At today's Monarch Avalon stockholders meeting, the sale of the Avalon Hill games division to HIAC XII Corp, a division of Hasbro, was formally approved. I thought r.g.b.ers might like to know some of what transpired.

The meeting in Baltimore was attended by four Monarch Avalon board members, including Eric and Jack Dott, plus 13 shareholders and interested parties. There were no representatives from Hasbro, at least none that identified themselves as such. Within the first five minutes, Jack Dott announced that the deal had been approved by a majority of the stockholders. Since the Dotts own a majority (or near majority) of the shares, this was expected.

The attendees were surprisingly aggressive in questioning the direction of the company, now renamed Monarch Services. One expressed disappointment because he had invested in the company because of the potential of its games. Eric Dott reported that boardgame sales had deteriorated for years, and many of the "jobbers" (game sellers) had gone out of business. He stated that the games were difficult to market without large resources.

I asked Eric if Hasbro had pressured Monarch to fire the employees of the game division. He replied that they had not done so, and that the firing was done because the employees had become unnecessary. In response to other questions, Jack said that $1 million worth of game inventory had been transferred to Hasbro.

The attendees expressed concern about the future direction of the company. Most of the hour plus long meeting was spent discussing the potential of Girl's Life magazine, one of Monarch's major remaining assets. There were questions about why the book value of the company is in the $4 to $5 per share range, but the stock trades under $2 NASDAQ symbol MAHI). Several attendees recommended that the company repurchase the shares held by outside shareholders and make the company private (the share price is up 10% so far today).

There were concerns that without the games, the company's printing capacity was now under utilized. Someone said the presses had been running 100 hours per week, but now were running only 40 hours per week. Then Eric Dott added an interesting tidbit: that just this week Hasbro had contacted Monarch about printing services (ostensibly, to continue to print various games). However, he said that since there were many printing companies in Massachusetts, he did not feel that such a deal was likely. I found his conclusion a bit odd; I'd think Monarch had the experience and tooling to print the game components, and therefore could easily (and inexpensively) do so for Hasbro. Regardless, I was happy to learn of this because it's another indication that Hasbro will be continuing at least some of the AH board games.