Design complete; need to find a publisher who can handle copyrighted material

Nintendo likely has their rights sliced into geographic markets, so you may have more options than you think. Even if Asian markets, for example, already have a boardgame license for this property, European or US markets may not. I'd contact a Marketing company that deals with whatever market you intend the game to be for, and see if they can learn how Nintendo has divided the rights for this franchise.

At worst, start calling into Nintendo itself, or have someone who is skilled at corporate burrowing to do it for you. Nintendo likely has a core of English-speaking reps, but if not, you may have to find someone who can speak Japanese to represnt your interests in this matter.

In short, you've done the easy part in designing a viable game. Now comes the departure from hobby-level effort and the beginning of treating your game design work as a business, and that will take a lot of tedius work in research and phonetime, as well as finding and contracting out work for researchers or business people, or language-specific individuals, to take the next step. If you can't do some part of the process, find someone who can, and be willing to pay them for their skills, or cut them into any potential payoff, should your game be snapped up.

The key, here, is trusting other people with your game's specifics. That could probably start here on the BGDF, where we're pretty free with ideas and such, and know that it would take more effort to steal one of our games than a potential thief is willing to put forth, since any success at marketing would bring their theft to our attention, and there's documentary proof of our development work that makes for powerful evidence
of copyright infringement and theft.

But even if you choose to not trust the people here, you'll have to give anyone you work with every possible detail of your product. There will be no playing it close to the vest with either a partner on your end who's doing business work for you, a marketing company that will negotiate on your behalf, or with Nintendo, who, quite frankly, wouldn't bother stealing someone else's idea when they could just spend the time developing a billion-dollar title instead. The width of your path to success will be determined by how trusting you are of others. Until you're under an NDA with someone, I'd let those who could help in on the details.

Good luck, though, since it seems you're thinking big.

The term you'll be looking for when seeking an agent is someone who is experienced with licensing properties for use in toys and games.

As I'm more focused on the hobby market instead of the mass market, unfortunately I can't suggest an agent.

I'm in Arizona, too, in the Phoenix area, not that it helps. :)

Hello Endymian,

I am just wondering. Is it possible too change the theme/art, so as not to infringe on the Nintendo Copyright/Trade Mark.

Regards
nomadsgames

Though the licensing would indeed take a chunk of the potential profit, there's a good chance the vastly increased sales of "Super Mario Brothers Board Game" over "Classic Side Scrolling" would more than make up the difference through sheer volume.