under the Mayfair Games trademark.
Pete Fenlon became the CEO of Mayfair Games in 2007 to oversee a major reorganization with a refocusing on core brands, most importantly the Catan family of games. In 2013, Mayfair reported selling more than 750,000 Catan-related products.
The public source identifies “Mayfair Games” as game publisher. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mayfair, Games and game.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mayfair Games” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.