Sixteen years looking for markets that don't exist

Milan, 2009. Lorenzo Tucci Sorrentino is twenty-four years old. Together with another Lorenzo, Silva, born in 1982, with a background in natural sciences and a soft spot for design, he founded a board game publishing house in a country where, until then, board games meant Monopoly and Risiko.

The first title was called Horse Fever. A horse racing betting game inspired by the 1976 film of the same name starring Gigi Proietti. Three modes, illustrations by Giulia Ghigini, rules in four languages within the same box. It didn't win international awards, didn't sell millions of copies, and will be remembered by almost no one. But it did something that no one in Italy had done before: treat the Italian board game as a serious editorial product, designed from its inception for the international market.

In January 2014, the two Lorenzos parted ways. Silva sold his share and founded a new publishing house called Horrible Games (renamed Horrible Guild in 2019). He himself described the separation as "very peaceful, on excellent terms," and a few years later Horrible re-released Horse Fever, distributed by Cranio. The two companies still collaborate today.

From that moment on, Cranio was no longer a project of two twenty-somethings with an idea. It was the project of a single Lorenzo who decided what it would become. What he decided to do required an author. And that author arrived, named Simone Luciani.

Simone Luciani, from Fermo, born in 1977, is now probably the most translated Italian designer in the world. Tzolk'in, Grand Austria Hotel, Marco Polo, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Newton, Golem, Tiletum, Darwin's Journey, Anunnaki. A collection of medium-heavy eurogames that has topped lists across half the globe. He has collaborated with Cranio since 2013, where he holds the role of Head of Development and Lead Designer: he designs, develops, and selects what the publishing house releases.

In 2019, he co-designed a game with Tommaso Battista that changed Cranio forever. It's called Barrage.

On February 9, 2021, something happened that had never occurred in the Italian board game industry. To understand it, we need to go back to 2017, the year Cranio sold its majority stake to Centauria Srl, a company heir to the historic Fratelli Fabbri Editori. For four years, Cranio was part of a large Italian publishing group, and Tucci Sorrentino, Giuliano Acquati, and Simone Luciani remained minority shareholders. In February 2020, Centauria, in its restructuring process, put the stake up for sale. A year later, the three minority shareholders bought it back. They publicly called the operation "The Revenge of the Nerds".

From that day on, Luciani no longer works for Cranio. Cranio is also his. The designer of the most important games in the catalog is also a majority shareholder in the company that publishes them. A unique case in the industry. It's like Cole Wehrle, instead of leaving Leder last January, had bought its shares six years earlier.

A few minutes' walk from Cranio's headquarters, at Viale Misurata 9 in Milan, Draft? opened on September 16, 2023. It's not a game store. It's a game pub. A bar with a kitchen, a library of about a hundred titles, staff dedicated to explaining the rules, and a game rental formula with redemption: if you decide to keep the game, part of what you paid to take it home becomes a discount on the purchase. Tucci Sorrentino says the idea was born to test prototypes on real people, no longer just on colleagues.

A year later, in September 2024, Cranio made a move no other Italian publisher had yet made: it opened Draft? to franchising. It announced this at the Salone Franchising Milano. Two options: open a new venue from scratch or convert an existing business. Tucci Sorrentino stated he wants to expand "between late 2025 and early 2026."

Cranio made about four million euros in 2024. Their website sells only three percent of their turnover directly. All the rest goes through specialized stores that buy from Cranio and resell to the end consumer, in physical stores or online. The hundred Italian Cranio Stores, specialized shops that handle all their releases, alone generate thirty percent of the Italian turnover. It is a publisher that has chosen not to compete with its retailers.

Tucci Sorrentino is a founder who for sixteen years has been trying to build markets that are not yet mature. In 2009, he tried to build the market for Italian author eurogames, when the number of Italian publishers releasing titles designed for the international market could be counted on one hand. Today, he is trying something else that no Italian publisher has attempted: replicating Draft? in other cities through franchising, bringing the Cranio brand out of the box and into a recognizable physical location. In between, there is only one constant: Barrage, which continues to grow, expansion after expansion, just like the publishing house that releases it.