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Less than a year later, she had launched Plan B Games, which debuted with Century: Spice Road, then struck gold at the end of 2017 with Michael Kiesling's Azul, which has now sold more than two million copies.
In March 2021, Gravel sold Plan B Games — which had acquired eggertspiele in mid-2017 and which included the studios Next Move Games and Pretzel Games (yes, again!) — to Asmodee. The press release issued at the time included this quote from Stéphane Carville, CEO of the Asmodee Group: "We are very pleased that Sophie Gravel and her teams, with whom we have developed a close partnership through the years, will be joining our group and participating in the development of our games catalogue."
In a return to the way things were before, as of August 5, 2021, Gravel is Head of Studio at Z-Man Games, with former Head of Studio Steve Kimball taking a new position as Asmodee's Director of Special Projects to work on various publishing efforts across all the Asmodee Group studios. (In Kimball's final post on the Z-Man Games website, he relays his history through the game industry, starting with his time at Fantasy Flight Games and ending by noting that one of his first tasks is "assisting Corey [Konieczka, head of Unexpected Games] with various odds and ends that are simply too much for any one individual to tackle. Ideally this allows Corey to spend less time administrating and more time designing.")
In a press release announcing the change of leadership, Gravel said, "I look forward to driving the continued growth of not only our iconic games like Pandemic, Carcassonne, and Love Letter, but also to take Z-man's signature approach of building games that are different, unexpected, and special into new games and projects." Gravel will continue to oversee Plan B Games in her new position with Z-Man Games.
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