Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here.
When this post goes live, I’ll be asleep. In Hawaii, it will be 4 in the morning. I think it’s a lovely place to celebrate my 25th birthday. I am incredibly privileged to be able to take the week off to do this. In fact, I’m not even having to spend a lot of money either – I racked up a lot of points on my travel card.
Need help on your board game?
Looking for more resources to help you on your board game design journey?
Vacations are important. That’s not just because they’re fun and give you good memories, though these are fine reasons alone and with no other justification. Creative work, especially creative work in a public sphere like what we see on the internet, requires an immense amount of discipline and consistency. Just about everybody I know in the board game industry is squeezing their projects into a busy schedule around a full-time job in order to bankroll their games. Even if that weren’t case, you simply cannot rush this process. It’s not doable. You have to take breaks for your own well-being.
The idea of “treating yourself” has become so cliche that many of the high-achievers I know scoff at it, including myself earlier in the business-building process. There are a lot of people online who will tell you to put in 18 or 19 hours per day every day of the week. That’s stupid. It’s counterproductive. If you don’t believe me, then believe Harvard Business Review.
There is something at the core of the anxious spirit that always wants to be busy. You may fear slowing down because you think others will pass you, only to wind up sabotaging your own efforts. This is the same thing that happens when a marathon runner tries to run too fast and sputters out 10 miles in. Hard work is awesome, but smart hard work is better.
Be a relentless manager of your time. Figure out which activities help you create games, build your online presence, or promote your project most efficiently. At first, this will probably only be 20% of what you do, but it will get you 80% of the benefit. This is called the Pareto Principle. Really lean into that 20% that gets you most of the results. Do more of that and less of the garbage.
This is going to sound really obvious. Maybe I’ll even sound like your mom. Let’s power through it. If you need to sleep, then sleep. Eat three healthy meals per day. Get some exercise. Get some sunshine. Hang out with your friends, your significant other, your family, your kids, or your pets. Do something you always wanted to do just for fun. Your mental health is very important.
I write two blog posts per week, almost all of which are over 1,000 words. I juggle nine social media accounts. I made a board game in under a year from scratch. I manage an online community of over 1,000 people. I crank out blog posts, show up on podcasts, and do live-streams. Sometimes I make new board games.
Guess what? That only takes 25 hours per week most weeks. I just don’t waste time – I’ve nailed down the processes, I focus on what I need to focus on, then I quit and go hang out with people I love, watch a movie, or fly to a tropical island.
It takes a long time to get to the point where you can do this. You will need to practice and you’ll need to constantly be asking “how can I do this more efficiently?” Even after you master it, you’ll occasionally have weeks where you have to work more than 25 hours per week on game stuff. If you do this regularly, though, you need to ask yourself what you can stop doing and what you can outsource.
I’m keeping it short today. Sometimes, you just need a minute. With the Highways & Byways Kickstarter rapidly approaching, that’s where I am right now.
Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here.
Last week I talked about reaching out to board game reviewers. There are tons of reasons to get your board game reviewed, but they mostly coalesce into these two categories: proving you’re good and getting seen. Reviews are great because they provide your board game with coverage in board game-related media. Yet you’re not merely at the mercy of what reviewers think of you. You have the ability to reach out and get heard. It’s not nearly as hard as you might think, either. In fact, in many ways, getting featured on blogs and podcasts is easier than convincing people to review your board game.
Need help on your board game?
Looking for more resources to help you on your board game design journey?
There is nothing more beautiful to an online creator’s ears than “I want to help you create content for free.” If you can write articles or interview well, that will be massive asset to you when you’re gearing up for a product launch. You will open so many doors by volunteering to write guest posts or offering to do interviews. The exposure you will get will be really beneficial as well.
Much like getting your game reviewed, there is a strategy to reaching out to relevant bloggers and podcasters. You need to do your research, finding blogs, podcasts, streamers, and other online creators with audiences. Don’t be a snob about audience size, either – when you’re getting started, offer to help out anywhere you can. You would be shocked at how much a small community can rally around a guest they enjoyed. In fact, I contribute much of the success of the War Co. Kickstarter campaign to the Twitch community of Retsy Reiver, whose audience is super tight-knit.
With board game reviews, you want to cast a wide net to reach out to a lot of different people who read different sites. With blogs and podcasts, it’s a little different. It definitely helps to cast a wide net, but unlike with reviews, overlapping audiences isn’t something you have to avoid. In fact, it can be very good to be seen by the same people more than once. There is an old marketing adage that people need to see a message 4-7 times to take action. That works for your name, too. If people see “Brandon Rollins” or “Highways & Byways” in five or six different places online, they start saying “who is this guy, what’s this game, what’s he all about?”
Reach out to big and small communities. I cannot emphasize this enough. A single interview or guest post on a big site can get you a lot of attention, but several interviews and guest posts scattered across smaller sites can have a big cumulative effect too. Not only will a large variety of people see you if you are featured on several smaller sites, but people on those sites are more likely to take action. It’s a bit like the bystander effect – when there are fewer people on the site, more people take initiative based on what the site says because they care enough to pay attention to this small site in the first place. I say this without even getting into wonkier stuff like the fact that being featured on several sites generates backlinks and can bump you up higher in Google searches. Rest assured that the Internet operates on a sort of algorithmic karma that rewards your generosity.
Don’t be afraid to reach out to creators outside of board gaming. With reviews, you have to be really careful who you contact, since you are sending a physical product with monetary value. With blogs and podcasts, that’s not the case. You want to spend the majority of your time talking to people who run board game blogs and podcasts, but don’t be afraid to reach out to people who have shows about other things that interest you. One example from my own experiences was my collaboration with Decipher Sci-Fi, a podcast about analyzing science fiction movies. I had a lot of fun with them and I’m about to guest star in my third episode and I’m looking forward to it! I’ve even picked up a few sales through them. Remember: not everybody who would buy a board game spends their time reading blogs or listening to podcasts explicitly about board gaming.
My collaboration with Decipher Sci-Fi was most bodacious.
Much like I advised last week, social media can be an incredible tool for reaching out to people you would like to work with. You can put out a general offer to collaborate, like what I’ve got below…
To spread the word about Byways, I’m helping others make stuff. Reply if you want…
1. A guest post or interview for your blog. 2. A guest for your podcast. 3. Someone to livestream a game with.
This offer is open to even the smallest and newest sites 🙂
…or you can start sending messages directly on Twitter or Facebook saying, “would you be interested in a guest post / doing an interview / doing a podcast together?” As long as you’re polite and you’re offering to help, the odds of getting a response are pretty high. For some of the bigger folks, you may want to send an actual formal email. I’ll be honest, though, I’ve yet to actually have to use email to reach out to a podcaster, blogger, streamer, or anyone else like that. Most of them are promoting their work on a social media channel of some sort, meaning they will probably see your message.
Have you ever done a guest post? How about getting featured on a podcast? Share your experiences and questions below, I look forward to reading them 🙂
Most Important Highways & Byways Updates
Highways & Byways is still being reviewed. All the copies are sent.
I’m continuing to write guest posts and interview for podcasts – I’ve got a lot lined up!
I’m about to go on vacation, but keep an eye on my social media. I have a very special surprise lined up 🙂
Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here.
The board game review process is one of the most important parts of game development. This is true whether you launch on Kickstarter or whether you launch by more traditional means. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll assume that you’re getting your board game reviewed prior to a Kickstarter campaign. That’s what I’ve experienced and much of the discussion will still be relevant even if that assumption does not apply to you.
Need help on your board game?
Looking for more resources to help you on your board game design journey?
Why Get Reviews?
Why are board game reviews important? There are three major reasons: consumer protection, authority, and reach. Consumer protection is pretty obvious: with so many games coming out, there is no way for somebody to try them all, play the demos, or print out the print-and-play games. Somebody has to be the arbiter or what’s considered good and bad, simply because consumers do not have time to do this themselves. What that resulted in for board gaming is a group of people who review board games on their blogs and channels as a hobby.
Second comes authority. This is pretty simple: board games that have reviews are more attractive than board games that do not have reviews, whether or not they’re good or bad reviews. Having a recognizable name on your project gives people the sense that you are serious.
Lastly, board game reviewers have audiences separate than the one you’ve been building on your own. Some of them even have audiences vastly bigger than one you can build up in the matter of a few months or a year or two. Regardless of whether your game is reviewed by people as big as Rahdo or a handful of YouTube channels with 1,000 – 10,000 subscribers, you will have your game seen by more people than you would without them. Don’t underestimate the small channels either – a close-knit community can be better than a disengaged large and decentralized community.
The Strategy of Reaching Out
With all this said, how can you strategically approach the review process so that you get the best bang for your buck? It’s no secret that board game prototypes are expensive, so you want to get the greatest authority and reach possible. Step one: focus on people who will like your game AND whose spheres of influence do not overlap. You want to find big and engaged blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels, that’s true. You also want to only send games to people who are interested in the type of game you have to send. But I’d argue it’s more important that you get people who specialize in different niches and attract different people. The benefits are twofold: you will gain wider reach and bad reviews won’t poison your whole audience.
Having reviewers whose audiences do not overlap can help free you from your fears. It is terrifying to send your work out to reviewers who will determine whether it’s good or bad. Most of them will probably enjoy your game, but it’s still pretty scary. All I can say is make peace with your fears and don’t let them push you into doing something stupid like only reaching out to people who will sing your praises (for a price).
That brings me to one last thing you need to be aware of before you reach out to reviewers. It’s a doozy, too. There are a lot of people who will try to charge you for reviews. I’m not talking about previews with high production value videos and marketing packages (which themselves are in an ethical gray area), I’m talking about money for positive coverage. Don’t get wrapped up in that. That wouldn’t fly in most other industries and its only because board gaming is such a young industry with so many independent reviewers and creators that it’s not a bigger problem than it is.
As for paid previews with nice videos and marketing packages, I’m a little more conflicted. They typically disclose the fact that money changed hands pretty prominently. Still, make sure that whatever coverage they provide is worth more than you could have gotten with the same money spent on Facebook or Board Game Geek ads.
Last but not least, if you’re avoiding bias, you’ll probably get one or two negative reviews. That’s fine. In fact, a negative review or two can grant you more legitimacy than a game which gets nothing but perfect reviews from every direction.
Getting the Conversation Started
Take a few hours to research board game reviewers. Read their blogs, watch their videos, listen to their shows, and figure out the size of their audience and reach. Don’t just look at social media followers or subscribers, look at their status within Facebook groups and other areas too. Get a spreadsheet ready and have a list of 15-20 people to reach out to. Expect a few no’s and always prioritize your preferred reviewers first when reaching out. You don’t want your eleventh best choice to take a game out of the second best choice’s hands if your second choice responds late.
It’s best to get to know the reviewer well before you need a review. Social media makes this easy. If you already know them, you can send a simple message on Facebook or Twitter. Here’s one I used to reach out to reviewers I already knew:
Hey [First Name], Happy New Year! I just ordered some Highways & Byways review copies. Would you like for me to save you one for a review?
Short and sweet. Then once they responded, I could send more details via email. Those details include my name, my game, my timeline, a description of the game, a link to rules, a photo, and a list of anything that’s different between the review copies and the final copies. I could then use the following email for both people I knew and people I didn’t know. Note: I changed up the first paragraph based on whether they knew me or not.
Hi [Name],
My name is Brandon Rollins and I have created a board game called Highways & Byways. I plan to launch a Kickstarter at the end of March, and I am emailing you to see if you are interested in reviewing the game. Here’s a little more information about the game:
It is a casual family board game for 2-4 players. I’ve heard it favorably compared to Ticket to Ride.
It takes about 45 minutes to 1 hour to play – less once you’re used to it.
It’s fairly lightweight, but there is definitely room to strategize if you want to.
It has a nostalgic 1970s travel theme – think bright postcards in sharply contrasting colors.
The objective is to travel a route of your own selection faster than your opponents. First one home wins.
The three basic strategies to win are:
Plan your routes more efficiently at the beginning of the game.
Manage your hand to make more bad events less likely and good events more likely.
Move as fast as possible while still taking time to manage your hand.
Here is a photo of the game being played around the table with my family over the holidays, so you know what it looks like when being used:
I’ve got a lot of links below my name if you would like more information. I’ve been working on this game since March 2017. It’s been privately and publicly play-tested, including blind play-testing both at a Protospiel convention and online. There is also a Tabletop Simulator demo, located here: http://bywaysgame.com/demo/
If you accept, you don’t have to mail it back when you’re done. Keep or return, it’s your choice! In fact, there are only two catches I think you should be aware of:
The manufacturer I used for the review copies is a print-on-demand supplier and not an offset printer like I would use if the campaign funded. That means the pieces, namely cars (pawns) and houses, might differ from their final form.
I may have the privilege of adding stretch goals if the campaign goes really well, so the components might even end up better than what you see. (Let’s hope!)
Thank you for considering my game. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to read this email and I hope to work with you in the future!
Brandon Rollins
(Phone)
(Email)
(Web/Social Media)
That’s about all there is to it. Make sure you don’t contact more people than you have review copies to spare. Give them a little time to respond. You’d be amazed what you can accomplish just by asking politely.
Most Important Highways & Byways Updates
All the review copies of Highways & Byways are shipped.
Honestly, the pace of my outreach is moving so fast that the previous three bullet points probably won’t even be all-encompassing in the short gap between me writing them and this post going up at 9 am Friday.
