Board Games

not sure if this should be here or in the kickstarter thread

Omayga said:

I've been playing quite a few games of Everdell lately, the family seems to enjoy it. Artwork is cute and the setup and play is pretty easy, my 10 year old caught on quickly. There is enough cards that you can get pretty good replayability through the base game. We opened up the Pearlbrook expansion and played 3-4 games with that and it adds a nice extra layer. Will probably look to trickle in Bellfaire and Spirecrest expansions over the next 8-10 playthroughs

all in all, I am pleased with the game, its still competitive but nobody is ever really out of it, all of our scores have been decently tight, no huge blowouts.

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Everdell has amazing visuals, no doubt. If you want a slightly more challenging, but way less pretty =/ game, look up Maracaibo on board game geek. Players are privateers in the spanish carabean (theme ala Sid Meyers Pirates). Tons of cards for engine building. Combat to ingratiate yourself with the old world (English, Spanish, French) and can even go hiking thru the bush in South America. Everything you do makes you points, can you make the best engine? That said, the game is only 4 turns long, and it has a learning curve. However, once you learn how it plays, it is a thing of wonder, just not beauty.

Rathar said:

Busted into the Table Top Simulator thing on Steam. Pretty nice assortment of stuff out there.

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Yeah look at the public tables to see what is popular and go from there.

As a nerd, I don't wish death on many nerdly things or makers of nerdly things.

that said, if you're business model is *that* coupled to a single event, you may have a systemic problem you probably should get resolved.

I'm really surprised that some of these $150+ boxed game makers don't work on having product available at other price points: Aka, make a:
$20 version with just the rules and a board you print out (you figure out your own tokens and dice)
$30 version, same as $20 but here's token art to print out too.
+$5 add on: official box with bits and bobs sorting.
+$15 add on: hq, glossy and felted cardboard board.
+$20 add on: makerbot files to 3d print your own mini's.
+$40 add on: we'll ship you mini's and dice.
...
...
Full price, everything professionally made and stuffed into a box, buy and go package.

Ninen said:

As a nerd, I don't wish death on many nerdly things or makers of nerdly things.

that said, if you're business model is *that* coupled to a single event, you may have a systemic problem you probably should get resolved.

I'm really surprised that some of these $150+ boxed game makers don't work on having product available at other price points: Aka, make a:
$20 version with just the rules and a board you print out (you figure out your own tokens and dice)
$30 version, same as $20 but here's token art to print out too.
+$5 add on: official box with bits and bobs sorting.
+$15 add on: hq, glossy and felted cardboard board.
+$20 add on: makerbot files to 3d print your own mini's.
+$40 add on: we'll ship you mini's and dice.
...
...
Full price, everything professionally made and stuffed into a box, buy and go package.

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Speaking as a businessman, that is not a sustainable model, especially for a small company or an individual. That is too many SKUs for starters. Also, the reason the $150 big box is available for $150 is because they are contracted to print a certain number of units.....usually in the thousands. So they get a scaling discount based on volume - good ol'
"economies of scale". If you were to only print 10 copies of the box, the game likely will cost $500-$1000 for only those 10 units, maybe even more. They will have to be hand-made because no factory is going to do a production run of 10 units when they can run 1000s of units for another project and make substantially more money for themselves.

With the way you have it listed, the game maker will have zero idea how many of each SKU he/she will be able to sell. Either he will have to try to produce hundreds to thousands of units, and hopefully sell through.....or produce units at individual quantities, and at a severely marked up price, therefore earning no profit.

This is why KS is successful for board games. It gives the designers a way to more precisely gauge how many units they can sell, so they can go to the factory and order a specific number of units they know with certainty they can sell. The factory can give them an accurate cost, discounted based on volume. Can you imagine trying to do this before KS was a thing? You would have to risk your own money, GUESS how successful your game is going to be, and hope that you could sell all the copies you made. Otherwise you would be stuck with a huge inventory and have to sell all remaining copies at a loss.

Mizake said:

Speaking as a businessman, that is not a sustainable model, especially for a small company or an individual. That is too many SKUs for starters. Also, the reason the $150 big box is available for $150 is because they are contracted to print a certain number of units.....usually in the thousands. So they get a scaling discount based on volume - good ol'
"economies of scale". If you were to only print 10 copies of the box, the game likely will cost $500-$1000 for only those 10 units, maybe even more. They will have to be hand-made because no factory is going to do a production run of 10 units when they can run 1000s of units for another project and make substantially more money for themselves.

With the way you have it listed, the game maker will have zero idea how many of each SKU he/she will be able to sell. Either he will have to try to produce hundreds to thousands of units, and hopefully sell through.....or produce units at individual quantities, and at a severely marked up price, therefore earning no profit.

This is why KS is successful for board games. It gives the designers a way to more precisely gauge how many units they can sell, so they can go to the factory and order a specific number of units they know with certainty they can sell. The factory can give them an accurate cost, discounted based on volume. Can you imagine trying to do this before KS was a thing? You would have to risk your own money, GUESS how successful your game is going to be, and hope that you could sell all the copies you made. Otherwise you would be stuck with a huge inventory and have to sell all remaining copies at a loss.

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I guess I figured that no one factory is going to handle all the bits and bobs. the dice place isn't likely to be setup to do felted game boards; the book binder isn't likely to do mini's. Etc etc. So rather than contract with *someone* who subcontracts all the other places (let's be real here, everyone involved is almost certainly in the alibaba ecosystem) and then gets paid to build and shrinkwrap boxes; the businessman does it himself. Sure, a bit more work perhaps some storage space, but at the end of the day he's got a pallet of minis, a pallet of game boards; etc etc. Hell, if they want, ship all that shit to Amazon and let them warehouse it (for an uglier cut of the pie of course) And in the format I described; some portion of your orders are going to be purely digital goods, which we can assume will have a pretty decent profit margin if your content people are paid some form of lump sum and/or residuals.

I'm not knocking KS for allowing real people to be the angel investor for those using it; or even trying to replace it. But in this day and age of print on demand publishing; chinese makerbot factories, et all; there's got to be a better solution for nonKS situations than the all or nothing of shlepping 50 lb complete set boxes to game stores and praying they convince one of their couple whales to put down the bills.

Edit: looking into Amazon's own print on demand service: a 40 page black and white softcover rulebook costs $1.33 to print. I find it hard to believe that a $5 or $10 markup over the PDF copy won't make a profit?

Ninen said:

As a nerd, I don't wish death on many nerdly things or makers of nerdly things.

that said, if you're business model is *that* coupled to a single event, you may have a systemic problem you probably should get resolved.

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That single event, and Essen in Germany, are where i buy most of my games for the year, since that's where they release. And I am definitely not alone in that, with as many people as I see toting away 5 to 10 board games, if not more. So the consumers play a part in the ecosystem. Games release at gencon, games preview at gencon and you can preorder. All of these sales go directly through the company, no distributor, no middleman, which I assume maximizes the money they make. Plus just picking up an older game at their booth, but again, with no middlemen involved.

And its not just direct sales on the floor. I probably buy 6 to 10 games at gen con, a few new RPG releases, but then pre order one or two more games that I have demoed and add a few more to a list to buy upon release in the coming months. That hands on info is invaluable to making a decision to buy a game, I can't trust DiceTower and the rest of youtube for everything.

It's the ecosystem they've built. Hopefully they can adapt for this year and hype up some releases throughout july and august and still get those sales.

On the topic of board gaming in the present, anyone using BoardGameArena.com? It has been what my gaming groups have been using on our usual board game nights. It's pretty slick.

I've worked Gencon a number of times for a bunch of different companies. The millions of dollars that changes hands that weekend is staggering.

Awwww yeah: