The first question you should ask yourself is: is this for me or do I want to commercialise this product. It’s a very important question, because then we have to consider if you will use your own time, will you use someone else’s – a freelancer for example. Many of the steps are the same between these two routes to making your own board game, but one costs a lot more money to start, but could net you a lot more money, one will take a lot more of your time.
The easiest board game you could make might just involve pen, pencils, and some paper – maybe an eraser too! If you wanted to be slightly more ambitious you could buy a build-your-own board game set from Amazon for £24.99 in this you would get Game Pieces, Blank Cards, a blank spinner & Dice. At this point it’s really up to your imagination, but again, this is with Pen to write rules, cards etc and it lacks that professional feel that I imagine readers of this article are looking for.
Crowdfunding is an incredibly popular way to fund board games, Stonemaier Games’ first board game was targeted at £20,000 this game retails for around £50. Gloomhaven, as another example, was targeted at £60,000 and retails at the high end nearer £100.
Why do Games Vary in Production Cost?
It’s clear that the complexity and pieces involved will increase price. For example, if you wanted a metal tin though Grand Prix International (GPI) you would need to order 10,000 tins, as opposed to the minimum of 2500 units because this minimum order quantity (MOQ) is the smallest the supplier can make and still be worth it from their side, we will discuss this more later in the article.
So What’s a Sensible Price?
After Scouring Kickstarter I can put the range from £8000-£6000, the most common goal was around £30,000. This seems reasonable given potential delays in the project or revisions to original ideas. It’s better to aim over and not need it than be 6 months into the project and realise you’ve run out of money.
What Is Your Board Game About?
So now we’ve established how much money you need to put aside to create a board game which will your board game be about? First, the setting will help establish the narrative.
Setting: Scythe and Ticket to Ride USA are set in the early 20thcentury and add to the romanticism of the game. Or maybe we want to base our story in the far future like Twillight imperium. Many popular games even take place in the modern day such as Pandemic, even more topical after the Covid 19 years. Essentially the setting is creating the mood for the player.
Brainstorming: So, we have the setting lets come up with an idea linked to this. This process may even take up to a couple of days. Jamey Stegmeir gives us a good number of ideas in this video (link). You want to be coming up with as many ideas as possible. But a truly original idea without inspiration is almost impossible. He recommends that we play similar board games, read fiction books and even play video games. Here we will come up with the theme, but It will also help us dictate mechanisms related to the theme. For example, the theme of Wingspan is birds, and all the mechanisms are bird-based, its straightforward when you have the finished product, but in the formative stages the link is not always clear.
Determining Rules:
We have the setting, we have the mechanics, now we need to establish rules. It of course makes sense that a more complicated game has a longer rule book. Twillight imperium for example has 25 factions each with unique abilities, home planets, starter units and technologies; this game is infamous for its length (link) and it naturally has a longer rulebook then say scrabble which is printed on the back of the box. Below are three example of board games from the cupboard: Chess, Cluedo and Scrabble. Each are incredibly successful, and share a similarity in the way the rules are displayed. A bullet point format is key and makes things easier to read. I also recommend diagrams and pictures to help illustrate your point.
Graphic Design:
Ok, we are building the game we know what it will be, now we need to commit this visually. We’ll need Logos, packaging design, card design. Many companies like Grand Prix International offer in-house designers. Looking at Fiverr we’re looking at around £50 for good logo creation and £50-100 for card creation. We must also consider plastic models here which is an additional cost.
Play Testing:
When creating something massive it’s often easy to overlook something small. In a similar vein, the mechanics behind gameplay may seem sound in theory, but when it comes to playing you can see how broken it can be. It’s important that we play test in 2 different ways. Once, of course, is yourself playing a prototype with some friends. Second, we should outsource this to independent board game testers, external testers will help better balance game play. They can identify issues on all the steps we’ve spoken about up till now, rules, mechanics, setting, from a completely impartial position. It’s a must if you want to make your own board game.
Mass Production:
Great, we’ve passed the play testing stage, let’s mass produce this bad boy. Well what do we need? We should include, but not limit ourselves to: Plastic moulding molding, Textiles, Die casting, Silkscreen, heat transfer, tampo printing, and Vacuum forming.
A typical first run would involve an MOQ of 2500 units. However, as discussed earler, it depends what materials we want to put into our game. If we want to use Metal tins GPI would need a production quantity of 10,000 tins to be manufactured because they are also constrained by their suppliers needs. Without going into too much detail, manufacturers create cost savings by using large machines and large production runs. Machines can be very specific and use interchangeable moulds/parts to create the product you’re looking for let’s say a square tin or a circular tin. The factory worker would need to make changes to the machine depending on the shape and this may even take up to a few hours in some cases, which is a few hours of production lost and therefore a few hours of money lost for the supplier – it’s just not cost efficient to do low runs.
How Much Should I Price it?
How niche is your game and where will your game be sold are the most important questions here. A game like Gloomhaven which retails for around £100 is unlikely to be sold in a supermarket as consumers just wouldn’t want to pay the price. Games for younger children and families conversely tend to be lower in price. For example a retail price of £40 for Monopoly
Important! If you set a retail price for your product on the high side, you can always reduce the price in the future and this even helps justify sales i.e. “its on offer” mentality. If you set your retail price too low however, you’ll have a harder time trying to increase your price when you realize you need to increase profitability.
How to Market my product:
Ah, the magic question! This of course becomes easier the more established your brand is, but in any case it’s best to refresh our memory. Let us count some of the ways:
- Setting up a booth at an industry trade show.
- Advertise in industry magazines and online buyer resources.
- Offer your product online through e-commerce, it’s a cheaper method as you aren’t playing for a storefront.
- Engage in direct mail campaigns to targeted retailers. I would always recommend calling though, you know how quickly junk email boxes can fill up! Ideally at this point you would establish a relationship with sales reps who will support you moving forward at that retailer. You can also build a relationship with independent sales reps who are making sales calls to independent stores, but they would take part of the cut as a middle man.
We aren’t specialists at marketing here and this is a brief overview, but we would recommend sending out samples to everyone you’re speaking to. A physical product speaks volumes above a non-committal phone call.
Conclusion:
To sum up creating your own board game is expensive, we suggest an investment or Kickstarter of around £30,000. The process also takes a lot longer than you’d initially think it might take 9-12 month from the idea’s inception until the final product hits stores, but the wait is well worth it. You will have left your mark of the ever expanding board game market and you might even make some good profit!
Why Don’t You Check Out:
https://tabletoptemple.com/why-board-games-are-so-expensive/ – we go into some more depth on why they are expensive to buy, beginning with the manufacturing process.
Sources and Additional Links:
10 Steps to Design a Tabletop Game (2020 version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgEt7PysQgc
