Brandon the Game Dev

Board game development is notorious for its trial-and-error approach. Experienced designers and developers will tell you that it’s all about iteration. You may create dozens of versions of the same game until you finally find one you’re satisfied with. Everything can be scrapped at a moment’s notice – mechanics, rules, art, and even basic core concepts.

So what’s going on? Are game creators bad at defining project requirements? Do publishers need to training in project management?

I say no. In fact, iteration is the at the root of board game development. Today, I talk about six specific reasons why this is an unavoidable part of the process.

1. Play-testing is chaos.

In the abstract, making a board game is fairly simple. You come up with basic ideas, find physical pieces to represent those ideas, and come up with game mechanics. Then you regulate the expression of those mechanics through rules.

Board game development requires the creation of an elegant system, much like programming in software development. Much like in software development, though, the tiniest changes can have outsized impacts on how the system as a whole functions.

Even simple abstract games like Chess and Go are so complex that the smartest computers in the world have just figured out how to beat people at them. It takes all that processing power to be able to understand the possible ramifications of each individual move. These games, by the way, and hundreds or thousands of years old. Most games in development are less than a year old.

What I’m saying is that play-testing a brand new game is chaos. You cannot possibly understand the nature of your creation until you spend a lot of time testing it. As your understanding grows, you will have to make design changes based around happenings that you could have never anticipated.

2. Form follows function.

Board games are physical products. Their form follows their function and their function follows gameplay. Just above, I’d mentioned how board game development was chaotic at its core because of the myriad variables that you have to slowly discover through play-testing.

Imagine what that implies from a materials standpoint. Every time your game changes, there is a possibility that you will have to swap out parts. The board might need to be bigger or smaller. You may need more or fewer pieces. Pieces may need to change in size. Each time the gameplay evolves, there is a risk that the physical form of the game has to change as well.

Early on, while board games are still being developed on pen and paper or in Tabletop Simulator, changing materials is easy. Once you get late in the game, though, such as with art, custom plastic pieces, or miniatures, it can be very complicated. Sometimes you’ll find that physical limitations or the costs associated with materials force you to make gameplay changes.

3. Art direction is complicated.

Similar to the above point, art needs to first and foremost suit the needs of the game. Because gameplay changes, art and graphic design will often have to change as well.

Yet there is even more to it than just that. Art direction, plain and simple, is complicated. You have to describe exactly how to create a specific piece of art to invoke a certain emotion and meet certain technical requirements. Communication is key when doing this, and often clients – myself included sometimes – can only say “make it pop.” We give vague requirements to artists because we don’t know how to give clearer ones.

What does this result in? Exactly what you would expect – revisions, rework, and sometimes additional costs. More clearly describing what you are looking for helps, but it’s not always possible and it’s not always a solution even when it is.

My recommendation is that you start with sketches or speedpaints when gathering art. If you need to revise artwork, this gives you a chance to do so before the majority of the work is completed.

4. Reviews can catch you off-guard.

Once you finally create your game, you’re not out of the woods yet. After all the board game development is complete, you still need independent reviewers to convince potential customers that your game is a good one. While board game reviews tend to skew positive, this is by no means something you can take for granted.

When you send a game out for review, prepare for the possibility that it will be panned. If the game goes over poorly, you will want to make more revisions before releasing the game. (Or you may even want to scrap the game entirely.)

5. The market can catch you off-guard.

I’ve talked about how important it is to vet your ideas before launching a product. Researching the market, studying people’s behavior, and using data to figure out what people want goes a long way.

But can we be honest for a second? Nobody is a soothsayer. Trends change fast. The market is fickle.

It is possible to work for a year on a game, play-test successfully, and create the entire product. At the end, you may find that you were slightly too late to launch. The market moved on. It doesn’t happen all the time, but if it does, you can often rework parts of the game you’ve already made and create something fresh.

6. Distributors have different rule book than Kickstarter.

One thing that bothers me: board game creators overrate Kickstarter and underrate traditional distribution. Having your game in Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or even Target is a safer bet than Kickstarter. Even small, local gaming stores, in my opinion, can bring you more sales and steadier cash flow.

But here’s the tricky thing. What succeeds on Kickstarter, which many board game creators use for funding, does not necessarily succeed in traditional distribution. With Kickstarter, shipping cost is a major driver of success. With traditional distribution, it’s shelf space or art style (looking buyable). The misalignment of incentives can force you into making revisions you didn’t expect.

If your endgame is to get into traditional stores, you will likely have to modify your game as a product. You might have to change materials, packaging, or even gameplay. This is easy to forget!

Embrace Iteration in Board Game Development

Board game development is rooted in trial-and-error. To succeed, you must accept this as a fact. Embrace the winding path of board game development and allow your product to slowly take shape. Creative work is often like this – meandering, unpredictable, and complex.

It’s not you. It’s the nature of the game!

Lately, I’ve been talking about the hard truths of the board game business. You can’t just make the board game you want. You have to make the board game other people want. Product-market fit is essential and without it, financial success much harder to obtain. Just look at some of these posts I’ve been publishing lately.

• Don’t Just Build a Board Game, Build a Business
• 6 Right and Wrong Reasons to Make a Board Game
• 4 Ways to Vet Your Board Game Before Launching a Kickstarter
• Board Games Aren’t Everything: 8 Reasons to Diversify Your Business

Well, guess what: I’m about to contradict all of that. I didn’t get into the board game business by being a human calculator. It wasn’t all about costs and benefits, supply chain management and marketability. I was 22 years old, chasing a childhood dream with blind passion.

Take a Leap of Faith

The great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard came up with the phrase “leap of faith.” At least, that’s halfway true since he never used those exact words. What he did exactly say is that “[t]hinking can turn toward itself in order to think about itself and skepticism can emerge. But this thinking about itself never accomplishes anything.”

Reason may set the human apart from the beast, but action still beats reason. It is by taking action that you can learn lessons that are emotionally real. You will experience things that will actually change you. If you create a board game, attempt a Kickstarter, and fall flat on your face, you will still generally be better off for it.

When Doors Slam Shut, Other Doors Open

In April 2018, I faceplanted. A game I had been working on for over a year and had spent $8,000 on had failed on Kickstarter. The reasons that led directly to that failure could not be readily corrected. The gap between the money I raised and the money I needed to raise was so great that I determined my best option was to ditch the game and move on.

Thank goodness I did. In a depressed fog, I somehow had the lucidity to make the right call on that. What’s more, the autopsy post I did on Highways & Byways led to a traffic spike that permanently increased the readership of this blog. I like to think of it as failing up.

A whole bunch of things came from that project that I didn’t even realize until now. For one, I’m in love and I’m engaged. One of the first things that made me stand out to my fiancee was that I was working on a board game about travel. It gave us something to talk about and bond over. The game didn’t launch, but the relationship sure did.

There isn’t a person on earth who could have predicted that. Nor could they have predicted that the increased traffic from the autopsy blog post made it possible for me to push the Discord server or the Facebook group. The clean slate gave me the chance to work on new projects – Tasty Humans and Yesterday’s War – with a team instead of alone.

Finally, the time wasted on the campaign gave this blog time to really take off. This blog has since become a major source of traffic for a marketing company that I run, which has superseded Pangea Games in revenue, profit, and personnel. If that campaign had made $50,000 or something, I would actually be worse off in business.

I’m not saying failure’s fun. It completely sucks. But it’s not the end of the world. The act of doing something you love can open branching pathways for you in life that you could never have otherwise anticipated.

Make the Board Game & Learn the Skills

I’m a big fan of the School of Hard Knocks. Whether you succeed on a project or not, the act of seeing something through to completion will teach you a ton. I have written a lot of posts on what goes into the act of designing a board game before. There are a lot of moving parts, and it takes a long time to create a board game.

Even the simple act of creating a game – not marketing it, packaging it, manufacturing it – simply creating game mechanics…my goodness. You have to play-test the thing dozens or hundreds of times. It takes seemingly endless hours of reiteration, re-versioning, and reimplementation. It can feel an awful lot like being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

If you want a board game to succeed financially, you have to learn project management, cost management, and supply chain management. This is true whether you go through Kickstarter or not. It’s brutal. So let me ask you this…

If you fail, do you instantly lose all the skills you gained?

No. You get to keep them. That’s a hell of a consolation prize.

Certainty & Order are Lies, but Beauty & Passion are Real

Life is chaotic and bizarre and nothing is guaranteed. More than that, life is absurd and we are all actively trying to seek out meaning in it. There are so many variables involved in starting a business or making a creative work that no one can say for certain what will and won’t work. It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.

Beauty and passion are real. As real as anything can be, anyway. When you make something you are truly proud of, no one can take that away from you. Creating something that you think should exist gives you something you can always look at and say “I created that because I wanted it to exist.” Passion leads us to take illogical, irrational leaps that sometimes work despite the odds. The long arc of human progress is full of leaps like this.

In pursuing passion, you’ll find yourself with all kinds of stories. Beauty and passion open doors when you share with others. You can ace job interviews and score free drinks in bars. You can make friends on airplanes and close deals with big clients.

Final Thoughts

This is not my usual how-to post. Nor is this a post about business strategy. This is a post for anyone sitting on the sidelines, intimidated by the possibility of creating something big.

Jump in. Do something you love! Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t. You won’t know until you try, and failure is not that bad. Experience is a fantastic teacher and sometimes you have to take a leap of faith.

Good luck 🙂

Board games aren’t everything. The world is very large and the opportunities to serve others are diverse and abundant.

I’ve been thinking big-picture lately. Many of you have likely noticed this with my recent posts. In Don’t Just Build a Board Game, Build a Business, I make the argument that you should consider creating something larger than a single game. The recent post, 6 Right and Wrong Reasons to Make a Board Game, is all about why your motivations are important to your long-term well-being beyond simple financial success. Could Kickstarter Become a Board Game Store by 2020 and Board Gaming in 2029 are my attempts to look into a crystal ball and imagine what the board game industry might be like in the near future.

All of this is to say: question your underlying assumptions! I cannot stress this enough. It’s a fool’s errand to do the wrong thing the right way.

Why write about this?

First, a little bit of background. I’m a big believer in Jamey Stegmaier’s Lesson #81: Don’t Quit Your Day Job. During the day, I work as a System Analyst on very complicated software in a big hospital. Additionally, I have begun providing marketing consulting services both inside and outside of the board game industry. I am also working on two tabletop games – Tasty Humans and Rift Shifters: Yesterday’s War. In short, I practice what I preach here.

Before we get to the 8 reasons, let me make a few more points so no one has any false ideas about how this is possible.

1. This is only possible through the power of teamwork. Any of these items alone, except for the day job, are not doable by one person’s effort.
2. As for the consulting, that did not come out of the blue. After I started regularly receiving cold contacts via this blog, I set up a separate company entirely to handle them. Heck, I’m still working on publishing the site!
3. It took me years to get to this point. The years 2015 to 2018 were like standing in front of an automatic butt-kicking machine made to show off the durability of steel-toed boots.

Board Games Aren’t Everything: 8 Reasons to Diversify Your Business

Reason 1: The board game boom may or may not last.

Board game sales have been growing year over year over year for several years. On the surface, this seems like unmitigated great news. After all, jumping into a growing industry is generally a winning move.

The only problem is we don’t know how long this boom will last. People might get tired of board games. Not to mention, they’re a non-essential good. Kickstarter has only been active since 2009, which I will note, is after the financial crises of 2007 and 2008. We’ve been in a bull market for a long time as of the writing of this article. We don’t know what will happen to the modern board game industry when the market isn’t doing so well.

Now, hey, don’t be sad! I personally believe board games have a bright future and that they are popular for a lot of reasons. Failure to acknowledge the inherent uncertainty of a single market is foolish, though.

Reason 2: Board game fundraising models may change.

All that time on social media, I’m seeing people lament that larger companies are pushing smaller ones off of Kickstarter. I’ve even written about the possibility of Kickstarter turning into a store in the near future. Either way, the board game fundraising model is inexorably changing. In the near future, the fundraising model could be such that it forces you to either go through a publisher or become the publisher. Not everybody can or should do that!

Reason 3: Board games have a long time-to-market.

Board games are long haul projects. No matter how fast you try to move, board games take several months to create, and often they take years. It’s hard to stay in a business where it takes that long to start making money and there is no guarantee that the game will succeed. Many, many great board games will flop because they are not right for the market at that moment. The long development cycle makes it hard to cope with this.

However, if you have multiple sources of income, this is a lot more tolerable. As badly as I want Tasty Humans and Yesterday’s War to succeed, Pangea Games / Pangea Marketing Agency has more than one way to survive. I don’t have to live and die by the sword, and neither do my direct reports, contractors, and freelancers.

Reason 4: Board games have tight margins.

If you’ve ever requested quotes from manufacturers, freight forwarders, and fulfillment companies and tallied everything up, you probably cried. You probably cried great money tears. That’s because the margins in the board game industry are tight. It’s really hard to sell a game at $50 or more unless the pieces are top-of-the-line. Similarly, you have to optimize everything at a materials level to make $19.99 or $24.99 games in small print runs.

Having more than one way to make money with a business allows you to create more games until you finally create an evergreen that can be produced in a large print run for a low cost.

Reason 5: Overspecializing in one market leaves you vulnerable to shocks.

This is an extension of what I said in Reason 1. We don’t know how long the board game boom will last. Even if the board game boom does last, there are lots of ways indie creators could be pushed out of the market by uncontrollable factors. New safety regulations regarding toxic materials in ink could force small companies to spend a lot of extra money on safety testing. President Trump could push for tariffs against importing from China, driving up the cost of manufacturing board games by 20% or more. Printer ink could double in price and make board games nearly unprintable. The USPS could raise their arbitrarily low shipping rates and squeeze out the indies so they can finally turn a profit.

Reason 6: If it’s money you’re after, it helps to have multiple income streams.

Money, money, money, money. So many of these points revolve around money. Most people making board games do so because they love making board games, and I think that’s an absolutely fantastic reason. I promote that all day, every day, and I love working with people for whom board gaming is their great passion.

Ah, but you still have to pay the bills. If you want to get that game published, you have to bankroll it, even before you’re ready to raise funds on Kickstarter. If you plan to do that, you either need to be independently wealthy, making a good amount on your day job, or bringing in money on different business pursuits. The first never described me, the second did for a few years, and the third is where I am now with Pangea.

Reason 7: You will build more contacts.

The board game industry is big, but it’s also very small. If you work in different, but related industries – whether through a day job or other business functions – you’ll meet more people. Meeting people whose day-to-day lives are different than your own is one of the greatest ways to learn.

Reason 8: You might find something you like more.

Your motivations are so important. The board game industry runs on passion. After a while, you will find that you either have the passion or you don’t. Diversifying your business will allow you to move toward what you want to do in the long run, whether it’s related to board games or not.

The ability to move toward what you want is crucial. Life is short. It’s too short to spend doing stuff you don’t want to do, at least forever, anyway. “Rise and grind” is fine for a few years, but it makes for an awfully shallow life if you do it for too long. Refuse to let yourself be pigeonholed!

A Caveat: There is a fine line between focus and myopia.

There is one great argument against everything I’ve said. You can argue that it leads to a lack of focus to spread yourself thin across different industries. This, my friend, is true – at least to some extent. The ability to deeply focus is important to doing great work. In fact, this is why I am such an advocate for building a team and having people specialize in what they’re good at and what they enjoy.

Yet the flipside of focus is myopia. You can miss things that are right in front of your face if you spend your days assuming everything must fit into a simple framework. Work hard and with great focus, yes, but also take time to look at the bigger picture.

Final Thoughts

Board games aren’t everything. To focus too much on one way to make money is to miss many paychecks. To focus too much on one way to express yourself is to leave deep thoughts unspoken. Staying within a small community for too long can stop many great relationships from flourishing.

With that, I leave you with one question. What’s a creative or entrepreneurial endeavor you’ve wanted to start outside of board gaming? Let me know in the comments below 🙂