Boardgames are a tough business to make money in. Anyone can become a designer. The market has thousands and thousands of games out there. Gamers have shelves and shelves loaded with games. They put games they don’t like or don’t have room for out into the used market.
What this all adds up to is that your game has to really fight to get attention. The game mechanics and components need to be really polished. The artwork needs to be very compelling. Thematic games need to have interesting themes and stories. More abstract/euro games need to have really tight rules.
It’s tough!
Most of the board games I have ended up playing in more recent years, have been via Tabletop Simulator (no consideration to try them, and since it’s online I don’t have to find people IRL to play with). Though I bought Survive: Atlantis and that game is hella fun and the board, pieces and cards are exceptionally well-made. I wanna get the other versions of the game that exist; they’re not even just thematic changes to the set, they actually have unique variants of the rules.
As a retailer, our margins are ever shrinking too. So many of these companies sell on Amazon and in big box stores that slash prices, everyone expects me to have those same bargain basement prices.
As someone that works in print it is an all but dead industry. 70 percent of companies that were around when I started 20 years ago are now closed and there is so little profit in print that the companies that are left are constantly on the edge of collapse.
Especially for things like board games there are so many different processes involved including often some special processes to get to your final product. This sometimes means you need to employ more than one company to get everything finished properly.
All of these things add up to making it less and less profitable to do these things so the companies that still manage to release a quality product and manage to stay afloat have my utmost respect, it is tough!
That kind of surprises me.
When I think about board games, I think of:
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Printed boards.
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Printed cards.
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Molded plastic pieces.
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Maybe cut wood pieces.
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Maybe glass counters.
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Maybe plastic dice.
And all of these have to be put in a box.
But…how labor-intensive are these? I’d think that the printing would be pretty heavily automated. I don’t know whether molded plastic needs a lot of processing (snipping seams or something?) or whether machines can bring a molded piece to a final state without human intervention.
kagis for an injection-molding plastic cost breakdown
https://www.omrajtech.com/composites-blog/cost-model-for-pricing-plastic-injection-molded-parts
Labor costs are associated with machine setup, operation, and quality control.
That doesn’t sound like there’s finishing costs involved.
Glass counters are machine-made.
I’m sure that cut wood pieces are done by a machine, or they’d cost a lot more and you’d rarely see them in budget sets.
Dice are done by a machine.
I guess that maybe a human could put N items of each into a box. That doesn’t seem like a lot of labor.
That doesn’t seem like a lot of labor.
Maybe for simple games, but for things that have a crates worth of stuff crammed into them like Gloomhaven, it seems like a bit more.
On the other side, there was a company that used cheap cardboard for everything and didn’t even include dice called Cheapass Games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheapass_Games They could probably manage.
My boyfriend is up to his eyeballs deep in boardgames. He does trade/sell the ones he knows are unlikely to get played again, but he’s probably got somewhere in the area of 120-140 games. The vast majority of the games he’s collected over the years have been funded by Kickstarter and many have expansions upon expansions to keep some games replayable. Many of the components are printed/manufactured in other countries, and still plenty of the games will run several hundred dollars each.
Once Trump was elected, with the talk about tarrifs he loosened up his budget to buy up what he could from his wish list, just to avoid this added expense.
This level of boardgaming is something I never knew existed till we started dating lol.
Can I hang out with your boyfriend?
We have weekly game nights! Unless you’re in the Chicago area though, might be a rough commute.
Dies MARTA transfer to the L? lol
It may either ease your mind (or give you anxiety) to know that a 100+ game collection is pretty average, and some people go way over that.
It’s not average. Not saying there is anything wrong with it, I love them, would love to have a hundred, but it’s not average.
‘Common’ might have been a better term.
It’s not common either lol 😭
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Everything is getting more expensive as if these parasites are just endlessly leeching
Time to get into cards
Also board games with simple apps to help, like Planet X.
Could do with learning some more card games. I love that you can play so much without having to buy anything new with them.
Dice perhaps as well? But other than perudo/liars dice I can’t think of much more than yahtzee. I usually just liars dice with a set of 50 I bought a while back and any cups that are available. Failing that you could probably even use your hands.
I heard of a solo dungeon crawler game you can play with cards called Scoundrel, need to read up on that.
Could do with learning some more card games. I love that you can play so much without having to buy anything new with them.
This, however, is anathema to an industry which is why you get card games that are thinly papered-over traditional playing card games with relabelled cards and slightly-altered rules. (Think Uno: the commercial wrapper around Crazy Eights.)
There are hundreds—or even thousands—of traditional games out there, playable with simple, ubiquitous playing pieces (like poker decks, small coloured stones/markers/whatever, and simply drawn boards on paper). So if the industry collapses you can keep playing new(-to-you) games for the rest of your life without running out.
Love letter is one I played recently that seems like it was probably based on a regular card game of some form. Skull is another, that one is so simple I wouldn’t be surprised if its origins predate modern playing cards.
the fact that you can buy counterfit tabletop games for a fraction of the price on aliexpress shows that there is no way to turn a profit in western printshops.
Yeah, tariffs are not going to get games printed in western countries. Those counterfeits often sacrifice quality of materials though. And there are many that are even shrunken down to reduce costs.
You’re conflating two different things:
- Getting games printed in China.
- Chinese counterfeit game publication.
#1 is not going to stop happening anytime soon. I saw this in a recent trip to Canada where I wanted to get some jigsaw puzzles with native art on them for friends. There were 500-piece sets manufactured in, I think, Seattle that were three times the price of 1000-piece sets manufactured in China. Yet buying one of each and taking a look at the contents there was little difference in the pieces. (The American-made one was a fraction of a millimetre thicker, but for that the cutting looked more accurate in the Chinese one. The pieces just fit better.)
#2 can be stopped, but would take intrusive border checks that most American businesses would absolutely not stand for.
My comment does not conflate anything.
