Brandon the Game Dev

Creating board games takes an enormous amount of time and effort. The simple fact is that there are a lot of distinct tasks that have to be handled to turn a game from an idea into reality. This is why I urge each new board game designer to share the workload, delegating tasks to a team instead of doing them all alone. When it comes to delegation, it helps to define some roles. Let’s start with three roles: board game designer, developer, and publisher.

The first thing you need to know about designer, developer, and publisher roles is simple. The lines are blurry. The definitions I am about to give you are simply for your convenience. They are to be tweaked, twisted, torn up, or thrown out at your convenience.

What’s the difference between board game designer, developer, and publisher?

Designers make the game’s soul. They come up with the basic ideas behind the game (the core engine), design mechanics, create the rules, and sometimes even come up with the theme.

Developers bring the game to life. Developers tweak until the game is perfected. They commission art, proofread, and play-test. Sometimes they even order samples and liaise with reviewers.

Publishers share the game with the world. They take the completed game created by designers and developers, and run as far as they can with it. They raise funds, market the game, and if everything goes according to plan, manufacture and fulfill it.

Designers can develop, publishers can develop, designers can publish, publishers can design, developers can design, and developers can publish. It’s all very flexible.

A sample timeline for a board game designer, developer, and publisher team

What does this look like in practice? I’ll demonstrate below with the sample timeline I created for Kickstarter Math: How to Deliver Your Board Game On-Time and Within Your Budget.

Validate game idea by market	Publisher	23 weeks before campaign
Develop basic lore	Developer	23 weeks before campaign
Game specs	Publisher	23 weeks before campaign
Contract	Publisher	22 weeks before campaign
Set up website	Publisher	21 weeks before campaign
Set up mailing list	Publisher	21 weeks before campaign
First draft of the game	Designer	19 weeks before campaign
Manufacturing RFQs	Publisher	18 weeks before campaign
Fulfillment RFQs	Publisher	18 weeks before campaign
Start and maintain WIP thread on BGG	Designer or Developer	18 weeks before campaign
Work on brand	Publisher	18 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game – early, private	Designer	18 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game with at least one person not designing it	Designer	17 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game – online, general	Designer	16 weeks before campaign
Preliminary artwork	Developer	15 weeks before campaign
Screen artwork with audience	Publisher	15 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game – online, guided	Developer	12 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game – blind, online	Developer	11 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game – blind, offline	Developer	11 weeks before campaign
Create physical prototype (with or without art)	Developer	11 weeks before campaign
Test physical prototype	Developer	9 weeks before campaign
Sign-off on game / Art must be done	Publisher	9 weeks before campaign
Print review copies	Publisher	9 weeks before campaign
Facebook group outreach	Publisher	9 weeks before campaign
Board Game Geek outreach	Publisher	9 weeks before campaign
Reddit outreach	Publisher	9 weeks before campaign
Send review copies	Publisher	7 weeks before campaign
Podcast outreach	Publisher	7 weeks before campaign
Blogger outreach	Publisher	7 weeks before campaign
Streamer outreach	Publisher	4 weeks before campaign
Press outreach	Publisher	2 weeks before campaign
Manufacturing preparation (complete)	Publisher	1 week before campaign
Fulfillment preparation (complete)	Publisher	1 week before campaign
Kickstarter campaign	Publisher	Campaign
Pre-order / sales system	Publisher	TBD
Ongoing distribution	Publisher	TBD

Interpreting the sample timeline

As you can see, publishers typically handle the majority of tasks associated with creating a game. This is because publishers act as organizations which have the resources to coordinate a lot of different tasks simultaneously. Designers, on the other hand, have relatively few tasks – design the game and do some early play-testing – but their work is critical! Game design and play-testing take up more time than nearly anything else except for possibly manufacturing and commissioning art.

Developers are in the middle. When games are first created, they’re often raw and rough. They’re nowhere near ready for the marketplace. They have to be further developed before a publisher can do much with them.

You’ll notice that the timeline doesn’t linearly go from design to development to publishing. This is no accident! From the very beginning, the publisher will need to make sure an idea is viable from a manufacturing, cost, and market perspective. Publishers who accept submissions rule out pitches that don’t meet these requirements. Publishers who work directly with certain designers may create specifications which the designer is obligated to follow. It depends on who you’re working with and how they roll.

Developers can get involved early on too! If the publisher and designer have a clear idea on what the theme will be, a developer can start working on certain elements of the game that will be applied later. This could involve creating lore or commissioning artwork. This can have the effect of enriching the game as an overall experience while saving time in the long run for everybody involved.

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The most important takeaway here is to come up with a coherent way to split up labor. The board game designer, developer, publisher paradigm is the simplest way I know of doing that. This is a method I’ve been using on my own games, Yesterday’s War and Tasty Humans, and I’ve found it extraordinarily effective.

I’ll leave you with a question: are you more of a designer, developer, or a publisher? Let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear from you 🙂

Over the last couple of weeks of Behind the Scenes: Lessons from a Kickstarter Board Game Publisher, I’ve talked about some of the strange goings-on I’ve noticed in the board game industry. I’ve talked about why People are Weird, Markets are Weirder…Especially with Board Games and Why Board Game Publishers Like Some Games and Don’t Like Others. Today, we’re going to talk about the tabletop gaming news cycle, and why it is – frankly – just plain weird.

There’s nothing conspiratorial here. There’s no grand machination orchestrated by shadowy figures. There are, however, definitely weirdo group dynamics that are exacerbated by the technological advances of our era, namely search engines, social media, and an unending deluge of data. Nowhere are these weird group dynamics more obvious than in the tabletop gaming news cycle.

People Are Weird. So are their media consumption habits.

In People are Weird, I stated that “gamers are becoming ever more sophisticated in ways to narrow down what they’d like to buy. No human being, let alone a busy one with a family or work or friends, could analyze every game to see what looks like ‘the best idea.’ Gamers do what any rational person would do in this situation – take mental shortcuts to make snap decisions.”

Turns out, people do the same thing with news, too. Left to our own devices, we gravitate toward news sources that act as comfort food for our mind. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and every Silicon Valley website out there that uses algorithms and automation to curate your experience only further serves to make you dangerously comfortable. Your Facebook feed shows you political news that enforces your current beliefs. Amazon suggests you buy items that resemble what you’ve bought before. Google tweaks your results based on what you click.

Good media outlets understand people. They help create the tabletop gaming news cycle.

Now in board games, thankfully, this effect is more innocuous. Curators of board game news, no matter who they are, have a vested interest in getting more views. They either want to display ads, sell merch, push their games, or take donations. This is true even for people who just want to pay the web maintenance bills. However, to get traffic, you have to talk about things that people are already reading about. You have to go through Google, social media, and Board Game Geek to find out where the hype is. The most successful websites create valuable content, yes, but they also by necessity have to be masters at the web traffic game. They know how to use the right keywords and buzzwords to follow the trends.

Websites need clicks, search engines need to work effectively, and gamers want to stay informed. At every level of the tabletop gaming news cycle, from the news-makers to the curators (search engines) to the readers, the incentive structure forces articles into saying the same thing repeatedly. That’s why there are a billion reviews of Azul online. That’s why gaming news has the general malaise of sameness after a while.

Social media follows the same rules.

“Okay, so I’ll just turn to social media and forums instead,” you might say. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest,  Reddit, and Board Game Geek can all provide alternative viewpoints to published websites. It is, after all, user-generated content. You would think that this would counterbalance the sameness of the larger tabletop gaming news cycle, but this is not the case either.

Every social media site and every forum worth its salt has some way of sorting. Social media sorts popular posts and prioritizes their position in the feed so more people see them. Reddit uses upvotes and downvotes, which – whether you admit it to yourself or not – colors the way you perceive the comment that follows. Board Game Geek has more complicated version of that which effectively does the same thing, involving Geek Gold, badges, a points system, and probably twenty other features that I still haven’t learned about after a few years of using the site. The incentive structure still exists.

Imagine, for a moment, a truly egalitarian website where there was no sorting, except for purely chronological and there were no upvotes or downvotes. Even in a place like that, there would still be “right” and “wrong” answers based on what people are expected to say. People are expected to conform to certain patterns, to like certain games, and say certain things. You follow the pattern, people praise you. You don’t follow the pattern, people think you’re weird. This is neither good nor bad, it simply is.

It’s not going to change.

At every level of news sourcing for any industry, including board games, there are incentives to say the same thing over and over. There are incentives to praise specific games and specific types of games. I don’t see a way around this or a way to change it. In fact, I even covered this a long time ago in The Board Game Industry: Powers That Be & The Hype Machine.

I’m loath to leave you on such a sour note, so I will conclude with five recommendations for new creators who want to make board games:

1. Figure out what kind of games people like to play, then make that but with your own spin.
2. Work in a team with other talented people.
3. While working in a team, work on more than one game at once.
4. Accept the weirdness of people, markets, and news cycles.
5. Reach out to players directly.

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Remember you’re a part of a bigger picture. Creative work can be very difficult and it can seem unbelievably difficult to get attention online. Stay strong, keep creating good work, work with talented people, and keep trying! You’ve got one supporter already 🙂

It’s no secret that board game publishers like to reduce risks. Most publishers have a system in place to help them filter marketable game ideas from unmarketable game ideas. Explained this way, it sounds innocuous. It looks like a true meritocracy where the best ideas are the ones taken to the market. Yet the process, so heavy on rejection, has left many game designers heartbroken.

Board game publishers have to sort good from bad. Most people already get this.

Most designers understand, at least on some level, the need to separate good ideas from bad ones. Companies have limited resources and can only spend their time developing the best of the best. The heartbreak comes from the seemingly arbitrary nature of what is accepted and what is not.

“Why wasn’t my [insert original idea] run with? There are mechanics in there that nobody’s ever seen!”

“Why did they retheme my [insert original theme] game into a generic fantasy world?”

“Why did they cut out half the parts and sell it for $19.99?”

“Did they really have to add miniatures?”

Consumers decide “good” from “bad.”

Last week I wrote People are Weird, Markets are Weirder…Especially with Board Games, in which I do my best to explain – without seeming like a total madman – why markets follow seemingly arbitrary trends. I explain why people don’t like to take risks in a world with so many choices. The central idea of that piece is product-market fit – the idea of a product tailor-made for an existing market of people.

Product-market fit is the law of the land. If your game doesn’t meet people’s specific desires, the overwhelming amount of games coming out will quickly bury it. Your game must be perfectly suited to meet the tastes of a sizable niche of people. This is the First Law of Small Business. Any business that wishes to survive has to play by these rules, at least until they’re a truly massive business (like Comcast, Verizon, Exxon, etc.)

Board game publishers are small.

All board game businesses are at least sort of small. Even the “hulking behemoth” of Asmodee has about 750 employees. You probably work for an employer that has more people than that, let’s be real. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a corporation that small, aside from my own Pangea Games. This is all to say that even if Asmodee were to produce games that didn’t have product-market fit, they wouldn’t be able to survive long.

Publishers are keenly aware of this, so they are very careful how much financial risk they expose themselves to. I bet you that 95% of publishers are three duds away from closing up shop. The profit margins on games can be enormous, but they usually are not.

Building on the above point, many publishers like to create a portfolio of different kinds of games to reduce risks. They may specialize in multiple different themes or games of different weights. They may say “we make this very specific type of game, this very specific type of game, and this very specific type of game…nothing else!” Each publisher’s niche is set by a variety of internal and external factors that are unknowable except to the people involved. Sadly, this leaves many game designers who submit their game ideas in the dark.

Board game publishers respond to external factors that are mostly invisible to designers.

What could some of these hidden internal and external factors be? The first one that comes to my mind is manufacturing costs. The price of the different pieces that go into board games along with the cost of shipping (which is a function of weight and size) drives what is profitable and what is unprofitable. Some games that are dependent upon very large boxes, very heavy components, or hard-to-make pieces cannot be made profitable at a price that consumers are willing to pay. So they get the axe.

Most publishers have friends in the business. They could be manufacturers, retailers, designers, or playtesters. Relationships provide intangible benefits to the publishers who have them, meaning that some games are easier to make as a result. Likewise, if a publisher is dependent upon a retailer such as Target for success, they might find that their business is dictated by the purchasing manager of an entirely different company! The fact is: these things are unknowable to the designer who submits a game. All they can do is submit the game.

Lastly, publishers may be working toward branding or market positioning that is different from what you can see online. Most savvy business owners plan a couple of years in advance. They are often in the middle of executing long-term changes that haven’t begun to bear fruit yet. They could be transitioning into heavy games or small box games, or changes exclusively into a sci-fi games company. It’s impossible to know until the branding changes are made public.

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There are so many factors that drive what board game publishers are willing to spend time on. They include market interest, existing contacts, manufacturing costs, future corporate strategy, and more. When you, as a game designer, submit games to publishers with your fingers crossed, don’t feel bad if you wind up rejected. You’re the captain of a boat on a bigger sea 🙂