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Board Game Creation Blogging Part 3 – Funding Method and Crowdfunding Basics

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This is part 3 of Blogging About Board Game Creation. I highly recommend reading the first two (or at least one) before reading this.

After finding a manufacturer, the question becomes how to fund the production of a game. There are obviously several ways to do so. One could try to get private funding from a few wealthy friends or a convinced investment group. One could send the game to established game publishers and hope to convince them to finish development and publish it. And the final option is crowdfunding, which is in essence an updated version of first on this list.

Crowdfunding requires a lot of work but gives the greatest amount of creative freedom to the designer, while private funding and established publishers offer less work but less freedom. I like the freedom to create what I want, and at the moment, my time is a very available resource to use in the creation and production of games. So I am going with the crowdfunding option. If you have a full-time job or other responsibilities, I would suggest going the find-a-publisher route. This ensures the least amount of work on your part (though it’s still quite a lot) and eliminates the whole “find a manufacturer” phase of the operation.

I had personally decided on crowdfunding long before ever coming close to finishing the game in the prototyping process. I already owned a company, and my dream is to own a company that produces all of the things I love (i.e. all of the things I make). Now obviously I can’t manufacture the game without proper equipment, the purchase of which would raise my kickstarter goals to astronomical levels. So I thought going with raising the cash myself through a crowdfunding platform (Kickstarter) and sending them to a manufacturer that would actually listen to what I said would be the best thing, considering my situation.

kickstarter-badge-funded

Hope to see this soon

Now, I would say to determine the method of funding before looking into anything else. In this way I did write these posts out of order. But I had the idea that I would be on Kickstarter when I started my project. And I made all of my following decisions accordingly. However, at this step in the process I reevaluated what I wanted my project to be produced as, and Kickstarter still seemed like the best option for me.
Now when making a Kickstarter campaign I can say that you should have a plan for everything. And the amount of money you need to raise should be the minimum you need to get the project done. That may sound obvious but if you plan on funding part of the project yourself and some large transactions don’t go through you may be paying a lot more than you bargained for.

The types of rewards, the story, how you’re going to do the video, and anything else you want to do (advertising, press releases, etc.) should be thought about and if all goes well, completed by the time the campaign begins. Then, after you get an idea of what you’re going to do, put the idea on the website immediately and submit it for approval. This does not mean that the project must be launched shortly after it is approved, but it does mean that you can launch it at any time after it has been approved. This is not what I did and I have suffered several delays as such. The Amazon payments process takes time, and so does Kickstarter approval. Take this time, and however much more time you need, to polish up the project and make the page look nice. Send the preview link to people and get feedback, make sure that you have a quote from the manufacturer, etc. When everything is in line is the time to start the project, not before.

In the next part, I’ll talk about exactly what that all means, and how to get the most out of a Kickstarter Campaign. Though this will have to wait until mine is actually over. In the mean time, if you’d like to hear something more in depth about one of the topics previously discussed, please leave a comment telling me what it would be. Thank you for reading.

Board Game Creation Blogging Part 2 – Looking for a Manufacturer

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I’m making a board game, and blogging about it. This is the second part of the process, which goes from finding a manufacturer to pricing for crowdfunding. If you are interested in the process before this, you might want to check out my earlier blog post. If something you want to know about is not covered in either part, please comment and I will try to fit it in in a future installment where I go more in depth into the process.

The process of finding a manufacturer really started before I even had the prototype, but it didn’t finish until long after. When I first went looking for manufacturers I wanted a U.S. one. I live in the U.S. and I like “made in USA” products. In this search I found very few contenders. The one that I wanted to go with was 360 Manufacturing, which makes all of the games for Hasbro, and apparently does other games, too. I say “apparently” because when I went to contact them, their “Request a Quote” form was broken. And when I emailed them I received no reply (I still haven’t gotten one and it’s been months). So I’m guessing that they either don’t care about other games (likely), don’t do them anymore (also likely) or are out of business (unlikely).

So I went back to the research board, and discovered to my dismay that making a game in the U.S. would be super expensive and have awful production times. I begrudgingly decided to have a look at Chinese manufacturers.

As you can see, China is much less attached to where I am.

As you can see, China is much less attached to where I am.

Now, there are several ways to go about having something manufactured in China. You can interface with the company directly, or going through a liaison company that will contact the manufacturer for you. Liaisoning is much easier on you, the game creator, but has a higher minimum number of games required, and higher prices overall. Interfacing with the company directly is cheaper, but puts way more work in your hands, and you can run the risk of getting a bad company that will a) Steal your game idea and take your money (or the reverse or one or the other) or b) poorly make your game and leave you with a crappy product and no legal way to get back at them.

I decided to go with directly talking to a company, because I have almost no money, and the higher order quantities would be raising the bar for my crowdfunding too far. Instead I decided to put my not-so-valuable-to-anyone-but-me time into researching what would be the best company for producing my game. I needed one that had good reviews and a tangible product set (see above for why one needs to make sure), had a relatively low minimum order, and could communicate in english relatively well (if either of us were to use google translate, that would be a mess).
In the end I decided to go with WinGo games, which had more reviews than any other company I saw (hint: if you’re reviewing a game manufacturing company, make the review easy to find) which gave me a good idea about its practices. It also had several glowing testimonials (The creator of “Gunship: First Strike” being the main one) and was relatively easy to get in contact with. It only takes one day to get emails back from them, which is amazing, and since they’re in China it’s right there when I get up in the morning. Their website is easy to navigate and fairly functional. It has a few problems but nothing too glaring. After a few emails and my idiotic showing of my lack of form-filling-out skills (they use an Excel spreadsheet) I was ready to get on to the budgeting part of the process. Really, the whole process was much easier than I thought. If I may complain, though, I’d say they do send answers back one at a time, rather than in aggregate. I know some people might be overwhelmed by a bunch of questions at once, but answering them one at a time does slow down the process.

Next time I’ll be covering the budgeting and introduction to crowdfunding parts of the process, and after that I’ll be moving into some more specific areas. Please leave comments telling me what you’d want me to write about more in depth.

 

Games That Teach – Axis & Allies and Short Term Planning

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When talking about board games, games so old and still so loved as “Axis and Allies” are hard to find. With so many versions, updates, and house rules, defining the core that is “Axis and Allies” can be difficult at times. One of the core elements,though, is most definitely the controlling of factories to get points to build more units with. And while this mechanic (mechanism) might seem like it favors strategy and thinking over the long term, I’d argue that it really encourages planning in the short term, for your next turn and not for future turns.

The one I have isn't the greatest.

The one I have isn’t the greatest.

Let me try to explain before you scream at me for being wrong (or more likely just leave the page). The resources you get at the end of a turn will not be used until the beginning of your next turn or later. A player can save up for long periods of time but there is almost no point when you’re being punched in the face by you opponent’s pieces. The illusion of long-term consequences comes from this ability to save, but really the game is just about how many IPC’s (resources) a player can get at the end of this turn to have the most effective next turn. While a player deploys resources at the end of their turn, it still means that the maximum they are thinking is two turns ahead, and if they think farther than that (i.e. want a battleship or aircraft carrier, which are expensive) they are likely to get taken out by their opponent who didn’t do that and is fighting with superior strength.

This is also coupled with the fact that the ultimate goals of each side are placed only several spaces away, except for the United States, which is impossible to take and has to produce units and move them across an ocean to be effective (which is why they usually have China). Players don’t have the time to think about turns farther in the future because if they do they’ll be beaten by players who thought about the turn directly ahead.

Now I’m not going to say that this makes for a bad game, or an un-educational game. In fact, the game is quite fun and in certain cases even has the player going for historical objectives. I do think, though, that the idea of Axis and Allies being a grand strategy game is silly. It’s a tactical game on a strategic board, which in and of itself is quite a good way to teach people about proper resource uses in the short term. And saving a few IPCs each turn will lead to getting some more powerful units in the future if done right. I quite like the short-term resource management that Axis and Allies has. And I also like the fact that it has the realism of a series of tactical victories leading to a strategic victory. It definitely isn’t like chess where a series of tactical blunders could stumble you into a strategic success. I like games that reward short-term victories with long-term benefits, even if in some, if not most, will make you second-best to the person who thought through the whole game.

Really, though, “Axis and Allies” is just a good game for dice chucking and pretending to be some foreign super-power for a night with some friends. Even if it isn’t as deep as it looks, it still lasts for some time and holds one’s interest the whole way though (if the players like WWII.)

Board Game Creation Blogging Part 1 – Inception to Prototyping

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I’m making a board game, and I run this blog, so I thought I could combine the two to write this blog post about making a board game.

I don’t know why I thought making a board game would be a good idea, but it seemed the most do-able project in my project lineup, aside from what I was already doing. In hindsight, this might not have been the case, but I think that making a board game might be one of the more rewarding things I’ll be doing for a bit, because it has immediate and highly tangible results. I like being near the end of a project and looking over the things I made and saying “Yes, I made these”. (Which, with the smallest number of games being 1000, might put me in a little over my head, but that’s a good thing.)

I’d say I started about a year and half ago. I’d graduated from high school two years early, and no longer had a chess partner (one of the few benefits of my forced interaction with people my age) and I wasn’t planning to go to college for a while. So I was just looking online a lot and drawing a bunch of comics, which I still consider my primary occupation. I had gotten on the fringes of the board game world when I had been looking up chess variants and other abstract strategy games (which I still love but getting only one other person to play them is kinda awkward). I decided to dive full into board games and got some of the most recommended beginner games (Pandemic) and some not so recommended games (Diplomacy). Quickly I discovered that while I was thinking about board games a lot, I didn’t have much time to play them. (My poker group was still a poker group and not the mini-gaming-group it is today. So I made up a bunch of designs for board games. The first was one I made for my mother’s birthday, which will show up later. But the main one was a historical game inspired by the Roman Empire. I had been learning quite a lot about the Romans (another hobby), and really wanted a game that captured the feeling of a late republican setting, which I found to my dismay during research was not available, at least how I wanted it.

So in the summer of 2013 I quickly made a prototype of my Roman game (Original code name) which at the time was really just cobbled together from other games that I’d played (Battlestar Galactica, Pandemic, Risk), seen (Eight Minute Empire, Cosmic Encounter), or had an idea of making (The board specifically was cannibalized from a Roman conquest game I still have plans for, although the boards are now quite different and will only get more so with development). I played it a few times with my family and friends, to which to response was a general “meh”. But I took “meh” on a first time prototype (a seriously bad one filled with inconstancies, spelling errors, and having almost no artwork for a very thematic game) by a guy who had absolutely no idea what he was doing as a sign that I had something good to work with here.

Seriously I played on this board several times.

Seriously I played on this board several times.

So I spent the next few months working on the game on and off. I had to stop several times because of important dates in my not-at-all lucrative comics business, and I tried building websites with no advertising plan in a small town. I heavily refined the game’s mechanics (mechanisms for snobs), wrote down actual rules, moved into a workable office space, made a good-looking board, and was just about to make better looking cards in January. I declared that I would playtest the game and have a Kickstarter launched by the end of February. My body’s immediate response to that plan was a month’s worth of migraines. At the middle of March I barely had the artwork done, so I decided to just order a prototype and see what information I could dig up. I did get to re-introduce the game to my friends, whose response went from “meh” to “man this is really cool!”. Unfortunately after that I got hit with a very bad cold and didn’t do my research (i.e. Why there isn’t a preview of my game by some well-watched game reviewers, etc.). But I did get a wonderful prototype at the end of it. Which I made a video about.

I think the new board might have helped

I went with the Game Crafter (www.thegamecrafter.com) to make my prototype for several reasons. The first and foremost is that it is very well known, and generally the most well-known producers make the most money and can afford to have the little touches it takes to make a high-quality product. Also, I considered the possibility of the planned Kickstarter failing, and me simply publishing the game through the already-uploaded files on the Game Crafter website, a proposition that seems less and less attractive, but might end up being the case if things go particularly badly. For these two reasons that are highly intertwined, I used the Game Crafter and only took a tiny glance at other platforms I could use for prototyping. I think, though, with the quality of components I got that I made the right decision.

I got several copies of the game, one of which is still wrapped and one is currently with me, being played by friends who now really like the game (of course it has negotiation elements, which can leave a sour taste in people’s mouths if played too much or in too long a game). I also got some other people to play-test it, to which to response was (and from my friends as well) “this is good, but the rules need some work”, which is what that phase of the process is for, so I can’t say it was a failure.

With this little bit of information in hand I dove in to the “Looking for a Manufacturer” phase which will be covered in the next post. I know I didn’t cover everything there is to cover here and I hope to cover some of the details more in-depth in later posts. If there is any particular part of the process you’d like to know about please leave a comment and I’ll move that closer to the top of my “to get done” list.

Games that Teach – BattleStar Galactica and Long Term Planning

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Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game is, as of now (on BoardGameGeek) one of the greatest board games of all time. And it is definitely the most played in my gaming group, which may or may not be a good thing. It can be gamed, and it can be a little annoying, so we can get a just a little mad sometimes. But really, it’s just fun, it’s one of the most fun times I’ve had almost every time I play it.

BSGHero
But there is something about BSG that I just love, and it isn’t revealing you’re a Cylon on the first turn to game the system. (Though I’m not sure this is a problem in the base game, or that it’s even really a good idea. It hasn’t been when I’ve been playing) It is the planning, and the treason (okay, I like the treason and the intrigue that comes with it), but the planning.

The game requires one to envision the endgame when surviving the present situation seems unlikely. While one is dealing with the current enemy warships, skill checks, and entering enemy robots, they must also constantly be thinking about who is and who may be a traitor, and if you might become a traitor in the future.

While you’re spending all your cards now to stop a Cylon (evil robot) invasion of the ship, or prevent a food shortage, you must think about how far this ship will move, is it really worth it to give up all of your cards now? (Yes, yes it is) Now, usually the worst happens, but if one has experienced teammates’ it usually ends in human victory. But what if it doesn’t, what if your teammates’ actually a Cylon? What if you are a Cylon? As long as there is the possibility of someone becoming a Cylon you have to remember to not do “too” well to avoid later suspicion.

And while avoiding doing too well as a good guy because you might become evil isn’t a realistic scenario, it does apply to various aspects of everyday life. Like, should I sink all of my money and/or time into this project, what will it prevent me from doing in the future (being a good villain)? Will it make other things I want to do harder? Etc. And I believe that it has really positively affected me and the way I look at future scenarios. Not to say that I was bad at long-term planning in the past and now I’m magically good, but I do have a bit of different perspective to look at things from and assess the future by.

In the end BSG is just a fun game of intrigue, bad stuff happening, and betrayal (Okay, I promise it’s fun, that sounded better in my head). But it can give a little push in the right direction when it comes to long term planning. It is by no means perfect, and by no means a class where one can develop the skill, but it could easily help with the development. Which is all we can really ask of a board game. (And Treason, we can ask that, too.)