Exclusive: Renegade Game Studios Extends Partnership With Hasbro

Today, Renegade Game Studios announced an extension to its partnership with Hasbro to produce games for the hobby market. In addition to more games featuring the Power Rangers brand, Renegade will produce card and roleplaying games for Transformers, My Little Pony and G.I. Joe brands. “Hasbro has brought so much joy to fans through these worlds filled with rich narratives and iconic characters. We are excited to expand our relationship with Hasbro to help bring these stories to hobby tabletops in a new way,“ explains Scott Gaeta, President and Publisher at Renegade Game Studios.

The partnership between the two companies began with Power Rangers: Heroes of the Grid, a tactical miniatures board game that launched in 2018. “I was approached by Saban [the previous owners of the Power Ranger IP],” said Gaeta, “about making a tabletop Power Rangers game for adult fans of Power Rangers. Not a children’s game, but something for fans who grew up with it in the 90’s. Before the game was released, Hasbro acquired Saban and we started working with Hasbro. We put Heroes of the Grid out and it was a hit. Hasbro has been wonderful to work with. I’ve worked with pretty much every studio. I was a little worried at first, but they’ve been absolutely phenomenal.”

“We’re thrilled to expand our relationship with Renegade Game Studios to include more fan favorite brands from our portfolio,” said Casey Collins, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Consumer Products at Hasbro. “The tabletop and roleplaying games Renegade Game Studios innovated for the Power Rangers franchise have proved to authentically connect with both gamers and the Ranger Nation and we are confident that G.I. Joe, Transformers and My Little Pony fans will love the exciting games coming soon.”

Renegade looks to put out two major styles of games in their partnership. The first will be deckbuilding games, where players construct a deck from a common pool to win the game. “We wanted to do something that would appeal to gamers but also to someone who is a fan of the show,” said Gaeta, “and those are going to be deck building games. We really like deckbuilding games. They are a nice middle ground that doesn’t take up the bandwidth of a collectible card game but they scratch a similar gameplay itch. We have a series of deck building games in the works based on all the different brands.”

The other major game initiative brings these settings into tabletop roleplaying games. As Transformers, My Little Pony, Power Rangers and G.i. Joe are Hasbro properties, it’s no surprise that the RPGs created by Renegade Game Studios will use the massively popular Fifth Edition rules set.

“Part of the strategy here is that if we want a GI Joe fan to play an RPG” said Gaeta. “We want to use the system that’s most common and widely known. Fifth Edition at this point is the common language in RPGs. We went back and forth on our discussions but we landed on Fifth Edition being what we wanted to use to achieve our design goals.”

This also allows for the cross-brand crossovers seen in comics where GI JOE and the Autobots team up to battle Cobra and the Decepticons. “There’s nothing to stop players from having GI Joe and Transformers characters in the same campaign,” said Gaeta.

The games announced today are expected to be released sometime next year. For now, fans will also be able to enjoy entirely new websites that Renegade will be launching this fall to support the communities for its line-up of Hasbro games. Organized play, achievements, and in-store and at home events will be added to current programs, such as the current Power Rangers free monthly scenarios and Morphin’ Monday’s Twitch programs.

“The partnership with Hasbro has really been great,” said Gaeta, “we’re excited about these new brands that I’ve been chasing for over a decade. It’s really nice to be finally doing some fun stuff with them.”