Every Pokemon Card Runs Through a Belgian Town You've Never Heard Of

Shuffle a deck of Bicycle cards. Rip open a Pokemon booster. Draft a Magic: The Gathering pack or a Disney Lorcana set. Argue over Monopoly, deal out UNO, guess who in Guess Who. You have, statistically, been holding the work of one company for most of your life - and there is a good chance you have never once said its name. It is Cartamundi, a family-owned manufacturer in Turnhout, Belgium, and it is the largest maker of playing cards and board games in the world.

The trick to Cartamundi is that it is designed to be invisible. It does not, for the most part, own the games it makes. It prints, cuts, collates, packs and ships them for the brands whose logos go on the box. When a Pokemon set sells out and resellers fight over the last cases, the headlines credit The Pokemon Company. The presses that ran hot to make those cards were often Cartamundi's. In the language of gold rushes, Cartamundi does not pan for gold - it sells the shovels, and it has been sharpening them since 1765.

01 / THE ORIGINThree printers, one Latin name

The modern company was formed in 1970, when three long-established Belgian printing houses - Brepols, Van Genechten and Biermans - merged their card operations. But those houses had been making playing cards since 1765, which means Cartamundi's craft is older than the United States. The founders reached for Latin: Cartamundi means "cards of the world," a fittingly large ambition for a printer in a town of roughly 45,000 people. Turnhout has been a center of card-making for centuries, and it still is. If there is a capital city of the world's card games, it is a modest Belgian town most people could not find on a map.

02 / THE MODELOwn the factory, not the fandom

Cartamundi's business is contract manufacturing at scale, plus a set of turnkey services that carry a game from concept to finished pallet. A customer arrives with an idea - a new trading card game, a board game, a promotional deck - and Cartamundi's design centers, project managers and supply-chain teams handle the rest: optimization, sustainable packaging, toy-safety legislation, logistics. For the biggest franchises, the company is the physical layer beneath the brand.

It also owns a few brands outright. In 2019 it acquired the United States Playing Card Company, the maker of Bicycle and Bee - the decks magicians and poker players reach for by reflex. That deal is a neat illustration of the strategy: rather than bet on which single game becomes a hit, Cartamundi positions itself so that it gets paid when almost any of them does. Its Custom Playing Cards platform extends the same logic down to a single customer, letting brands and hobbyists print their own designs onto professional decks.

The catalog of services fans out from there. There are collectible and trading card solutions, where a franchise gets full co-creation from concept through finished set. There are board and card game solutions, staffed by dedicated project managers who worry about product optimization, deadlines, cost, sustainable packaging and the patchwork of toy legislation that governs anything a child might touch. There are promotional and packaging solutions - custom decks, boxes and loyalty giveaways for brands and retailers. It is an unglamorous menu, and that is precisely why it is valuable: most companies that want a game made do not want to build a factory, learn toy-safety law, or negotiate board and paperboard supply. Cartamundi already has.

03 / THE CUSTOMERSThe names on the boxes

Cartamundi's customer list reads like a shelf at a toy store, minus its own name. The Pokemon Company and Wizards of the Coast for trading cards. Hasbro for board and card games. Disney for Lorcana. Beyond the marquee franchises sit retailers commissioning private-label games, casinos ordering decks by the crate, brands printing promotional cards, and the loose community of magicians and collectors who buy Bicycle by the brick. The scale is easy to under-picture: more than 60 million board games leave its plants in a year, and trading-card volumes run into the billions of individual cards. Hundreds of millions of people around the world have handled a Cartamundi product without any way of knowing it.

04 / THE BOOMRiding the trading-card gold rush

For decades, playing cards and board games were a steady, unglamorous business. Then collectible cards caught fire. Pokemon never really left, Magic kept compounding, and Disney's Lorcana arrived and sold through print runs almost as fast as they were made. Cartamundi found itself sitting on exactly the right presses at exactly the right moment. Collectible cards climbed to about 45 percent of revenue and, according to CEO Stefaan Merckx, became the company's principal growth engine, posting double-digit growth.

The response has been to build more capacity. Cartamundi committed on the order of 200 million euros to expand trading-card production and set out to hire roughly 1,000 people worldwide in a single year, with total headcount aimed above 4,000. When demand for a physical product outruns supply, the constraint is not creativity - it is machines, floor space and trained hands. Cartamundi is spending to remove that constraint.

What separates Cartamundi from a generic printer is the combination of scale, breadth and trust. A franchise handing over a global release cannot afford a run that arrives late, off-color or out of spec, and it needs a partner that can absorb sudden spikes when a set goes viral. Cartamundi's answer is a spread of plants on multiple continents, design centers that shorten the loop between idea and pallet, and a wall of quality and environmental certifications. Competitors exist - other European board-game makers and card printers, several of which Cartamundi has bought over the years, plus a field of Asian manufacturers - but few match its combination of heritage, geographic footprint and the ability to say yes to the world's biggest brands at once.

05 / THE FOOTPRINTA dozen factories, two design centers

Cartamundi grew partly by acquisition. It bought France Cartes in 2014, took over Hasbro's game factories in Ireland and Massachusetts in 2015, and added the United States Playing Card Company in 2019. Today it runs roughly a dozen manufacturing plants across Belgium, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, India and Japan, supported by design centers that keep lead times short and shipping closer to the customer. Not every move has been expansion - it closed the former Hasbro plant in Ireland in 2023 - but the overall direction has been toward a broader, more global manufacturing base.

06 / THE AGILITYThe year the card lines made masks

Cartamundi's most revealing chapter is a small one. When the pandemic hit and card demand wobbled, the company retooled precision manufacturing lines to produce certified face masks under the name Medimundi. It was a temporary detour, and it went back to printing cards when the world needed cards again. But it showed what the company actually sells underneath the decks: manufacturing flexibility at industrial scale, backed by the certifications - ISO 9001, ISO 14001, FSC, G7 - that let a global brand trust a run of tens of millions of units.

07 / THE PLACEWhere it fits in the market

In a games industry obsessed with intellectual property - the next franchise, the next hit set - Cartamundi occupies the layer almost nobody photographs: the presses. Its rivals are other card printers and board-game manufacturers, several of which it has absorbed over the years. Its customers are the household names, from Hasbro to The Pokemon Company to Disney, plus retailers, casinos, brands running loyalty campaigns, and the magicians and collectors who buy its own decks. The company is, in effect, critical infrastructure for a hobby enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people who will never learn its name. That anonymity is not a failure of marketing. For a contract manufacturer, being the trusted, invisible partner behind everyone else's brand is the whole point - and after 250 years, business has rarely been better.