Brandon the Game Dev

Heads up: this fulfillment article assumes you live in the USA. Even if you don’t, it’s still helpful – but it’s not as specific to your needs.

Fulfillment is one of the trickiest parts of any board game Kickstarter. It requires your inventory being sent from your manufacturer via freight shipping agencies through customs agents to warehouses and finally to your customers. It’s the part of the process that feels the most international and it’s one of the areas that feels the most overwhelming to the uninitiated. That’s for good reason: the devil really is in the details.

Last week’s article, we focused on domestic fulfillment from the perspective of a resident of the USA. This week, we’re going to focus on international fulfillment. This is a little more complex than last week’s, but we’ll follow the same format.

Like last week, I recommend that you read some of the other fulfillment articles I’ve written – particularly A Crash Course on Board Game Fulfillment. They include:

• A Crash Course on Board Game Fulfillment
• 3 Simple How-To Guides for Board Game Fulfillment
• How Board Game Fulfillment Works at Fulfillrite
• How I Fulfilled a Kickstarter & Bought a House in the Same Week

Scenario 1: You fulfill the game yourself using USPS even for international packages.

I’m using brand names here, but that doesn’t imply loyalty to them.

“A hundred and sixty backers,” you say to your co-designer. “I never thought we’d make it this far, but here we are.” Having shopped around for a number of fulfillment companies, you’ve determined that it just doesn’t make sense to send all your inventory and warehouse it with a larger company for 160 packages. You have enough space in your garage for the remaining 340 units, so you tell BangWee to go ahead and ship the game to you.

Twelve long weeks pass and your game is printed and shipped from Shenzen, China to your home of Provo, Utah. It’s shipped into San Fransisco and then travels by less-than-truckload (LTL) to a nearby warehouse. You borrow your friend’s pick-up truck, move about 40 boxes of 12 games each, and regret lifting with your back instead of your knees.

You unload the inventory in your garage on a wooden pallet. The inventory all looks neat. BangWee did an awesome job. You cover everything up with a tarp and get ready for a busy Saturday of preparing packages.

Now your US packages? Those aren’t too hard to send. We covered that in last week’s version of this same scenario. But you’ve got 12 packages that aren’t US-bound. Five go to Europe, three to Australia, two to South America, one to Russia, and one to Belize.

After dropping off a big batch of US-bound packages, you return to the post office the following day with your remaining 12 packages. Each one is neatly packed with the lightest material you can find. You make sure that the package is a small as it possibly can be. Smartly, you ship First Class International instead of Priority to save money. You don’t get tracking and the packages can take weeks to ship, but Priority Mail can be close to $100 each. That’s seriously cutting into your profits, and would even make you run at a loss.

You fill out 12 different customs forms by hand. It’s pretty time-consuming. You wind up paying a little over $500 to ship everything. Weeks later, your customers receive their packages. Some of them receive them with no issue, a few of them have to pay customs fees on delivery but they let it slide, two more are demanding reimbursement for the customs fees, and one package went missing entirely.

At this point, you’re probably hearing the record scratch. Customers getting charged customs? Paying extremely high shipping rates? Whaaaat?

I’ve done quite a bit of research and I’ve yet to find a satisfying way to fulfill board games internationally without going through a third party such as Games Quest, or another company with global distribution. The simple fact is that sending a board game from your house to Australia can be as much as $50. Similarly, you can send a similar game to the UK for about $30, but then they’ll get hit with customs and handling fees when it’s time to receive their package at the door. It’s a mess.

Can you fix this by using FedEx or UPS? Maybe, maybe not. That’s highly dependent upon the nature of your project and I’ve never had any luck with it. Their rate estimates come out so high that they wind up making the USPS look good.

Some clever folks have worked around the difficulties of international fulfillment for small Kickstarters by shipping a few copies of their game to friends within a region or country, such as the European Union, and then having them ship the games separately from there. Does that work? Sure, it can. But do you really want your business to depend on bundling games to send to overseas friends and then pressing them to fulfill your deadlines? I sure don’t, and to be honest, it’s not usually a money saver. That brings me to…

Scenario 2: You have Games Quest fulfill your games for you.

Again, I’m using brand names here, but that doesn’t imply loyalty to them.

“Eighteen hundred games!” Your parents can’t believe it. How could your scrappy team of three make $51,000 on Kickstarter? That’s enough to order more than the MOQ from Panda Games, with stretch goals to boot!

Last week, when we ran through this scenario, you sent most of your stock to Fulfillrite, a company that specializes in fulfilling packages to the US. They can fulfill packages internationally, too, but they can’t do it in the customs-friendly way that backers have become accustomed to. (This might change by the time you read this, though.)

To fulfill your 217 international packages, you send 250 units to Games Quest. Like Fulfillrite, they take care of fulfillment behind the scenes. The only difference is that they’re sending to different countries. The average package costs about 10 pounds to ship, or $13.

Every once in a while, you get a customer service call saying they haven’t received their package. They’re so few and far between that you send another game no questions asked. By all measures, your campaign was a smashing success and you barely had to work during fulfillment!

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International fulfillment is nothing to be intimidated by. It’s not as simple as domestic fulfillment, but there are a great number of services available to board game creators like you and me to help make the process easier.

Do you have any questions about how to fulfill your campaign? What about war stories from your own fulfillment experiences? Share both in the comments below 🙂

Heads up: this fulfillment article assumes you live in the USA. Even if you don’t, it’s still helpful – but it’s not as specific to your needs.

Fulfillment is one of the trickiest parts of any board game Kickstarter. It requires your inventory being sent from your manufacturer via freight shipping agencies through customs agents to warehouses and finally to your customers. It’s the part of the process that feels the most international and it’s one of the areas that feels the most overwhelming to the uninitiated. That’s for good reason: the devil really is in the details.

Truth be told, once you get past the bear of a learning curve, fulfillment isn’t terribly difficult to master. There are a number of great companies you can ask for help such as Fulfillrite and Games Quest. You can even fulfill games yourself – domestic or international – if you’re really determined. That’s why I’m here to ease you into this subject.

First, a little background info

I’ve written a number of articles on fulfillment before including:

• 3 Simple How-To Guides for Board Game Fulfillment
• A Crash Course on Board Game Fulfillment
• How Board Game Fulfillment Works at Fulfillrite
• How I Fulfilled a Kickstarter & Bought a House in the Same Week

I love this subject. It’s maddeningly complex, yes, but it’s well-established that I’m a fan of travel and I think it’s fascinating how these things work.

A Crash Course on Board Game Fulfillment covers the basic concepts of fulfillment and How Board Game Fulfillment Works at Fulfillrite does the same basic thing from the fulfillment company’s perspective. For today’s article, I’m going to focus on two very specific ways you can fulfill games. By focusing on two very specific scenarios, I hope to give you examples that are very close to what you can expect to encounter in real life.

We’re going to focus exclusively on covering domestic shipping in the USA. Let’s save the international stuff for the following week so we can understand the basics first.

Scenario 1: You fulfill the game yourself using USPS.

I’m using brand names here, but that doesn’t imply loyalty to them.

“A hundred and sixty backers,” you say to your co-designer. “I never thought we’d make it this far, but here we are.” Having shopped around for a number of fulfillment companies, you’ve determined that it just doesn’t make sense to send all your inventory and warehouse it with a larger company for 160 packages. You have enough space in your garage for the remaining 340 units, so you tell BangWee to go ahead and ship the game to you.

Twelve long weeks pass and your game is printed and shipped from Shenzen, China to your home of Provo, Utah. It’s shipped into San Fransisco and then travels by less-than-truckload (LTL) to a nearby warehouse. You borrow your friend’s pick-up truck, move about 40 boxes of 12 games each, and regret lifting with your back instead of your knees.

The inventory is unloaded into your garage on a wooden pallet. You check all the inventory to make sure it looks neat. BangWee did an awesome job. You cover everything up with a tarp and get ready for a busy Saturday of preparing packages.

You’ve got a Stamps.com account and you’re ready to use it. You’ve already uploaded Kickstarter’s CSV flat file, which contains all the US-bound shipping addresses you need to ship to. You keep a separate spreadsheet open in Excel so you can mark each person’s name off once their parcel is ready. That way, you carefully make sure that everybody is getting exactly what they paid for.

You’ve already ordered 200 flat rate padded mailers from the USPS website, free of charge. You’ve also got a big roll of bubble wrap, and special label paper for your printer. You start printing off labels two at a time at the price of $7.10 each, the commercial rate of a padded mailer. A little expensive, you gripe, but you know that customers will have it within four business days and it’s cheaper than UPS and FedEx.

One-hundred sixty packages, five hours, and seven music albums later, all the packages are sealed and loaded into your car. You take them all to the post office, have them scan your tracking sheet, and you’re done. Now you can keep an eye on the status through Stamps.com and address any late deliveries.

Scenario 2: You have Fulfillrite fulfill your games for you.

Again, I’m using brand names here, but that doesn’t imply loyalty to them.

“Eighteen hundred games!” Your parents can’t believe it. How could your scrappy team of three make $51,000 on Kickstarter? That’s enough to order more than the MOQ from Panda Games, with stretch goals to boot!

You know there’s absolutely no way that you’re going to be able to fulfill this one on your own. It would take days, if not weeks. You need professionals to ship out the games, which they thankfully can both faster and cheaper than you could on your own. After reading an interview on your third-favorite game development blog, you contact Fulfillrite. You create an account, describe your needs, and they send materials that you can overview.

You contact your manufacturer and tell them to send inventory to Fulfillrite’s receiving address. Then you carefully relay all the information they tell you to. You prepare files exactly to their specification. Your account rep, Charlie Brieger compliments your attention to detail.

Twelve weeks pass between the funding of your campaign and Fulfillrite receiving your inventory. Two more weeks pass and everything’s been shipped. Every once in a while, you get a customer service call saying they haven’t received their package. They’re so few and far between that you send another game no questions asked. By all measures, your campaign was a smashing success and you barely had to work during fulfillment!

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As you can see, fulfillment is nothing to be afraid of, even if it seems complicated. There is more than one way to get the job done. Do you have any questions about how to fulfill your campaign? What about war stories from your own fulfillment experiences? Share both in the comments below 🙂

When it comes to Kickstarting your board game, there is no shortage of complicated tasks which you will need to complete. You – or someone you outsource to – must be able to design a game, bring it into physical form, build an audience, and make sure there’s a market for it in the first place. However, one task, in particular, seems to get more attention than the rest: creating the perfect board game Kickstarter campaign page.

Let’s get two things out of the way first. First, a Kickstarter campaign page is not something you should ever rush. You should create a draft as early as you can and start outlining even your roughest thoughts. Nobody can see your draft unless you share it. Waiting until a week or two before the campaign to start creating your page is asking for a disaster.

Second, trends will always change. No guide can ever detail exactly what the optimal Kickstarter campaign page looks like because people’s expectations are fluid and best practices change. The campaign pages that got funded in 2015 don’t necessarily look like the ones that will fund in 2018. No matter when you’re reading this, whether it be 2018 or 2038, you need to look at ten pages that funded. Ideally, you want to look at the pages of highly funded games for campaigns whose games resemble your specific niche – sci-fi, worker placement, etc.

While trends are always changing, there are a few basic concepts that do not. Here are the four I’ve observed:

1. All Kickstarter campaign pages must be fundamentally built to appeal to your target market. The page is about them, their desires, and how you can meet them.
2. The campaign page must communicate all critical information clearly.
3. Everything on the campaign page must be either tested, confirmed, or realistic. Never over-promise!
4. It’s always ideal to get your audience’s feedback before you launch.

Kickstarter campaign pages tend to follow a basic structure. Every one of the items I’m about to list is in most, if not all, Kickstarter campaigns. They may or may not be in this order:

• An explanation of the game as a product
• How to play the game
• A list of what’s in the box
• Rewards
• A list of what’s left to do
• Game reviews
• Demos – print-and-play, Tabletop Simulator, Tabletopia
• Budget
• Shipping Costs
• Timeline
• Stretch Goals
• More information – such as your website and social media links

That brings me to the Kickstarter campaign video. The video must not be an essential part of the page since most people won’t watch it. The video only enhances your page, and must do so in a way that people find familiar and approachable. From my observations, videos are more subject to changing trends than the Kickstarter campaign pages themselves. Pay attention to those same ten games whose pages you checked out earlier. Ask yourself these questions:

• What information are they sharing in the video?
• How long is the video?
• Who is featured in the video?
• What is the production quality?

Play it safe when it comes to creating Kickstarter videos. You want to show some personality in them, but you want to make sure you’re keeping the four questions above in mind. Successful campaigns tend to have a better idea of what information to share, how long to make the video, which of their staff to include in the video, and how nice the video should look. When in doubt, mimic the successful companies you see on Kickstarter. That may even include renting high-quality video equipment or asking a video crew to help you.

So how does all this relate to a real, live, non-theoretical Kickstarter campaign? That’s a good question and one that I’ll answer by an in-depth look at Trogdor!! The Board Game. By the time you read this post, it’s probably going to make a million bucks. It’s a good example, and frankly, it’s fun to talk about Strong Bad (of Homestar Runner fame). Again, when you do this for your own game, you need to pick games that look like your own. This isn’t traditionally “board game-y” but that casts their business decisions in stark relief for us here, and that makes for good analysis.

The page follows this basic structure, which is tried and true: stretch goals, description, list of components, how to play, rewards, stretch goals again, add-ons, reviews, backstory, social media, shipping rates, and a thank you section. Pretty straightforward, but I’d like to point out something critical: despite being a well-established (and awesome) intellectual property, they talked primarily about the game – not Homestar Runner.

Here are three quick observations that tell me they’re not just cynically cashing in here:

1. It includes a lot of custom meeples, which are prominently advertised. Board gamers, based on a number of polls I’ve done on Facebook groups, Board Game Geek, and Twitter, are really into that. If you go run a poll on favorite components, custom meeples is likely to be in the top three.
2. They have several reviews and testimonals. Some of them are from folks like Pendelton Ward and Alex Hirsch, creators of Adventure Time and Gravity Falls respectively. Others are from reviewers you’d traditionally associate with board games: Unfiltered Gamer and Pawn’s Perspective.
3. They’ve got animated GIFs showing off pieces and gameplay. This trend has sprung up in the last couple of years. It’s worth paying attention to.

Even the top of the page alone suggests that it’s hitting some board gamer “yes” buttons. Sure, they emphasized Trogdor’s name the most prominently because Trogdor is awesome. But they also emphasized custom meeples and tiles, both of which are popular components. The project photo is staged in such a way that it shows off its table presence and hints at a larger game. The name is bright red and clearly draws the eye. A lot of thought has been put into this first impression!

The video makes this even more clear. Yes, it’s definitely a video made in the Homestar Runner brand, which makes their adherence to Kickstarter expectations even more remarkable. Remember: these are folks who have an audience and will get funded no matter what, but are choosing to push the product instead of the brand because they know it works.

The video is 2:39, a little on the long side. It starts in a goofy way, but that’s because of the brand. Then it shows off the components – a lot. Later they show gameplay and start describing how the game works. Their history allows them to focus on more than just the product, but they choose still to focus on the product.

Don’t take my interpretation purely at face value, though. You need to check other campaigns and analyze them to see how they operate. Pay attention to trends and see what you can make yourself. Start early, get feedback, be clear, follow the basic structure. If you do all this, you’ll be well on your way to making the perfect Kickstarter campaign page.