Two friends, a Polish basement, the most beautiful miniatures of the decade

Imprint · N°01 · Awaken Realms

Imprint is Frogames' new feature that tells the story of those who publish the games we find in boxes. The founders, the decisions, the bets that defined a catalog — and those that are defining it now.

Marcin Świerkot was at one point about to become a banker. With a degree in International Business from Wroclaw University of Economics between 2011 and 2014, a career in the financial sector that was going well — as he tells it, he already had his own office. Adrian Komarski, Marcin's friend since university, was already one of the best solo miniature painters in Poland.

They decide to drop everything and open a studio together. They opened it where it cost nothing to do so: in Adrian's parents' basement. They painted miniatures for other clients, for third parties. No games, no publishing ambitions, no design. Just brushstrokes on plastic and resin, done better than those who bought them would do.

The basement is in Wrocław, the third-largest city in Poland after Warsaw and Krakow, a thousand kilometers east of Berlin. It's a place that in the last fifteen years has filled with video game studios, tech startups, and designers who have learned to compete globally starting from Eastern European budgets.

The studio grows. In June 2015, they officially registered the Awaken Realms brand and opened their first real factory — no longer the basement, but with their own resin casting line. The same year they launched their first Kickstarter: The Edge: Dawnfall, a miniature wargame from their original universe. It did well. The second, two years later, changed everything: This War of Mine, the tabletop adaptation of the Polish video game by 11 bit studios. It was the first title that made them known outside of Poland. But the real one came in January 2018.

Nemesis launched on Kickstarter on January 17, 2018, with a target of £50,000. Twenty-one days later, it closed at over three million pounds from 30,553 backers. It is a semi-cooperative game set on a drifting spaceship, with aliens reproducing in the cargo holds, secret objectives that push you to betray your crew, and a clear inspiration from Ridley Scott's first Alien. It becomes the cinematic experience of board gaming.

But it's not for the gameplay that Nemesis defines Awaken Realms. It's for how it looks on the table.

This signature is the direct legacy of the basement. Two miniature painters who had become very skilled working for other clients, when it came to making their own games, applied the same standard to the entire product. Nemesis is the game where that logic becomes a system. From Tainted Grail to Etherfields, from ISS Vanguard to Great Wall, up to the more recent Grimcoven and Dune: War for Arrakis, the structure is always the same: a strong IP, a coherent artistic direction, collectible-level sculptures, production on par with AAA video games.

In 2016 Świerkot also founded Gamefound — a crowdfunding platform specializing in board games, an alternative to Kickstarter. In 2022 Ravensburger invested 4.5 million dollars in Gamefound, becoming a strategic partner. Since then, Awaken Realms has a dual identity: it is a publisher of its own games and the owner of the platform on which many other publishers crowdfund. Six of the last six Awaken Realms campaigns are on Gamefound, not on Kickstarter. The last six campaigns have raised almost 39 million euros.

February 2024. Awaken Realms announces a Gamefound campaign for Puerto Rico 1897: Special Edition — a deluxe edition of Andreas Seyfarth's classic eurogame, under license from Ravensburger. Promotional images circulate on social media. Someone notices the wrong details: hands with six fingers, half-drawn wheels, merging geometries. These are the classic signs of generative AI — probably Midjourney. Ella Ampongan of Dice Tower lined them up on Twitter. A controversy erupted.

Ravensburger — who holds the Puerto Rico license and is also Gamefound's main investor — publicly intervened. The images were removed. Świerkot promised "no AI in the final product" but did not answer questions about why it was used in the promo. The pattern was repeated in the following months with Agricola: Special Edition, Grimcoven, This War of Mine Second Edition. Awaken Realms stopped hiding the use of AI in preliminary stages and began to declare it beforehand.

March 2026. The same thing happened with Concordia: Special Edition. This time the backlash was more organized: dozens of users gave Concordia SE the lowest possible rating on BoardGameGeek, citing AI as the reason. The game's average rating plummeted to 4.7 out of 10 — the lowest of any Awaken Realms title, against the usual 8+. On March 18, 2026, Świerkot released a statement where the tone was different from previous ones: tired, exasperated.

Bet

Online noise is not the paying backer Awaken Realms openly declares the use of AI in preliminary phases of concept work and mock-ups — but never in the final product — and bets that the market will tolerate this distinction. The numbers, for now, prove them right: despite the review bombing, the six most recent campaigns have raised almost 39 million euros in total, and none have failed. In the statement of March 18, 2026, Świerkot wrote: "We find the whole conversation extremely draining. It's also simply heartbreaking — we are working hard on our games." Source · BoardGameWire · March 25, 2026

There's a precise paradox at the heart of the Awaken Realms story. In 2013, two friends bet that extreme craftsmanship — painting miniatures one by one, better than anyone else — was worth abandoning a banking career and moving into their parents' basement. That bet worked so well that in 2026 the same company became famous for automating the preliminary stages of creation — brainstorming, mock-ups, concept art — using software that generates images from the works of other artists.

The official position is that the final product is still handcrafted. The unstated bet is that backers will care less than it seems from the forums.