Brandon the Game Dev

Tasty Humans is the latest, and in my opinion, the greatest creation of Pangea Games. It’s a tile-placement, puzzle-solving board game for 1-4 players about villagers attacking monsters. Except it’s from the monsters’ point of view! The Tasty Humans Kickstarter went on to raise $20,536 and then several thousand more on BackerKit for a total of $28,000 and counting.

It’s been an extraordinary privilege of mine to work with Ryan Langewisch, the designer of the game as well as Tyson Mertlich, the developer who helped make the magic happen so early on. They were the creative force behind the game, and really, the soul of it.

But my role? I took their work, which they had so painstakingly and lovingly created, and marketed it before printing it and sending it around the world. I talked about fulfillment already. Today, I’m going to talk about how we got this game printed.

What goes into printing a board game?

I’ve written before about the surprising amount of responsibility that goes into printing a board game. You can read more about that by clicking on any of these articles.

• How to Find a Board Game Printer
• How to Create Board Game Specs and Files for Your Printer
• How to Order a Print Run for Your Board Game Kickstarter

To make a long story short, though, it’s not just about finding a good printer. You have to create files which your printer, which is likely overseas, can use to start creating a physical product. You have to painstakingly describe every detail of how you want the game crafted. Failure to do so will lead to misprints on a massive scale. Needless to say, the process is intense.

How’d we find our printer?

Early on in the manufacturing of War Co., and then as part of the research stage for the ill-fated Highways & Byways, I became personally familiar with the work of at least half a dozen different board game printers.

For Tasty Humans, we created a detail spec document and requested a quote from each printer. For those whose quotes were reasonable, we ordered samples and then went with the highest quality. That turned out to be a relatively small shop in Hong Kong called BangWee whose quality and price both turned out to be shockingly good.

It was initially the recommendation of Jesse Bergman from a long time ago that made me first aware of BangWee. He used them when printing Battle for Sularia. For whatever reason, I remembered the name, looked them up, and the rest was history!

How did we make the game specs?

As I discussed in How to Create Board Game Specs and Files for Your Printer, your role in printing, as a game developer, is to create specs and files. Specs are how you request quotes and describe the game that you want to create. Files are what you give to the printer so that they can create it.

The specs for the Tasty Humans base game were as follows:

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COMPONENTS	SIZE	COLOR	MATERIAL	SURFACE TREATMENT	QUANTITY	REMARKS
Box	290 mm x 220 mm x 40 mm	4C/0C	high density mounted cardboard	Matte lamination	1	N/A
Board	254 x 190 mm	4C/0C	2mm high density mounted cardboard	Matte linen	6	each board is unique, no fold
Punchout Board	237 mm x 211 mm	4C/4C	2mm high density mounted cardboard	Gloss	3	72 tiles, each 20mm square, 1 die-cut pattern
Cards	Poker size	4C/4C	300gsm bluecore (standard)	Matte	54	2 backs
Rule Book	A5	4C/4C	128 gsm gloss paper	1	12 pages
Plastic Disc	18 mm dia	Yellow	N/A	N/A	1	N/A

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When then had to make a few modifications to accommodate stretch goals and a last-minute change in materials, but this at least gives you an idea of what specs look like.

How did we make the game files?

When then had to start creating the files themselves. Empty files are simple. You have lines for “margin”, “trim”, and “bleed.” All the text and important stuff that absolutely must not be cut off must be placed in the margin. The trim line is where a card, board, or other component is intended to be trimmed by a machine. The bleed gives you a little bit of room for error if the machine cuts a bit too far in one direction.

Using the above as an example, BangWee gave us files containing nothing but the lines you see above. We then paste our art into their files and make sure everything lines up. So, as you can see, everything important on the card is within the margin. We want a thin blue border on every card, so the trim line means a perfectly cut card has 3 mm of blue on all sides. The bleed area makes sure you still see blue even if the cutting machine is off by 1 or mm.

So we followed this basic process for the box, boards, rules, cards, and tiles.

The only component in the game that did not require full color print files was the king piece. That required a simple vector graphic which BangWee would then use to carve tiny pieces into wood, which would then be later painted yellow.

A minor hiccup in quality control

One of the difficult things about printing board games is that you almost inevitably end up outsourcing outside of the country. Most companies you work with online have customer service based in the US to reduce the possibility of errors in communication. Unfortunately, this drives up cost.

What happened in our case is that we initially requested that BangWee use a certain kind of material for the boards. It was different than what we expected, so when we received a sample of the material, everything except for the boards looked good.

In truth, we just asked for the wrong material. We then requested that they switch the board material to match that of one of the samples (of other board games) they sent us. This then required us to recreate board files based on different specs after the conclusion of the campaign. We were under a time crunch and had to turn around new boards very quickly.

Again, this was our fault and we fixed the issue in about two weeks’ time. BangWee then delivered early, meaning that the project was not delayed because we changed board materials.

If we had to do this again, we would have requested a sample specifically of Tasty Humans from BangWee after the game funded but before the campaign concluded. That way, we could have fixed these issues before the funds cleared.

Another minor issue that we resolved shortly after receiving our first Tasty Humans prototype was ink oversaturation on the box and the rules. That was a quick fix on Photoshop. PrintNinja has a good tutorial to explain what we changed.

What did we do well?

BangWee did a phenomenal job with the printing. We could not be happier with the way the games turned out. For that reason, we are very glad with our choice in printer and for our good research and sampling process. If we had to do this 10 times over, we’d print with BangWee every time.

What would we have done differently?

If we had to do one thing differently with the printing of Tasty Humans, it would be ordering a prototype of the game with all stretch goals after it funded but before the campaign ended or the funds cleared. In short, this would make sure we didn’t pay unnecessary sampling costs while giving us the time we needed to fix problems.

As a rule of thumb, I highly recommend anyone who is printing a board game to assume that you will need to sample your game twice. The first time is to give you a chance to correct issues and the second time is to make sure your fixes turn out the way you wanted them to.

Final Thoughts on Printing the Tasty Humans Kickstarter

Overall, we were very happy with how the printing process turned out! Our files were pretty close to print-ready without changes and BangWee did excellent work. If we had to go back and time and do this again, we would do just one thing differently: give ourselves a little more time to sample and prototype!

Tasty Humans is the latest, and in my opinion, the greatest creation of Pangea Games. It’s a tile-placement, puzzle-solving board game for 1-4 players about villagers attacking monsters. Except it’s from the monsters’ point of view! The Tasty Humans Kickstarter went on to raise $20,536 and then several thousand more on BackerKit for a total of $28,000 and counting.

It’s been an extraordinary privilege of mine to work with Ryan Langewisch, the designer of the game as well as Tyson Mertlich, the developer who helped make the magic happen so early on. They were the creative force behind the game, and really, the soul of it.

But my role? I took their work, which they had so painstakingly and lovingly created, and marketed it before printing it and sending it around the world. Now I’m going to tell you how I did that last part.

What is Kickstarter fulfillment?

You hear all this talk about Kickstarter fulfillment. What exactly is it?

As backers use the term, fulfillment covers basically everything between a Kickstarter campaign ending and people receiving their rewards. That means manufacturing, freight, customs, and order fulfillment.

How Tasty Humans was manufactured is complicated and I intend to write a post about just that. Suffice it to say, BangWee printed Tasty Humans and they did an absolutely phenomenal job. The price was low, the material quality was high, the colors were gorgeous, and the customer service was handled remarkably well. I have nothing but praise for those folks printing board games out in Hong Kong.

As for the rest of fulfillment, there are basically three parts: freight, customs, and order fulfillment. Freight involves getting large shipments of games from the manufacturer to a fulfillment warehouse. Customs involves importing goods into a different country. Order fulfillment involves finding a warehouse to store inventory, putting items in boxes, and shipping those boxes to customers.

How did we handle freight shipping and customs?

Freight shipping is one of the most intimidating parts of Kickstarter fulfillment. It’s one of those legacy industries that even in the 2020s is bursting at the seams with unnecessary middlemen and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Many freight companies have websites that look like they were made when Friends was airing new episodes. What’s more, their customer service tends to be spotty and vague.

So imagine my relief when the CEO of Fulfillrite turned me onto a tool called Freightos. It’s basically Expedia for freight companies. You make an account, log in, describe your shipment and its weight, and – boom – you have a list as long as your arm of sea and air shipping companies. You literally just have to pick one, enter in your credit card information, and fill out a few forms. How these guys haven’t taken over the world yet is beyond me.

Now most freight companies that you select through a marketplace like Freightos will handle customs for you. But there are still two salient points which I feel must be made.

First and foremost: pad your schedule to account for customs exams. Make sure you have some extra cash set aside, too. Customs flags games for additional exams pretty often. Tasty Humans, in particular, was pulled aside for about two weeks and X-rayed. Shortly thereafter, a bill for $600 arrived in my email inbox. Nice.

Second: if you absolutely feel the need to have warehouses in different countries, split your freight at the point of origin. Don’t ship from China, import the whole thing into the US, pay a customs bill, and then ship part of it to Germany, and pay a customs bill again. What’s the use in that?

A brief note before we talk about fulfillment…

I would like to talk about how we handled order fulfillment. However, I am first obliged to say the following.

We used Fulfillrite for order fulfillment. I have done a considerable amount of paid consulting work for Fulfillrite, and I still do. As such, consider this paragraph the necessary disclosure of that fact. Even still, I will relay the facts of our experience with them exactly as they happened.

How did we handle order fulfillment?

Fulfillment went really well! During the downtime caused by the customs delay, I went ahead and integrated BackerKit with Fulfillrite’s systems. On that fateful Monday morning when the games arrived, January 6, there were about 700 orders ready to go. The remaining 140 were either $1 backers with no physical reward, stragglers who had not yet provided an address, and people whose credit cards expired before they could be charged.

The games arrived sometime around 10:30 that morning. They had about 200 shipped out by noon. By the time I had typed up an update to go out to my backers, a mere five hours later, there were only 100 orders left unshipped. The only reason they had not received the inventory and shipped every order that day is because I had to wire transfer more funds into the dashboard.

Holy smokes! I’ve consulted with these folks for a long time, so I know what they’re capable of. But I really think the same-day shipping and receiving speaks for itself.

Now you may ask yourself, as I initially did, “how do you fulfill international orders from a US-only warehouse?” They had recently partnered with a company called Asendia, which is a postal carrier that specializes in shipping to foreign countries in such a way where the shipper pays the customs fee. It’s a neat way of circumventing the myriad problems that come with having a dedicated warehouse in Europe or the UK, a subject about which I will likely write a 2,500 word, SEO-friendly diatribe about later.

No campaign fulfillment ever goes without a hitch, of course, and Tasty Humans ran into two distinct ones.

Problem 1: The Padded Envelope Affair

I marked “padded envelope” as an acceptable form of shipping packaging for a 2-pound, foot-long, sharp-cornered board game. Thinking back, this was likely something I did because I expected there would be large padded mailers with thick walls which would be acceptable packaging for board games. This wasn’t the case.

No one overrode my initial error in judgment by forcing the games to go out in rigid boxes. My approval of shipping Tasty Humans with padded envelopes instead of rigid boxes went unquestioned. But let’s be real: can I truly be frustrated with a fulfillment company for following my instructions to the letter?

Problem 2: The Customs-Free Customs Fees Affair

Remember how I said we were using a service called Asendia to pay for customs on behalf of our international customers? Well, Politifact says “mostly true.” A lot of people don’t know this, but you have to cross a certain threshold item value before customs fees are incurred. This is called the de minimis customs value and it’s different for every single one of the 200-odd countries on this planet.

Fulfillrite’s systems are very smart. They calculate the cheapest overall postage, and they assign that to your order unless you override it or otherwise specify. So for many European countries, we ended up sending packages via USPS or FedEx, and no one was hit with customs fees. Places like the U.K. that have low de minimis values, we sent packages via Asendia and paid the customs fee for our customers, and they never even noticed!

But this was not so for Denmark or Sweden. No, our northern European friends were hit with value-added taxes that were not covered by Asendia…mainly because we didn’t use Asendia. We used USPS.

You could call this a fault of Fulfillrite’s system. You could call it my own error for not overriding the default shipping method. No matter who you blame, though, the fact remains that I ended up Pangea-PayPal’ing six or seven Scandinavians because we take our “no customs fee” promise very seriously, even if it means reimbursing customers.

What did we do well?

Overall, the process was very smooth. We’d go with Fulfillrite again in a heartbeat. Freightos was also wonderful in helping us to arrange freight as well. BangWee, the printer of Tasty Humans, has gotten nothing but compliments and we are particularly thrilled with the quality of their materials.

I’m own worst critic and I’m happy with how this campaign turned out. This campaign’s fulfillment process has met the standards of a guy who beats himself up for not being able to run six miles when it’s 100 degrees outside.

What would we have done differently?

Looking back, we’d fix the two problems we mentioned with fulfillment earlier. We would also pad our timelines by another month or two overall. The simple fact is that even though we were very fast and efficient in shipping this campaign, we missed our target date by two weeks. A drop in the bucket for a five-month process, sure, but still not what I had intended.

Final Thoughts on Fulfilling the Tasty Humans Kickstarter

We were very happy with how fulfillment went for Tasty Humans. The campaign ran into few issues, was pretty close to shipping on-time, and stayed within our budget. By sharing our story with you, we hope that you can have a similarly positive fulfillment experience with your board game Kickstarter!

In 2018, Quacks of Quedlinburg won the elusive Kennerspiel des Jahres award. It has since remained a hot game on Board Game Geek and a perennial favorite in Pangea Games board game giveaways! So with that in mind, what can we learn from this award-winning board game with a silly name?

Before we talk about what we can learn from Quacks of Quedlinburg, let’s talk about how the game works. For that, we’ll borrow the following blurb from the game’s Board Game Geek page.

In The Quacks of Quedlinburg, players are charlatans — or quack doctors — each making their own secret brew by adding ingredients one at a time. Take care with what you add, though, for a pinch too much of this or that will spoil the whole mixture!

Each player has their own bag of ingredient chips. During each round, they simultaneously draw chips and add them to their pot. The higher the face value of the drawn chip, the further it is placed in the swirling pattern. Push your luck as far as you can, but if you add too many cherry bombs, your pot explodes!

At the end of each round, players gain victory points and also coins to spend on new ingredients to add to their bags. But players with exploded pots must choose points or coins — not both! The player with the most victory points at the end of nine rounds wins the game.

1. The name is immediately funny, and the theme adds another twist.

When you first heard Quacks of Quedlinburg, you probably chuckled a little bit. The name itself is ridiculous, calling to mind images of ducks wandering the cobblestone pathways of Bavarian towns making a ruckus (as if they were geese). It’s a funny image that warms the hearts of non-gamers who aren’t enticed by the idea of trading wood for stone.

Once you open the box, though, you find out that you’re actually playing as a quack doctor, pushing a different kind of canard! You compete against others to make life-improving elixirs for the uneducated populace. Of course, if you fail, your whole pot will blow up like you dropped Mentos in Diet Coke.

It’s absurd and you can’t help but smile at it. Aspiring board game designers should take note of how the name and the theme tear down barriers that would otherwise keep would-be-gamers out of gaming.

2. It’s an example of push-your-luck par excellence.

Quacks of Quedlinburg is unabashedly, unashamedly push-your-luck. Not everybody is into this kind of mechanic and many find it to be unsatisfying. But this game leans into it, and instead of trying to shoehorn push-your-luck elements into a game where it doesn’t belong, it fully embraces it.

Throughout the whole game, you are building your bag to have different ingredients which you draw at random and add to your potion. You know that adding ingredients gives you a better chance to win, but you also know that adding too many will make the whole thing explode. When playing, you have to constantly ask yourself, “is it worth the risk of adding that one, final ingredient?”

The trade-off is dead simple and couldn’t be more obvious, but it works.

3. Mitigate push-your-luck with a good catch-up mechanic.

Unfortunately, push-your-luck games can quickly become obnoxious. This is because any game that proudly proclaims that it is luck-based runs the risk of becoming unfun very early on. You are, after all, one bad dice roll away from ruin in many push-your-luck games.

Smartly, Quacks of Quedlinburg included rat-tails, which act as a catch-up mechanic. In essence, you will receive an amount of rat-tails proportionate to how far you are lagging behind the first player. The first player, of course, will receive no rat-tails. Without getting into the specifics, the important part here is that losing players receive a handicap that matches the number of rat-tails they receive.

The upshot of all this? The game works to give losing players a chance, not unlike Mario Kart, which gives better items to players who are losing.

4. The time to play each game is matched perfectly to the game’s weight (as suggested by theme).

When you have a game that is proudly luck-driven, you have to keep the play-time short. Even with well-designed catch-up mechanics like rat-tails, luck-based games are like firecrackers. They’re fun for a short amount of time and they fade away quickly.

That is to say, a three-hour luck-based game would be Monopoly intolerable. A forty-five minute luck-based game, such as Quacks of Quedlinburg is much better.

Now that said, one of the common criticisms of Quacks of Quedlinburg is that it runs too long. The game has been generally received as positive, so the time to play is not a particularly nasty issue. That said, if you’re creating a luck-based game, let this be a lesson to you: even with a catch-up mechanic and a fairly short play-time, you will likely receive the same criticism.

Final Thoughts

Quacks of Quedlinburg is a fine example of a heavily luck-driven game done well. It’s enticing to newcomers and has a good sense of humor. The play-time is short, keeping the game from feeling like a long game of roulette. The presence of a catch-up mechanic keeps it from feeling like the die has been cast from turn 1.