IMMERSE PLAYERS INTO ANOTHER WORLD – 7/55 FEATURES OF BEST-SELLING BOARD GAMES

Immerse players into another world. Some people just love to lose themselves in a Fantasy world with their Friends. Games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering and Warhammer are examples of this genre, but these are mostly considered for the more ‘hardcore’ gamers. Over time, we have seen great success for games which tried to make this type of immersive fantasy gaming more mainstream and more accessible. Heroquest and Heroscape were two games which tried to make deeper gameplay based on fantasy universes and scenarios accessible to a broader audience, and they achieved genuinely massive commercial success.

Some people love escapism – maybe they watch Netflix sci-fi content to escape the humdrum of everyday life, but that is a passive form of escapism. What this type of board game can do is to offer the same escapism in a more active, social fashion.

As with most other types of board games, there have never been so many ways to reach the type of person or groups of people interested in or at least open to more deeply immersive gaming. Community is everything today, and there are so many marketing tools available to board games companies to reach and activate audiences who were hitherto hard to get to.

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Obvious Concept & Gameplay – 4/55 Features Of Best Selling Board Games

Having an overtly obvious concept & gameplay can be one of the key success factors for new board games. Classic games with heritage in the market, whereby people already know what the game is and how it plays, they can have quite complicated gameplays and obscure concepts. This can often confuse those new to the board games market into thinking that they can mirror these classic games. The reality though is that the modern mass market gamer tends not to have the attention span to make the effort to work out something complicated. Therefore having a blindingly obvious gameplay and game concept is important for new games.

Eventually it is the substance of the gameplay which will define success – if the experience of playing the game is not compelling then post launch reviews and bad word of mouth may kill the game, but before game play quality and experience can result in further sales due to the social proof of others liking and recommending them, enough games need to be sold initially. Think of this in terms of a virus pandemic like the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus spreads, and people who contract the virus then pass it onto more people, who pass it onto more people and so on. The same principle applies to marketing board games, and just like with a virus the higher the levels of exposure achieved in the first instance the bigger the impact.

One further point on this feature of best selling board games – the primary form of marketing for board games is the packaging. If the person hasn’t seen or heard of the game before, and if the marketing for the game has not reached them then the purchase decision will be driven primarily by the on pack communication. The implication of this is that we can forget trying to create clever abstract artworks with our board games packaging – we need to really clearly communicate what the game is, who it is for and why the person should buy it. This applies both in physical retail and online. The dynamic may be a little different but if the person looks at the pack or the image of the pack and can’t quickly see what it is and why they should want to buy it then they will look elsewhere.

We help board games companies grow profitably. To date we have delivered $tens of millions of new sales revenues for board games companies across the world. We have also saved our clients around $10m in manufacturing cost savings. Our work has helped more than 100 companies. To find out more about what we do & the services we offer to help board games companies profitably grow, just click here: www.kidsbrandinsight.com/services

Simplicity works.

This is the 3rd out of 55 features we identified of best selling board games

Some really great games are just simple. There are some really classic long term successful games which have really simple gameplay i.e. Checkers/Draughts or Uno. As long as a game is great fun it doesn’t need to be complex. In fact one of the primary attractions of this type of game is the ease of understanding.

General apathy from the occasional mass market gamer towards investing the time and effort required to learn how to play a game is the biggest barrier for games companies to overcome. Unless you are a company offering super complex games for a hardcore gamer with an instruction manual that is as thick as a house brick, simplicity and quick start instructions are critical to achieving mass adoption of your game.

As long as your game mechanic and the social dynamic it creates is compelling, simplicity can be a really good thing.

We help board games companies grow profitably. To date we have delivered $tens of millions of new sales revenues for board games companies across the world. We have also saved our clients around $10m in manufacturing cost savings. Our work has helped more than 100 companies. To find out more about what we do & the services we offer to help board games companies profitably grow, just click here: www.kidsbrandinsight.com/services

Variety Is The Spice Of Life – 2/55 Best Selling Board Games Features

 This is the 2^nd of the 55 features we have identified that can underpin best-selling board games.

Creating Games which have a varied play pattern should ensure that players don’t get bored. Games with dull & predictable play patterns don’t tend to sell well over the long term. Games which keep the players ‘on their toes’ often do!

This variety can come in many forms – from different question categories in a Trivia game, to a scenario changing card or event, or a ‘random’ card or mechanism in a game. By twisting up the gameplay, the experience can be made more compelling but also less predictable. There are plenty of games where the result is evident long in advance of the end of the game, which can become boring and can limit repeat play value in a game. And repeat play value tends to be one of the primary long term success factors for board games.

The variety that is required needn’t be difficult, deep or complicated though. As an example, take Asmodee’s outrageously successful card game Dobble. Dobble has the power to transform a room full of people, and that is a really special thing. The game itself doesn’t become boring because every time a new card is turned over the game changes, and the visual observations have to start again. Introducing compelling variety into game play can be this simple.

If you found this article interesting, please share with your friends and colleagues in the board games business.

We help board games companies grow profitably. To date we have delivered c. $90m in new sales revenues for board games across the world. We have also saved our clients around $10m in manufacturing cost savings. Our work has helped more than 100 companies. To find out more about what we do & the services we offer to help board games companies profitably grow, just click here: www.kidsbrandinsight.com/services

55 Features Of Best Selling Board Games – No. 1 Reinvention

This is the first in a series of articles looking at various key themes and features of best-selling board games. This is a serialisation of our book ’55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games’.

Reinvention can sell more units than mere Invention! Some Types of Games just work really well, and so why completely reinvent, if there is part of a proven formula you can ethically use, and can genuinely add value to and improve, then use it (but take legal advice to avoid infringing other people’s rights – the tangible and karmic implications of legal disputes are not to be entered into lightly).

There are a number of classic examples of this, for instance, when Monopoly board game added a calculator to replace the physical money they found they had a massive hit product on their hands despite the fact that the original version of Monopoly had already been in the market for generations. This is reinvention, and there is no bigger example of successful reinvention than ‘Monopoly Here And Now’. If you want the inside track on how this game came to be, you can listen to our podcast interview with Richard Heayes the ex-Hasbro Games designer credited with the original idea:

https://playingatbusiness.libsyn.com/creating-best-selling-board-games-with-richard-heayes

Reinvention though doesn’t just need to apply to best selling games like Monopoly. Maybe there is an old fairground or arcade game you can rediscover and bring to market in a board games format, or maybe a game you played once as a child but haven’t seen for decades since. If it worked once, maybe it will work again!

We’ll be back next time with Feature No. 2 of best selling board games.

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