Brandon the Game Dev

A couple of months ago, I asked the readers of this blog to send in answers to the question “what confuses you most about board game development?” I got a lot of responses, and one of them was about how to find an audience for a board game. That’s what I’ll be talking about in this post.

This week, I want to respond to a comment by Chris Helm. In it, he states that he is most confused by finding a buying audience. How do you identify an audience? Do their tastes change over time?

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This is an excellent question, and it’s right up my alley. I run a marketing agency as well as a separate blog dedicated to talking about the discipline of marketing. Finding an audience and determining how to please them is primarily a marketing question.

Game Design Principles & Finding An Audience

At this point, many game designers will balk at the idea of doing market research. Marketing research, they fear, will inhibit creativity and be an act of “selling out.”

That’s not the way I see it. In truth, marketing ultimately comes down to creating good experiences for people so that they are willing to exchange something of value for something else. If we lived in a world without money, marketing would still exist.

Game designers market without even meaning to when they design their games. Game designers tend to play a lot of games and interact with a lot of gamers. They almost always want to make games that their gaming groups will enjoy, just by nature. Intuitively, game designers are marketing to themselves and to their closest gaming friends.

By purposefully undertaking marketing research, and identifying it as such, game designers can get ideas on how to make a great game. Therefore, market research is how game designers can find an audience, identify their needs, and make them happy!

Marketing Research for Board Game Creators

First, let’s go over the basic ideas behind market research. The five main objectives of marketing research are to:

1. Gather data about people and companies to understand what people need.
2. Determine the feasibility of a business (or, in your case, the desirability a board game idea).
3. Identify and develop new markets (in your case, player bases).
4. Test demand.
5. Boost the success of promotions.

Marketing research can be conducted in a number of different ways. The simplest is observation. Either online or in-person, you watch people play board games and listen to or read their reactions to games. This includes listening to reviews, reading threads on Board Game Geek, browsing social media, and so on.

Observation is likely how you are going to find an audience. That is, how you are going to select a group of gamers to create a game for.

Play-testing is market research, too. In fact, play-testing is nothing more than assembling a focus group around a specific product, which is in your case, a game.

Play-testing is largely how you are going to make sure your game is pleasing to your intended audience.

Other marketing research tools include interviews, surveys, and reading the websites of competitors. This is just scratching the surface, too, but I’m trying to keep it high-level for this post. For more details on market research methods, most of which you can adapt to board games, I’ve got three more posts you can check out:

• 14 Cheap Ways to Do Market Research for Your Small Business
• 23 Excellent Questions to Ask Your Customers
• 15 Ways to Use Market Research to Grow Your Small Business

How to Use Marketing Research to Make a Better Board Game

As you can see, the basic applications for marketing research in board game development are easy enough to understand. Read reviews, watch people play games, pick an audience to design for, look at similar games, and play-test to make sure your game is good.

All of this is pretty traditional wisdom. Yet what is often missing is the bigger picture – the reason for doing all these things in the first place.

When doing market research in the board game industry, you have seven objectives:

1. Figure out which gamers you want to serve.
2. Make sure you are making a game for gamers who actually exist. (Failing to do so actually led to the collapse of a game project I did in 2018.)
3. Find ways to please those gamers.
4. Figure out where those gamers hang out, online and offline.
5. Prove there is real demand for your game.
6. Find similar projects to imitate and reference if you decide to run a Kickstarter.
7. Refine your pitch using real market data if going to a publisher.

Tastes Change Over Time, So This Process Never Ends

It’s tempting to think that once you have found an audience – a group of gamers you really connect with – that you don’t have to do market research anymore. This is not the case.

People’s tastes change over time. Certain board game design trends fall out of favor or become cliche. Art styles wax and wane in popularity. The industry moves quickly and many gamers keep up with trends.

This doesn’t mean that you have to become a trend-chaser, always trying to make a game based on the latest hype cycle. It does mean, however, that before you initiate each project, you need to make sure that you are meeting a need that is still likely to exist in a year.

Keep in mind, board games take a while to develop. That’s why it makes sense to chase, say, a three-year-long trend toward science fiction themed games and not the latest current event.

Final Thoughts

Finding an audience for your board game is straightforward. By observing people’s behavior online and paying attention to their likes, interests, and needs, you can create games that gamers are more likely to enjoy. Through play-testing, you can refine your ideas and make sure that they live up to their promise.

Market research is how creators and companies identify people’s needs. That way, they are always making relevant, high-quality games to be enjoyed for years to come.

A few weeks into our long isolation, my fiancee and I played Imhotep for the first time. Yes, I know we’re just a few years behind the rest of the world in that regard. But hey, that’s what being isolated for weeks on end is for, right?

In any case, we received this game as a gift from grandmother, who apparently has a really good eye for which hobby board game to buy! Naturally, we needed to set the game up and take a few photos to send to her, if nothing else. We ended up playing longer than expected!

Like many board games, Imhotep has a lot to teach board game designers. But first, a quick explanation of the rules:

In Imhotep, players become builders in Egypt. You want to build a combination of pyramids, obelisks, burial chambers, and temples. All of these structures will earn you points.

You build these structures with stone. Stone is gathered from a quarry and transported via boats. Collecting stone is a single action, as is loading stone onto a boat, and offloading it onto the structure of your choice. You get one action per turn.

It’s all pretty straightforward euro fare at this point, but one mechanic stands out to me as being incredibly profound. You can’t load stone onto a boat and build a structure in the same turn. That means you can load stone onto a boat and your opponent can move your stone to a completely unexpected place, thus wasting your stone or forcing you to use it in a way you didn’t want to. Keep this in mind for the rest of the article!

1. One way to obscure scoring: count points for different actions at different times.

Anytime you make a “point salad” style game, it’s important to obscure scoring so that there’s no clear winner or loser during the game. (Point salad here meaning any game where you gather points from a variety of sources.)

In Imhotep, this is done in a very simple way. When you build pyramids, points count immediately. When you build temples, points count at the end of the round. Collecting cards, creating a burial chamber, and building an obelisk, on the other hand, are all only scored at the end of the game.

This is hardly unique to board games, but Imhotep does this in such a clear way that new board game designers would do well to pay attention.

2. Use simple mechanics to create options for counterplay.

One of the elements of great game design is interaction. When players don’t interact, this creates games that feel like “multiplayer solitaire.” That’s not necessarily bad, but a lot of gamers don’t like that.

Imhotep, on the other hand, avoids the multiplayer solitaire problem by limiting players actions so severely. This means you can choose to either move stone onto a boat or offload stone from a boat. You can never do both in the same turn.

That means you can place stone on a boat with the intention to move it to a specific place. Your opponent can then choose to move your boat somewhere else entirely, thus thwarting your plan. Even if they don’t do that, the threat looms and that creates a new level of gameplay where you make your moves based on expected countermoves by your opponents.

3. Don’t let players control their destiny completely.

Games need luck to feel fresh. Without luck, you create games that can be completely solved. With very few exceptions, you have to add luck to a game to make it interesting. This is not just true for luck-driven games like Quacks of Quedlinburg. It’s also true for super skill-heavy games like Twilight Struggle.

In Imhotep, the element of luck doesn’t come from the game, but rather other players. Even though anticipating your opponents’ moves is a skill, you can never do so with 100% certainty, so there is always a luck element. There is always chance. You measure risks, move accordingly, sometimes getting lucky and sometimes getting unlucky.

4. Force players to improvise.

Because boats are moved unpredictably in Imhotep, you are forced to improvise. You can’t count on your stones going to any particular place on the board. Because of that, you simply have to load up as much stone as possible and take advantage of the opportunities in front of you.

Sometimes, you can pick up a clean 7 points by moving to the pyramids at the right time. Other times, you can create a horizontal row of four stones in the burial chamber, scoring a cool 10 points at the end of the game. Yet you cannot consistently plan in advance. Every turn, you look at the board in front of you and you make the best move you can.

Final Thoughts

Imhotep is a smart, sharply designed game with a surprising amount of strategy. Because it plays quickly and is easy to learn, I recommend that board game designers pick up a copy to learn from it. It has a lot to teach about creating a strategic game based on improvisation 🙂

Photo credit: Pongrácz Zsolt. CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Source.

The coronavirus pandemic has weighed heavily on my mind ever since I first bought a basket full of Nyquil in tiny neighborhood Walmart on the first day of March. We’re going through a world-changing event right now. It’s scary and it’s going to be a long slog with no easy way out.

Both terrible and beautiful things have happened, are happening, and will continue to happen. Nothing will be unchanged, including board games. Yes, the coronavirus will change board games. That’s what I want to talk about today.

Look, I’m no psychic. I thought iPads were stupid in 2010. Obviously, I was wrong. I will be wrong many, many more times in my life. Predicting the future is a notoriously difficult trade. Nevertheless, trying to do so leads us to have interesting and necessary conversations.

Board games. Some of us play them for entertainment alone. Many of us design them for fun. Many others still design them for profit. Whether you love board games for the gameplay, the creative outlet, or the money-making potential, the coronavirus is going to change the way you play board games.

I want to talk about what I think’s going to happen. I want to hear your thoughts in the comments below, too. Let’s process this together.

1. Solo and 2-player games are going to be massive.

Board games are social in nature, so we tend to think of board games as being for at least 2 players and usually 3 or more. Yet this does not reflect underlying trends that have been simmering for a long time. For example, there are a ton of solo board games out there and the market for them has been pretty good for a while.

A lot of people are still stuck in their homes. Many others are going to voluntarily stay in their homes for a while. The number of people who are going to be spending time alone or with only their significant other or roommate is going to be much higher than in 2019. Board games, therefore, need to reflect this change in social dynamics. The ones that do will sell more copies.

2. Board games will become more popular because they feel like luxuries but are inexpensive.

Economic recessions have weird impacts. For example, lipstick sales famously went up during the 2008 recession. This makes no sense until you realize that lipstick is an inexpensive way of feeling attractive and put-together. That feeling might otherwise be pursued by getting a fancy haircut or new wardrobe.

People need to feel connected to others. They need human connection. Normally, a concert or big event would be a great way to fill that need. However, both of those are expensive, and board games do the job reasonably well for less money. (This is not even to mention the impacts of social distancing on large events.)

3. Board games will become more popular because people need human connection.

Speaking of filling a need for human connection, board games won’t just excel because they’re a cheap way of connecting people. They will excel because they’re an available way of connecting people.

Casually going to the movies, the theater, a concert, or a convention is not going to be nearly as common in the next few years as it used to be. Yet the same behaviors that drove people to do those things will still drive them to seek human connection – just in different ways. It won’t always be Zoom calls!

4. Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia will spike in popularity.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced people to adopt technologies that they would otherwise be much slower to even notice. One of those technologies is video calling, or anything related to remote work. Yet how do board game developers work remotely?

Enter Tabletop Simulator (or Tabletopia). These tools make it possible for developers to play-test together and for gamers to play board games online. While playing board games on a computer might have seemed tedious even six months ago, it’s a relief in a time when it’s literally dangerous to touch physical board game pieces.

5. The coronavirus has ended traditional board game conventions for the foreseeable future.

One of the best ways to prevent spread of the coronavirus is incredibly simple: stay several feet away from other people. Physical distancing is such an easy-to-understand concept, but it precludes so many events that we take for granted. Among them, board game conventions.

We’re not going to see traditional board game conventions in 2020. We may not see them in 2021 either. If the opportunity to go to a convention arises, many people will be very reasonably skittish about going.

There has been a lot of talk of virtual board game conventions. Certainly, technology makes it easier to have virtual board game conventions. However, much of the magic of board game conventions comes from the sheer stimulation of a 1,000 geeky booths and 100,000 geeky people all around you.

It’s not the same on Twitch. It could be better and it could be worse. We’ll find out soon enough.

6. Many small publishers are going to close.

I hated typing that sentence. I don’t want to be Brandon the Game Doomer here. Nevertheless, I’ve written this blog with the earnest belief that it’s important to talk about the hard stuff, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.

This is not a good time to have a small business, generally speaking. Some businesses, particularly eCommerce or professional services that can be performed remotely, are doing great. Everyone else, well…

You can’t go to that restaurant (or shouldn’t). You can’t go to that store (or shouldn’t). Need I go on?

Now board games can be sold online, and many publishers will do that. Board games, in general, I believe are a great business to be in right now. However, many publishers rely on local gaming stores, or worse, conventions, to sell their games.

That business model, simply put, is just not going to work in 2020 and probably not in 2021. That’s a long time to go without revenue. A lot of our beloved publishers are going to have to adapt or close.

7. Super small board game publishers will have the best chance they’ll ever have to succeed.

Demand for board games is probably going to go up. High-quality publishers, on the other hand, are likely to fold. That means the massive demand for board games will still be there but will remain unmet for a while.

If you are a solo creator or a member of a small team of board game creators, you will soon have the levelest playing field you’ll probably ever see. People will crave well-made games and there may not be enough of them to go around. Start creating something worthwhile in advance so you can fill that need.

How do you think coronavirus will change board games?

I’m still trying to comprehend the scale of the changes that we are seeing right now. What do you think the board gaming world is going to look like a year or five from now? Let me know in the comments below!