Brandon the Game Dev

Gamification has become quite the buzzword lately. The concept is simple: through gamification, you take the elements we associate with games – point scoring, competition, rules – and apply them to something else. Businesses have fallen in love with this concept because they’ve found that gamification works wonders for motivating people. But why?

That’s a complex question. For that reason, I’ve brought in Sean Fallon, Founder & CEO of Smunchy Games and User Experience (UX) Designer extraordinaire. His background in UX has given him a keen sense of what motivates people to take action.

By looking at game design from this new angle, we hope to help you understand why board games are so playable and what that means for other aspects of our lives. Without further adieu, I’ll now turn it over to Sean.

Why Gamification Makes Work Fun

Gamification is a fantastic tool. Using it when users have to complete mundane, repetitive tasks is always a good idea. A better way to understand gamification is through game design- whether that means playing a game or designing one.

Why does gamification make everything else more fun? This is a question that many have asked in the UX design space, where many are looking for ways to incorporate it. However, they always seem to treat gamification as an afterthought, and that can be one of the largest mistakes they make.

People sometimes think of gamification as something that isn’t needed or is secondary to other “important” features. If gamification is implemented and is also the core concept that is designed around, it will drive amazing results that keep people coming back and enjoying whatever they’re participating in. For example, people have more fun with gamified work and often put in more effort!

Gamification is Motivational Magic

Gamification is a win all around. When used in business, it means higher quality results for the company. These results are obtained purely because the person putting forth that effort was having fun and forgot they were doing mundane tasks.

Gamification really is a fascinating concept that dramatically increases productivity. As one of the old sayings go, “time flies when you’re having fun.” It’s true. When we have fun, we focus on what we’re trying to do.  Think of another common adage: “love what you do and you will never work another day in your life.” This is also true to some degree and revolves around having fun.

Why do we make games for children when it comes to education, completing chores, or doing a task that they wish not to do? Are adults so different that they aren’t allowed to have fun with what they’re doing?

Games provide a way for us to accomplish tasks we never thought we’d be able to accomplish before. More importantly, that sense of accomplishment makes us as humans feel great. It allows us to push forward, making another round of fun go by until we’ve accomplished the task. This cycle then repeats.

Board Game Design Makes You Better at Business (Because of Gamification Principles)

So why bring any of this up? What’s the point?

I’ve been designing and working with tabletop games for the last 5 years. In fact, I would encourage anyone who is in the UX design profession or planning to get into it to play more tabletop games, or try your hand at making your own – even if it’s just to understand the process.

The reason I suggest this is because whenever it comes to my UX design work – whether I’m designing an application for a massive Fortune 10 enterprise client or I’m working on a tiny card game – it’s important to understand these user experiences. While game design is clearly different than application design, it is absolutely a wonderful way to stretch your UX muscles.

A Practical Example

For example, a card game may have 40 cards, all different abilities, skills, thoughts, rules, and forms of actions. These play out in many different experiences for the players involved. This type of journey mapping, from a mechanics perspective, is extremely helpful when understanding the feelings and emotions the players may go through during the game. This is a treatment we apply to a journey map, turning it into an empathy map. You can further pare down journey maps and empathy maps to very specific scenarios and instances which create many playtesting questions. Playtesting in this stage of game design is related to user research in UX design.

These processes are similar in many different forms of design. The reason why this particular process for game design can bring a user “ delight” is that it allows the UX designer to think beyond the experience. This may sound counter-intuitive, but it’s not. This is because it breaks the designer out of their structured experience shell and into the creative process. Allowing the UX designer to think beyond the immediate experience at hand shows the designer the big picture – the end to end experience. When practiced in this way, we take all of these thoughts, experience, journey maps, playtests, and user research; combining it into this nice package of creative thought. In this particular case, gamification.

This gamification package is a box filled with fun. Because of the exercises in both game design and application design, the UX designer can apply gamification in such a way because they’ve been able to stretch those UX muscles in game design. Everything becomes more fun for users/players in the end and brings us full circle to the effort put in by others – and makes it more fun for the UX designer too.

Final Thoughts

If you take anything away from this article, take this away with you: gamification is used best when trying to focus the user’s effort into accomplishing any task set before them.

I want to end this article with a little game. Go back through this article and count how many times I use the words “fun” and “UX”. Once you have the number of each of these, add them together. Take that number and add your birth month to it plus the number of letters in your first name. Then find your favorite board game on Board Game Geek and leave a comment with that number and that game.

Kickstarter vs. retail: it’s an epic battle for the ages. We live in a world where over $165 million of the tabletop game industry’s $1.5 billion was raised on Kickstarter. Obviously, retail’s going the way of the dodo. So it goes.

Not so. Retail is a lot bigger than Kickstarter, but Kickstarter is a lot flashier. In reality, both forms of distributing board games serve different purposes.

As someone who’s keenly interested in your motivations as a board game creator or business owner, I must confess there is no one-size-fits-all answer. How you respond to the matchup of “Kickstarter vs. Retail” is very dependent on your goals. For that reason, I’d like to weigh the pros and cons of both.

Kickstarter Distribution Pros

Let’s start with the obvious pros of Kickstarter. First and foremost, there are far fewer formal restrictions on what you can and can’t make. You can make products that wouldn’t fit in well in a traditional store. Kickstarter basically lets you create what you want as long as it doesn’t violate their Terms of Service and there’s a reasonably good chance you can fill orders.

Kickstarter also doesn’t restrict whether you can go to retail after the campaign. Many creators have launched their Kickstarter campaigns and wound up in retail stores later. You may very well take the same path.

If it were a battle of flashiness and attention-gathering, Kickstarter would win Kickstarter vs. retail. Retail has its advantages, and we’ll cover those later, but no one can deny the sheer rockstar excitement of launching a Kickstarter campaign.

Kickstarter Distribution Cons

Lest you think Kickstarter is a beautiful dream, let’s go over the ways it can be a nightmare. First, it’s an enormous amount of work. I have a 70-something article series on this site that’s been pulling in traffic for almost two years. That’s how much work it is to run a board game Kickstarter. This is not something to take lightly – it will eat up your free time, a lot of money, and you may have to sacrifice some other things you want.

“But that’s the cost of freedom, Brandon!” Perhaps, but a lot of time, freedom isn’t really what it looks like. Retailers report to customers, and if you go through a retailer then you report to them. Take the retailer out of the picture, sell directly to customers, and you report to the customers. The customers are your boss. They’re above you on the org chart.

While you can choose your customers by making different types of products, you will ultimately have to make a product that people want. For board games, that means making a game that a certain set of gamers wants to play. When you create a game for a specific demographic of gamers, that means you’ve achieved the holy grail of business: product-market fit.

Achieving product-market fit means tweaking components, arts, and gameplay to suit your audience. You have to match or exceed customer expectations. Retailers have to do this, too, but often it’s easier to figure out what you have to do to please them. They’ll either tell you outright or you take photos of their shelves and figure out what kind of products they sell.

Finally, there’s one last major issue with Kickstarter campaigns. When the campaign is over, you may lose your audience if you’re not careful. This is less on an issue with retail stores who can passively sell your games on an ongoing basis. Two years after you get into Barnes & Noble, you’ll still be selling games. Two years after a Kickstarter campaign, there will probably be no meaningful engagement on your project page.

Retail Distribution Pros

Once you’re in a retail store, you’re pretty much good to go. Some stores will buy inventory outright and some will buy on consignment. But in neither case will a purchasing manager buy something that’s not likely to sell. They are gatekeepers who are attuned to their markets’ desires.

When people see something in a physical store or even a big name retail store online, it makes it seem more legitimate. That means retail distribution is a good way to reach the “Never Kickstarter” crowd, which is bigger than you think.

Most importantly, you only have to please a handful of retailers to stay in business. You don’t have to deal with hundreds or thousands of gamers. You simply have to please a few retailers. Isn’t the simplicity a relief?

Retail Distribution Cons

Kickstarter is complex, but accessible to the masses. Anyone can launch a Kickstarter campaign, but not just anyone can get into a store. Unfortunately, retail distribution is managed by gatekeepers. You have to know who to talk to in order to get anywhere.

So how exactly do you get a hold of purchasing managers anyway? To tell the truth, it’s not hard but it does require finesse that most people don’t have. You have two options. Option one: find out who purchases games for the store you’re interested in and cold call or email. You put your best foot forward and potentially get the door slammed in your face. Option two: get a mutual contact to break the ice. If you’re well-connected and savvy with tools like LinkedIn or Twitter, option two is more attractive and accessible. If you’re not, option one is your fallback.

What do you say when you get them on the phone, though? Well, depends on who you’re talking to and which store it is, but there are some common throughlines. For one, they probably want you to finish the game. At the very least, you need a prototype and at the most extreme, you need the game printed and warehoused. Anything less and you’ll probably be ignored or brushed off.

Last but not least, each store has a different market and stocks different products. Your products must meet their market. Instead of on an individual level, you must achieve product-market fit on a store level. Otherwise, why would stores with tight margins spend valuable shelf space on you? The best way to figure out what works well in the store boils down to two methods. One, ask directly – starting with cashiers. Two, observe what’s already there and make something like that, but a little different.

Final Thoughts on Kickstarter vs. Retail

There’s no silver bullet. Kickstarter vs. retail is a question that must be decided on based on your needs and your business’s needs. By spelling out the pros and cons above, I hope you can make a more informed decision 🙂

A lot of board game creators ask the same question: “how do you fund your board game on Kickstarter?”

It’s a great question. Kickstarter is complicated, but the potential to earn thousands of dollars from dozens, hundreds, or thousands of backers is worth investigating.

But there’s a fallacy in this thinking. The way this oft-asked question is framed from the get-go can lead you astray.

I’ve written about how you have to bankroll your own board game projects long before they reach Kickstarter. That means you have to find an alternate form of funding. This is true whether or not you go to Kickstarter.

If you already have to raise funds before Kickstarter, that raises a big question. “Do you need to fund your board game on Kickstarter?”

The answer to that is no. Four alternatives readily come to mind. Let’s talk about them.

Note: I am not endorsing any of the four ways below. What’s good and what’s bad depends entirely on your situation, your business plan, and your pitch. The purpose of this exercise is to clearly delineate alternatives to Kickstarter, however attractive or unattractive they may be.

1. Self-fund.

A lot of times, people act as if Kickstarter were the only way to raise funding. It’s easy to forget that Kickstarter is only ten years old as of the time this article is being written. People have been starting businesses since ancient history.

Let that sink in. People have been raising funds for their projects since before angel investors, crowdfunding, or even the modern banking system. You don’t necessarily have to go with the newest, prettiest, trendiest funding method.

Self-funding is the grandfather of all fundraising. That means dipping into your personal funds, be it your checking account, savings account, 401(k), or using credit cards. You can even try asking friends and family for money.

Obviously, you don’t want to bet the family farm to try to fund your board game. Tapping into your retirement accounts can be a bad idea. Even drawing from your savings isn’t always the best option.

There is, nevertheless, one massive benefit to doing it this way – you don’t have to answer to anybody. You don’t have to try to chase Kickstarter trends. No bank, small business association, or angel investor can override your decisions when you self-fund. You are truly the master of your own destiny.

2. Get a loan from the bank.

“I’m not made of money, Brandon.” Most people aren’t. In a world in which people cannot come up with a few hundred dollars for an emergency, asking you to pull thousands from your own personal accounts to fund a board game project would be absurd.

To many people, the logical answer is to go to Kickstarter. After all, if you fund your board game on Kickstarter, you can build your business with sales before the product is even finalized!

Of course, this is built on some faulty assumptions in the first place. The most obvious is that you have to raise funds to create a game ready for Kickstarter in the first place. Kickstarter is a noisy medium where there are a lot of phenomenal options available for roughly the same price. Why would somebody back the concept of an awesome game when a print-ready awesome game is one more click away? In short, they wouldn’t.

If you are unable to self-fund and you need extra money to be ready for a Kickstarter, you can always ask the bank for a business loan. Granted, I’m not recommending this option, nor am I saying it’s a bad idea. It is merely an option that is available to you, and indeed, was the way that many businesses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to be.

(Just be careful with debt.)

3. Get an SBA loan.

Naturally, though, banks may show some hesitation to lend you money for one reason or another. Or perhaps you hesitate to take a loan from a bank. There is another place you can go, provided you live in the US: the Small Business Administration.

Much like a bank would, the SBA can provide loans. Fortunately, they often provide loans for smaller amounts with different loan terms and more attractive interest rates.

There are some hurdles, though, and many of them are not easy to clear. According to Fundera, the customers most likely to be approved had over $180,000 in annual revenue, a credit score of 680, and have been in business for four years or longer.

Clearly, this is not the right option for “I’m a college student and I want to make a board game.” It may be a good option for “I’m 41, have been in business for a while, and want to try something new.”

4. Find angel investors.

Last but not least, you can always seek out funding from an angel investor. Some people have lots of money and they seek ways to use it. One of the ways affluent individuals like to spend their money is by providing capital for a business start-up, sometimes for equity and sometimes for kicks.

This can seem like an extremely loopy answer. “Why would anybody give me tens of thousands to make a board game?” It’s a legitimate question to ask. The simple truth is that there are people out there who want to be involved in projects they like and for whom money is not an object. If you can’t self-fund or get a loan, finding a person like that becomes, by default, your next best bet.

Is it a long shot? Oh, absolutely. But it’s something to keep in mind.

Do You Really Need to Fund Your Board Game on Kickstarter?

Forget about Kickstarter for just a second. It is just a new venue for an old idea – selling attractive products to customers. Whether you crowdfund, take a loan, self-fund, or find an angel investor, you will have to face one simple question. Is my business meeting a real market need?

If the answer is “yes” and you can demonstrate with real evidence that the answer is “yes,” then don’t limit yourself to Kickstarter. Spending your time obsessing over the right way to raise funds is not nearly as important as making something worth raising funds to create.

Consider all the options.