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 manage a Kickstarter community. That’s what I’ll be talking about in this post.

This week, I want to respond to a comment by Wade which can be roughly summarized as, “how do you manage a board game Kickstarter community?”

A lot of Wade’s comment is concerned with making sure that your Kickstarter community does not become overly negative. To me, this is particularly interesting since Wade correctly points out that many online communities can become toxic. As I see it, the best way to combat toxicity in online communities is to set a good example and make sure people are having their needs met.

Kickstarter Community Managers Have Three Responsibilities

Kickstarter communities are loosely-defined concepts. They consist often of the Kickstarter comments themselves as well as the publisher’s social media. Naturally, there is also an offline element too, experienced through play-tests and conventions. I’ll focus on the online community for the purposes of this post, though.

No matter where your Kickstarter is being discussed, though, you have three responsibilities as a Kickstarter creator (or collaborator):

1. Incorporate feedback to develop the best product.
2. Provide customer support.
3. Engage the community and build excitement.

Each responsibility is pretty nuanced, so let’s break them down one by one.

Incorporate feedback to develop the best product

When you create a Kickstarter campaign, backers have the general expectation that you will listen to their feedback and incorporate it into this product. When Kickstarter was relatively new, this was extra true. Nowadays, products on Kickstarter are much closer to completion, so there isn’t as much wiggle room.

Even still, astute backers often have good advice. They might tell you that a certain component finish or material feels better. Perhaps they have a little bit of advice for your art direction.

Not all advice is equal, and some of it is quite bad. Yet all of it should be acknowledged, publicly appreciated, and considered. Even advice you can’t use is a gift. Somebody cared enough about your project to stop their day, talk to you, and try to help you achieve your dreams.

At the same time, don’t overpromise! Don’t launch a campaign until you know what you can and cannot afford to change without compromising your game cost or delivery timeline. Upgrading card stock from 300 gsm to 330 gsm linen is usually reasonable. Adding 50 custom pieces of art is not.

Customer Service Rules

Kickstarter backers often use comments, messages, and social media to request customer service. During the campaign, they may ask about shipping prices, customs, components, and game rules. Answer their inquiries quickly, politely, and accurately.

After a campaign funds, but before it delivers, remember that you’re holding onto other people’s money. Give them regular updates. An update every couple of weeks goes a long way toward assuaging the ever-present fear of being ripped off!

After your campaign starts shipping, you will get a bunch of inquiries. Some people won’t receive their package. Others will get unexpected customs bills. A certain percentage will arrive damaged.

When you receive customer service inquiries of that nature, be polite, be quick, and be generous. I have found that because my money is worth time in consulting, it is often most cost-efficient for me to send replacement copies instead of investigating lost packages. If customers pay unexpected bills, I reimburse them.

Yes, you pay more money upfront by being radically generous. Think long-term, though! In the process, you build a great reputation and are more likely to retain customers. Plus, you don’t waste time that could be spent doing something else, including making money. Sure, someone might be out to screw you out of $50 for an extra copy of a game, but in the grand arc of the campaign, that is an insignificant line item.

Community Manager Rules

I’m obsessed with building online communities. Yet in doing so, I like to make sure that I’m building a community based on goodwill, kindness, generosity, civility, and shared interests. This is not always easy to do on the internet.

In a previous post, I talk about eight simple steps to building online communities. Now I’ll show you what they look like in the context of a Kickstarter campaign.

1. Choose the right gathering place for your community. That would be Kickstarter. Next!

2. Establish a theme and ground rules to ensure positive discussion. Your Kickstarter campaign itself will set the theme and Kickstarter as a platform will set the ground rules. To ensure positive discussion, though, make sure you think twice before you launch. Think of the objections people might have to your campaign and try to get ahead of the curve.

3. Invite about 20 of your friends. Ask your friends and family to leave the first handful of comments. This can set a positive tone which people emulate.

4. Establish norms. Kickstarter moves too quickly for you to establish norms the same way you usually would in an online community. However, I recommend sitting by your computer for the next hour or two – or having your collaborators do this on your behalf. Respond quickly and positively to all comments that come in. Again, this helps set a positive tone.

5. Give people a reason to join. This will be your game. Again, make sure your product is awesome before you launch and this will go a long way toward ensuring you have a friendly community.

6. Push to 1,000 members. This is the threshold where I find that people start talking to one another in online communities. This advice doesn’t apply so well to Kickstarter.

7. Listen to feedback to keep your community healthy. See my previous point about incorporating feedback to make the best product.

8. Don’t overspecialize on one platform. In this context, it means be sure to check websites other than just Kickstarter once you launch!

Final Thoughts

The keys to making sure you have a positive community on Kickstarter are simple. Listen to feedback and be genuinely grateful when you receive it. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Be open and communicative. Provide great customer service. Follow the basic rules of community building online.

It may seem like a lot to juggle, but I know you can get the hang of it. Simple gestures of kindness coupled with taking decisive meaningful action go a long way on Kickstarter!

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 two of them were about knowing when to pivot during a game design project. That’s what I’ll be talking about in this post.

This week, I want to respond to a comment by Corry Damey. The question can be roughly summarized as “how do you know when to pivot your board game design?”

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Why Pivot in Board Game Design?

Play-testing is notoriously difficult. Game design involves creating a system of rules and mechanics that are interpreted by players according to their expectations. Rules and mechanics alone often interact in complex, unpredictable ways. This alone makes play-testing difficult.

On top of that, people don’t always completely understand the rules of the game or the possibilities that mechanics provide. People bring their own biases and expectations. In short, gamers won’t play your game the way that you want them to.

There are far more ways to screw up a board game than to do one well. Because game designers are creators of complex, unpredictable systems, even the best ones cannot reliably create fantastic games on their first time. For that reason, game designers have to make peace with the fact that their games will have to change a lot before they are ready for public consumption.

Smart Play-Testing Principles

In an old post called Designing Tests and Keeping Records, I talk about how you can stay organized even as your game is revised dozens of times. I encourage you to read that post in its entirety.

Even if you don’t, though, there are two principles which I would like for you to bear in mind when play-testing:

1. Take notes.
2. Save your old work.

If you do these two things, you can always reverse a pivot. Don’t destroy old versions of your board game – make new ones instead!

Pivot Early, Pivot Often

Game designers are an intellectual crowd. The great struggle with which intellectuals will eternally battle is a simple one: the real world will never look like the one you imagine. People with perfectionist tendencies may be tempted to stick with a design that’s “almost working.” In truth, though, if you’re early in the process, your game is far more likely to need a big change than a small one. (More on that in a minute.)

Suffice it to say, if your design just feels “off,” then pivot. Pivot like you’re trying to get a big couch up a staircase.

When to Pivot: The 10 Elements Method

In 10 Elements of Good Game Design, I riff on an old Wizards of the Coast article and talk about what makes great games great. I wrote the original version of that post in 2016, and it’s the oldest post on this blog that I actually like, so I encourage you to read that one as well.

The ten elements of good game design, listed in that post, are as follows:

1. A clear objective
2. Constraints
3. Interactivity
4. A runaway leader killer
5. Intertia
6. Surprise
7. Strategy
8. Fun
9. Flavor
10. Hook

As I see it, if you’re missing any of the first eight, you need to pivot. Flavor and/or hooks can often be added late in the development process since they are primarily thematic. That said, if you don’t think you can add flavor or a hook without ruining theme-mechanic unity, then, yes, you need to pivot.

With that in mind, let’s talk about eight specific scenarios under which you would want to pivot your game.

1. Your game lacks a clear objective.

Without a clear objective, you cannot determine who won or who lost. Objectives are so essential to board games that not having one arguably makes your game not a game at all, by some dictionary definitions.

Having an objective, of course, is not the whole battle. If your scoring system is confusing, for example, then figuring out how to score the most points is too obscured to be playable.

2. Your game lacks constraints or has too many constraints.

If achieving the objective is incredibly simple or incredibly difficult, then odds are, you need to change either the game mechanics or the rules to make it easier or harder to win. Too few constraints rob the players of any sense of achievement. Too many constraints give your game all the fun of a trip to the DMV.

If you cannot fix this issue with a few superficial rule tweaks, you probably need to pivot.

3. It feels like nothing you do in the game matters.

Games need to be interactive. You may achieve this interactivity by having the game impose constraints upon the player, or you may achieve this by having players play against one another. No matter what, though, gamers need to feel like they are interacting with the game. Otherwise, the game feels pointless, like a first-person shooter video game that’s 90% cut scenes.

4. Runaway leaders happen often.

Allowing the leaders to run away with a game is one of the worst qualities that a game can have. Players need to feel like they have a chance to win up until the very end of the game. The only exception may be hardcore skill games.

Again, if you cannot fix this issue with superficial rule tweaks, you probably need to pivot.

5. Your game does not reward skill.

As bad as it is to allow leaders to dominate the game with no hope of the losing players recovering, it’s also bad to feel like your lead is not sustainable. Games need to have an element of inertia. Otherwise, it becomes Candyland.

6. Your game has no surprise.

Even in games with perfect information (where all the pieces can be seen) like chess, your opponent will still catch you off-guard. This doesn’t happen nearly as much at the hyper-competitive level of chess, but for your average day-to-day person, chess is a game that affords players a lot of viable strategies.

Games with no sense of surprise will become dull quickly. They risk becoming “solvable,” which is to say, they have one right way to play. If your game is headed in this direction, you probably need to introduce an entirely new mechanic.

7. Your game is all tactics and no strategy.

You need your game to give players a chance to win by merit of their skill, but not lose for the slightest tactical error. That is to say, your game needs to have an over-arching strategy instead of just a series of tactical decisions. If your game feels like it is missing this key element, you probably need to pivot the design.

8. Your game just doesn’t feel fun.

It’s a soft rule, but an important one. Games are supposed to be fun. If you make a series of small tweaks but your game just still feels like a chore, then you probably need to pivot the design on a much larger level. Even deeply flawed games can often be cleaned up if they feel fun.

Final Thoughts

Pivot early, pivot often. Creating board games is complicated and oftentimes when our designs don’t work, it’s because an underlying assumption of ours is wrong. The fastest way to solve that is often by pivoting the design entirely and trying something new.

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 Nikhilesh Chitlangia. I want to particularly focus on part two, which can be roughly summarized as, “how much should I spend on manufacturing for my board game?”

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Basics of Board Game Manufacturing

Before I talk specifically about how much to spend on manufacturing, I want to take a moment to go over how to find printers, how to create specs, and how to test samples. This will not only cover some of Nikhilesh’s other inquiries, but it’s also a necessary primer for this post.

First, when communicating with board game printers, you need to be able to create specs. This article is a must-read to tell you how to do that. This is longer and more detailed than I am able to get into for the purposes of this post.

Reaching out to Printers

After you choose materials for your game, create print files, and meet legal labeling requirements, then it is time to reach out to printing companies. Some companies you can reach out to include BangWee, LongPack, Panda Games, and PrintNinja.

Once you have specs ready to go, you can send them to the printer and request a quote. Please note that most printers who create board games at a reasonable price are offset printers, and those require a minimum print run of at least 500, and usually 1,000 or more. This is the minimum order quantity (MOQ).

When you send out specs, pay attention to the quality of their communication. Printers should provide timely and useful information, have a solid grasp of English, and should be able to recommend ways to save money on printing.

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Once they send samples, you should check the quality of the games. Check the quality of ink used in printing as well as the materials used. You may not be able to get a custom sample for free, but printers should at a minimum provide a sample kit consisting of games already printed for free (or the cost of shipping only). It’s sketchy if they don’t.

Total Cost of Manufacturing

Bear in mind that when you receive a quote from the printer, you will only see the cost of manufacturing. If you are trying to figure out the cost of printing a game and having it sent to a warehouse to be distributed later, that’s a different number. That’s called the “landed cost.”

The landed cost of a game includes the cost to manufacture, ship via freight to the warehouse, plus customs and tariffs. To get to this figure, you need to add the manufacturer’s quote to a freight quote (which can be obtained freely from online freight marketplaces like Freightos). Then you need to add the cost of customs and tariffs, if applicable.

How Much You Should Spend on Board Game Manufacturing

As a general rule of thumb, the price of your game should be five times the per-unit landed cost of your game. Therefore, to determine how much you should spend on manufacturing, you need to figure out how much you can sell your game for. This article can help you determine a reasonable price.

To use a specific example, our latest game, Tasty Humans, has an MSRP of $34.99. We printed 1,250 copies for a total cost of $10,703, broken down as:

• Manufacturing: $7,979
• Freight: $2,127
• Customs: $597

The landed cost for each unit, therefore was $10,703 / 1250, or about $8.50. You’ll notice our MSRP is closer to four times our landed cost than five. That’s because we have really close connections to Fulfillrite, which saves us a lot on shipping. Therefore, we felt okay about skirting the “five times landed” rule a bit.

Get Quotes Very Early in the Design Process

The single biggest tip that I have for people manufacturing a board game for the first time is in the headline. Get quotes as early as you possibly can in the design process.

It’s very helpful to know which components are going to be prohibitively expensive to ship. That way, you can remove the expensive components when your design is in an early enough stage for you to be able to find a workaround.

This is why, for example, Tasty Humans uses punchboard and not Azul-like acrylic tiles. Both the manufacturing and shipping costs would become prohibitively expensive.

Final Thoughts

Thankfully, determining how much you can spend on board game manufacturing is relatively straightforward, at least compared to advertising. Ideally, you want to be able to charge five times the landed cost per unit, which includes manufacturing, freight, and customs.

That means that once you determine an appropriate price for your game, you can back into an appropriate per-unit cost of manufacturing. If your initial quote ends up too high, you can always change the components to reduce the manufacturing cost.