Brandon the Game Dev

Board games have been absurdly popular for the last several years. In 1999, the possibility of the board game industry experiencing a massive renaissance like the one we’ve all been witness to was laughable. The business was shaky to its core. There were relatively few fans, the supply chain was rocky, and raising funds was hard. Then, serendipitously, one by one, the obstacles toward the modern board gaming landscape fell away. We now have Scythe, Gaia Project, Terraforming Mars, Gloomhaven, Root… The list goes on.

So what happened?

Why the Question “Why Board Games are So Popular” Matters to You, the Developer

First, let’s talk about why the question matters in the first place. Many of you know I’ve gotten really into the discipline of marketing. Marketing isn’t just about selling people random stuff they don’t need, unless you are, quite frankly, a hack. It’s about figuring out what people like, why they like it, and how to give it to them.

When something as seemingly random as board games becomes very popular, it makes a marketer’s Spidey sense tingle. Understanding the emotional origin behind people’s connection with board games is very important if you’re a publisher. You’re not just trying to make the greatest worker placement fantasy game…you’re trying to make a game that satisfies the emotional needs of your customers.

History provides context. That context can be used to explain why board games have become popular. That can, in turn, help us make great games or even predict whether or not board games as we know it will last.

1. The Internet and Social Media Made the Communities Possible

Board gaming is an obscure enough niche that it can’t justify the existence of a TV network, large magazine, or other traditional media outlet. Prior to the modern internet, especially social media, there wasn’t a particularly good way for people to connect over their love of board games. Social media allowed people from all over the world to connect around common interests. This, in turn, allowed people to express demand in ways that enterprising creators could take note of and act upon.

2. The Internet and Social Media Made Us Want to Log Off

Simultaneously, the very same tools that made board gaming as we know it possible – the internet and social media – came with a whole bevy of problems. Humans, biologically, are not programmed to talk to faces on screens. We need other people, physically, in our lives or else we suffer. We become lonely and isolated – one of the biggest problems of the modern age.

On top of that, the modern internet qualifies – in my opinion – as a social supernormal stimulus. A supernormal stimulus being anything that’s really attractive and not natural, such as junk food and it’s delicious calvacade of fats and sugars that our ancestors would never have been exposed to. Social media is a very normal part of socializing now, but some people are reacting – at least in my anecdotal evidence – with a sort of revulsion to that. They turn to more “wholesome” hobbies like board games. People want a form of escapism from the supernormal stimuli of modern life.

Now all that said – this is not why people prefer one particular game over another. This is not why people go out and buy Terraforming Mars or Azul. It is my opinion that this modern feeling of overwhelm creates a desire for a tangible social experience – which board gaming provides better than most forms of entertainment available today.

3. The Supply Chain Changed

People began to connect over their love of board games. At the same time, people felt a desire to play board games to get away from modern hyperstimulation. Completely unrelated to either of these occurences, something else was going on simultaneously.

Internet access and lax trade policies made it possible to manufacture games across the world. Board games are difficult to manufacture because there are a lot of parts. It used to be tough to find a printer for a reasonable price unless you were a really big company like Hasbro. Now, it’s very easy and takes a couple of days.

Revolutions in the print industry as well as the logistics industry made the supply chain for board games go from being very complex to sorta complex. There are still barriers to entry, mind you, but they are a lot lower. This allowed smaller print runs, which in turn allowed games to be made around niches. At the same time, you could identify profitable, in-demand niches by checking in with the growing board game community, which was by now both an online and offline entity.

4. Kickstarter Changed the Profit Model

You might find it remarkable, but we managed to make it this far into the article without mentioning Kickstarter. Created in 2009, I don’t remember seeing much of the site until 2012 or 2013, well after the widespread adoption of social media. With a simpler supply chain providing lower barriers to entry for pleasing a newly connected community, now all that was missing was a way to make the money to print the games.

Oh, hello, Kickstarter.

You probably know how this story ends. Board games have taken over Kickstarter, accounting for as much as 30% of the revenues they bring in. When Kickstarter entered the scene, the last barrier to entry – money for printing – fell away. This, in turn, opened the floodgates for a thriving culture of board game creators to create a steady stream of board games for board game fans. Regardless of Kickstarter’s future, their contribution to the board game industry is and always will be monumental.

5. A Culture of Creation Developed

Last but not least, there is one remaining element that helped make board games as popular as they are. That is board game designers themselves. A massive culture started to develop around board game design. If you don’t believe me, just type “board game design” into either the Twitter or Facebook search bar. You’ll see men and women from all over the globe who are passionate about making board games. There are entire cons dedicated to play-testing board games (Protospiels).

The culture of creation is yet another tributary into the mighty river of the modern board game industry. It may be the most important, too. The internet, social media, and the global supply chain are here to stay. Kickstarter may or may not keep their business model as it is today, but that’s not terribly important as long as the demand for board games continues to grow. The passion of creators is what keeps a steady supply of board games coming out today.

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By thinking about why board games are so popular, we can better understand gamers and their ultimate desires. From there, we can continue to make games that are emotionally satisfying.

Why do you think board games are so popular today? Let me know in the comments below!

(Jamey Stegmaier has written an article recently called Top 10 Reasons for the Rise in Popularity of Tabletop Games. It’s another great take on this subject, and I encourage you to read it.)

Making board games is really difficult. A lot of people who decide to make board games can’t tell the difference between the right and wrong reasons to make a board game. I want to talk about this in depth today because your motivations will seep into everything you do – for better or for worse.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about the future of Kickstarter, board gaming, and those of us who strike it out on our own to make games. Much of what I’ve discussed is only superficially about board games. The deeper messages are based on business strategy and the ability to plan for the future. This is where your motivations become really important. The right reasons will keep you going in the tough times and the wrong ones will eventually push you out of the business.

The Wrong Reasons to Make a Board Game

Wrong Reason to Make a Board Game #1: A Get-Rich-Quick Scheme

Some people see multi-million dollar Kickstarter campaigns and become excited about the financial prospects of the board game industry. You’re smart enough to know that campaigns like that are rare and almost always the result of teamwork. Yet you may still aspire toward that sort of campaign.

Assume you made $4 million like Rising Sun. Let’s say it’s made by a team of five people – a low estimate, honestly. Now let’s say there is a profit margin of 15% on it, which is pretty high for a niche product with physical inventory. You are then left with $120,000 before taxes. That is roughly equal to one year of salary and benefits of a decently well-paid white-collar professional in an urban area once you add healthcare, dental, vision, and the taxes your employer pays and you never see. Seriously, try this online calculator out if you don’t believe me.

Now let’s be real – most of us would love that kind of cash to do this kind of work. Still, my point is that this is a best-case scenario in which you’re not even wealthy. Your upper bound in the board game industry, without doing some other kind of work, is the lower bound of the upper middle class in a low cost of living area.

There are right and wrong reasons to make a board game, and money is definitely one of the wrong ones. Yes, you should try to make a profit if you want one. However, don’t perceive the board gaming industry as your ticket to fabulous wealth. It’s not the linchpin in your FIRE retirement strategy.

Wrong Reason to Make a Board Game #2: You Hate Your Job or Boss

It’s seldom these days that I see a person truly convinced that board game design will make them rich. However, many want to start their own business because they hate their job or boss. They build a business with the expectation that they won’t make much money, but it will be enough to survive. One of the most foolhardy beliefs I see mindlessly echoed online is “turn your hobby into a job.” Don’t do that – create a larger business and use your hobby and an existing market to establish yourself and create a product.

If you build a business, you need to make it to where you can sell different kinds of products to meet your customers’ needs. Board games may not meet their needs forever, so you need infrastructure in place to switch if you want to. We have no idea how long the modern board game boom will last or if it will at all. Even if it does last, that’s probably going to bring tougher competition. You have to think bigger than board games if you want to see yourself out of the traditional job market.

Wrong Reason to Make a Board Game #3: You Think It Will Be Easy

I failed to mention earlier the fallacy of the “quick” part of “get rich quick.” Board games are long haul projects. They take several months at best and can even take years. You have to stagger game releases and work in a team to try to bring in steady income with games. Even doing so, you’re likely to have some duds in between.

It’s not easy! The time taken alone is difficult, but the actual tasks themselves are even harder. I didn’t appreciate how hard making a board game was until this blog took off and I started getting calls from entrepreneurs. We forget how much goes into making a game. There is game design, play-testing (which is incredibly detailed), manufacturing, fulfillment, marketing, and much more. Some things can be created on a lark, but board games – at least made for profit – cannot be created this way. It’s difficult and it requires money and project management skills.

The Right Reasons to Make a Board Game

These will be a lot shorter because there are no fallacies to point out 😛

Right Reason to Make a Board Game #1: You Love Making Board Games

If you really love making board games for its own sake, you should do it. Hoping for large amounts of cash, an easy project, or a way out of things you don’t like will make you unhappy. Yet if game development is truly something you love, it is worth it. Life is short and as long as you meet your commitments and stay in touch with the ones you love, spend as much time as you can doing what you want to do.

Right Reason to Make a Board Game #2: You’re Trying to Figure Out What You Love

Not everybody knows what they want to do with their life and free time, and that’s fine. Sometimes you just need a complicated project to focus on for its own sake. That’s where I was with board gaming in 2015 when I started making my own. When there are so many options in life that you don’t know what to do, sometimes picking a focus – any focus – can help set your life on the right track. I was 22 years old and right out of college. Making board games helped me decide what I ultimately wanted to do.

Right Reason to Make a Board Game #3: You Want to Work Hard & Learn Quickly

Last but not least, if you’re looking for a challenge, creating a board game can certainly fill that need. Between the game design, play-testing, manufacturing, fulfillment, and business skills, you will find no shortage of new things to learn. If you’re willing to work hard and you just want to learn as much as you can, this is a fun way to do it.

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Knowing the difference between the right and wrong reasons to make a board game goes a long way. You need to understand your motivations so that you can remain productive and happy while you’re making games. Having unrealistic expectations can cause a lot of frustration.

What I’ve discussed above may have made you uncomfortable. I am empathetic to that. My only desire in writing this is to get you to examine your motivations so that you can remain happy while making board games.

Why do you make board games? Let me know in the comments below!

Of all the ways to learn about board game fulfillment, I didn’t think the Quacks of Quedlinburg would be one of them.

From February 25 to March 9, I worked with Charlie Brieger, the CEO of Fulfillrite on a giveaway contest. We gave away the aforementioned game and there were a lot of ways you could enter the contest. One of which was answering the question “what confuses you the most about board game fulfillment?” Charlie and I didn’t know if that question was going to be useful or not, but we figured it was worth a shot.

Turns out, we received 165 responses that, in the aggregate, were incredibly insightful. When you run a board game publishing company, fulfillment is a major part of your customer service considerations. Likewise, if you run a fulfillment company like Charlie does, it’s always useful to hear from the customers.

Shortly after the contest, I put together a report for him summarizing the data. We thought it’d be fun to answer some of those questions online. I’ve selected twelve of your questions and Charlie will be answering each of them below.

1. What is fulfillment?

After a Kickstarter campaign is funded, a lot must happen in order for you to receive a game! It has to be manufactured, shipped by freight (ocean or air), sent to a warehouse, and then sent to your house. As you can imagine, the game devs who made the game you want to buy can’t do this alone.

What I’ve just described is the supply chain. The supply chain includes everything involved in the production and distribution of a product, such as a board game you’ve been looking forward to. Fulfillment is an important part of the supply chain. It involves order management, picking, packing, and shipping.

2. How does fulfillment work?

Fulfillment is what we do at my company, Fulfillrite. When you place an order through your online store, or when a Kickstarter creator has a whole bunch of orders to fulfill from a Kickstarter campaign, that’s where we pick up. We receive orders, prepare the packages by selecting the appropriate inventory, then we send it out via USPS or FedEx – whichever is appropriate.

3. How does international shipping work?

International shipping is very similar to domestic shipping, with a couple of key differences. First, the postage costs more because it takes more cars, more planes, and more boats to get a game from our warehouse in New Jersey to Sweden, than it would, say, Pennsylvania. Second, we fill out customs forms which lets customs agencies know how much to charge in taxes for exporting / importing goods.

4. How are games shipped to my house?

When games are shipped from a transportation hub to your house, that’s called last-mile delivery. A lot of people consider this to be the hardest part of the entire supply chain!

When we ship products, there is a handoff. The product is then in the hands of USPS, FedEx, or DHL. From our warehouse, they send your game to the nearest one of their hubs, which is usually within 50 miles of where you are. From that local hub, one of a few scenarios can occur:

1. The game is then sent by mail (USPS, Royal Mail, etc.).
2. The game is delivered through courier service. This is when UPS/FedEx/DHL comes to your house.
3. Your game is sent to a pick-up location at your request. For example, FedEx can ship to Walgreens for pick-up. Amazon likes to send products to Whole Foods for your pick up when it’s not practical to deliver to your home.

Again, this is not a perfect process. If you live somewhere really remote, there may still be no last-mile delivery service. However, emerging technology such as self-driving cars and drones may change this in the future.

5. How are shipping costs determined?

A little while ago, we did a post with Brandon called Board Game Fulfillment & Why it Matters on Day 1 of Game Development. In it, we said that shipping costs were largely determined by two factors. The first is the height, width, and length of the package. The second is the weight of the package. The lighter and smaller boxes are, the cheaper the cost to ship will be.

Why are bigger and heavier boxes more expensive to ship? The answer lies in other parts of the supply chain, many of which Fulfillrite doesn’t deal with directly. Heavier packages take more fuel to ship by ocean and by truck. Similarly, the bigger a package is, the fewer you can fit on a single vehicle – whether it be a gigantic transpacific ocean liner or an 18-wheeler truck. Every square centimeter of space you take up on one of those vehicles is a square centimeter someone else’s products can’t occupy, so they charge accordingly.

6. How do you determine how long it takes to ship a game?

Once we receive orders at our warehouse, we move pretty fast. Everything inside Fulfillrite is very streamlined, so we can have orders out the same day we receive them if received by 2 PM.

Now that’s just getting inventory out of our warehouse. If you’re a gamer, you’re probably wondering how long it takes for the entire shipping process to be over – including the last-mile delivery. For most people, it’s as simple as adding the time it takes us to ship the order and the time it takes the couriers to deliver the order.

7. How are customs and taxes determined?

Customs and taxes are based on different countries’ regulations. Goods are classified by the type of good or goods they are. Customs and taxes are then applied based on the type of good(s) and the country they’re going to. I recommend you use an online calculator like this one if you need to calculate customs or taxes for a Kickstarter campaign.

8. How do you determine whose game gets shipped first after a Kickstarter campaign?

The short answer is that we defer to the recommendations of clients. That is, if the Kickstarter campaigner says to ship to a certain subset of people first, that’s what we do. Otherwise, we ship them all within the same day or two. We ship based on the information the clients provides, which may include special instructions. In reality, though, we usually ship them out so quickly that it doesn’t matter.

9. How does Amazon ship so cheaply and quickly?

Great question – we call this the Amazon Effect. In short, customers have really high expectations of shipping because Amazon is so fast and inexpensive. You’re probably referring to Amazon Prime – which provides free two-day shipping for most items to most places in the US.

Amazon is cheap because Prime generates a lot of cash by encouraging people to buy more items. This makes it plausible for them to rush ship nearly everything they have in stock. They also have a lot of local warehouses spread all over the world and robust IT to help them predict which items will be needed in which areas. Finally, the fees on their Fulfillment by Amazon services are fairly steep, which gives them the additional cash needed to finance the Amazon Prime program.

10. What causes delays in fulfillment?

By far, the biggest cause of delay in Kickstarter fulfillment can be chalked up to shipment receiving delays. Kickstarter campaign fulfillment relies on a few prerequisites:

• The timely communication between the campaigner and the manufacturer.
• No issues in manufacturing.
• Timely shipping by ocean, plane, or truck.

If something goes wrong with any of the above, that causes us – and other fulfillment centers like us – to start late.

If there are any problems with last-mile delivery after a game leaves our warehouse, that can also cause you to receive your board game later than you would like.

11. Why are companies so bad at communicating throughout the supply chain process?

There are a few causes. Regrettably, the most common one is simply that a Kickstarter campaigner does not follow up with timely information. Other times, a Kickstarter campaigner’s inventory is being manufactured or shipped by ocean/air and they have little communication from the people who currently physically possess the games. In short, they don’t know what’s going on either.

Once games are in a warehouse like Fulfillrite or in the hands of the courier handling last-mile delivery, communication tends to improve. We often send out tracking numbers that make it easier for people to figure out where their games are in transit.

12. How can we handle the less environmentally-friendly parts of fulfillment?

It’s pretty incredible that you can move goods across the world a matter of days. What’s not incredible are the fossil fuels that are burnt, the greenhouse gases that are released, and the packaging that is created and then quickly disposed of.

Fulfillrite is aware of environmental concerns and we take steps to make sure our operations are as green as possible. For one, we’re physically close to the Newark, JFK, and LaGuardia airports. We’re also physically close to the Port of New York & New Jersey. Not only does this cut down on costs, but it also means inventory doesn’t have to travel very far by truck to get to us. This cuts down on a lot of harmful emissions.

We’re also careful not to use more packaging than we need. We send a lot of small items, so we use small boxes to send items instead of larger standardized boxes. Since we use smaller boxes, this saves the materials needed not just for the boxes but also for padding the inside of the boxes too. In short, we keep your games safe and snug without senselessly harming the environment.

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As you can see, fulfillment has a lot of moving parts. We hope that by taking the time to answer some of your questions, you better understand the extraordinary inner workings of the processes that ship games to your home.

Have any more questions? Let us know in the comments below, we’d love to hear them 🙂

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