BOARD GAMES PACKAGING – 5 KEY THINGS TO GET RIGHT FOR A SUCCESSFUL GAME
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BOARD GAMES PACKAGING – 5 KEY THINGS TO GET RIGHT FOR A SUCCESSFUL GAME
There are a couple of major drivers of board games sales. Arguably the most important is the quality of the game experience itself, because a good game, or even better, a great game, will eventually start to sell itself when enough people have played it. Games are innately sociable, so you are automatically sharing a good experience with other people, which will therefore beget a ‘viral’ effect. The second most important driver of board games sales (arguably) is the packaging. Unlike a Toy, where the functionality (and therefore the fun) of the game is the critical factor, game packaging needs to do something more complicated – it needs to communicate the basic game concept of course, as well as the theme, but most importantly it needs to communicate how & why the resultant social experience will be better than all the other games around it in retail. It’s quite difficult to be certain of why one pack design is more effective than the other, as there are so many subjective factors. But after years of working on Games, research testing them with Gamers and listening to (often firmly delivered!) retail feedback, the key factors I believe are:
1. Clarity– on one level, mystique can be very successful in marketing products. But for Games, you definitely need to overtly or covertly communicate the type of game, a basic but clear idea of the theme or game concept, who it is for and why they should buy it.
2. Graphic design style that fits the genre of the Game, the consumer target and the retail channels. For example, a ‘Hobby’ or ‘Gamers’ Game which is heavy on instructions and strategy, and primarily, or at least initially, targeting the German market, will have a very different illustration style to a mass market game launching in the USA. This factor is not difficult…look around at other Games in the same space and you will usually find it easy to identify the prevailing style. For sure you can try to make the mould if you want to, but just have a good reason for doing that – if every other Game in your genre has a particular pack design style, how do you deliver what the standard approach delivers while doing something different? My creative colleagues may (and many times have!) berated this mindset as they naturally want to innovate & break the rules, but in that case, there should be a clear rationale, and not just a vague desire to do something different. Something different requires consumer education, because purchase habits in the Games space are fairly habitual, and if you break the habit, you need to work much harder to educate and incentivise people than you do when you just feed an existing habit!
3. Clear communication of mandatories– if you look at Games from major players in the industries, they tend to have some mandatory communications which appear as a visual callout. Think about the classic MB Games stripe down which used to appear down the left hand side of all classic MB products like Guess Who, Connect 4, Operation et all each have a very different theme and game play, but yet the consistent communication of age target, maybe even typical game play length. In short, this approach to communicating mandatories in a clear and repetitive format, in a way which is visually distinctive from the creative graphic elements of the pack is a proven part of successful games packaging design. But you don’t have to literally carve out a distinct mandatories space on the front of pack, you can deliver the necessary information in many ways as long as it leaps out to the eye quickly & clearly.
4. Details belong on the back of pack– it is definitely possible to over complicate a front of pack design. So normal practise is to put details, as well as actual vs idealised visuals on the back of pack. There is debate over whether you should show people playing the Game on back of pack or not. Showing people of a particular demographic gives a clear signal of who you are aiming the Game at. Not doing that potentially makes your audience broader. I have worked on many of the best-selling (as well as some of the worst-selling) Games of all time in some way or another, and some fd those Games featured images of people playing on the back, and some didn’t.
5. Don’t forget the sides of the packaging – in some retail formats (especially in some European countries), Games are stacked on top of each other instead of side by side. This makes the communication on the sides of the packaging critical therefore. Some Games feature only the Game logo on the side of the pack, which seems like a lack of thoughtfulness does it not? Surely you would also add in any critical mandatories (like age target), a position strap line & and an intriguing image, character or illustration to get the shopper to take the game of shelf?
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