About Admira Games

Admira Games is a small board game studio in Cologne, Germany. We design strategy games for players who like reading the table as much as the rules — games where mechanics carry meaning, and the people across from you matter as much as the engine you’re building.

The name

Admirari is Latin for to admire — the studio is named for the quiet wonder a game produces when it lands. It’s also a nod to Admira Wien, the Austrian football club; the founder grew up at Alemannia Aachen and Burtscheider FC and liked the sound of the word. The studio carried an earlier working name — JO Games, for Jonas-Oliver Games — which made way for Admira before the studio formally launched.

The mission

A studio of board gamers, for board gamers. Of strategists, for strategists. We want to make games we’d want to sit down to ourselves — and we’d rather take the long way to clarity than rush a half-finished idea.

Founder

I’m Oliver. Admira Games started in 2023 as a partnership with Jonas Küttner, after several years of prototyping together. On 1 January 2025 I refounded it as a solo studio in Cologne. I split my week between a software engineering day job and Admira Games — three days at a desk in finance, four days on board game design. It is a solo-founder reality, not an investor pitch.

My design philosophy came out of a long apprenticeship. I studied history — Greek antiquity, Aristotle, international relations — before I came to game design through Civilization, Twilight Imperium, and an early prototype with Jonas that grew into Aegeapolis. The lesson I keep returning to: it’s not about having lots of great ideas; it’s about simplifying the ones you already have.

I look for elegance — simple mechanics that combine into complexity. Reading-games on two levels: the board, and the people across the table. Games that reward attention, not optimisation.

Our first project

Aegeapolis is a strategy board game set in Classical Greece, launching on Gamefound on 3 November 2026. It is the distilled product of five years of design work: an open Aegean polis world to explore in Sandbox mode, and a story-driven Campaign mode in the same box, carried by four characters drawn in echo of Greek black-figure pottery.

Get in touch

For press, reviews, and direct inquiries: oliver.guenay@admiragames.com.

For everything else, the contact page has a form.