SO YOU INVENTED A BOARD GAME, NOW WHAT?

One of the best features of the Board Game business is that the barriers to entry are fairly low. You can come up with a new gameplay mechanic, get some graphic design done, or potentially do it yourself. You then find a factory, send them the specifications and the artwork files, and then you are ready to place an order and get your Game manufactured.

Sounds easy right…? Well we may have summarised a lot of different steps and difficult decisions and creative developments here for the sake of brevity, but the point is this – from a commercial perspective, developing the Game is the easy part!

The easiest thing to do in the business of Board Games is to press the button & write a purchase order for inventory of your Game – that’s what so many Board Game startups do. The hard part is to actually sell it.

Number one point here – please think very carefully about manufacturing your Game. You can easily create a mock up, or prototype of your Game, you can even today produce a more or less final looking and working version of your Game at a comparatively affordable cost. You may want to go and try to sell that sample to potential customers first before you even think about starting a manufacturing run.

Imagine if the feedback you get is a). that might work, but here’s some things you need to change or b). That product has no chance of working, we would never buy it. If you get this feedback, you will feel silly to have run manufacturing and to be sat on thousands of copies of a Game that nobody wants to buy, or which could have been saleable if you had presented it to the market first and then taken on board the market feedback to tweak your product to make it a much more compelling proposition.

We have advised plenty of companies who have run production and then failed to secure any Sales for the Game. Over the decade and a half we have been in this business of Consulting on the Board Games business, we have had plenty of people pay us to run, in effect, a post mortem for their Game. And routinely within seconds of looking at the Game we spot various critical flaws or misconceptions which make the product commercially unviable.

But that’s not just us, we aren’t saying that we know everything – far from it! But ANY industry person can tell you if your packaging size/format is a problem, if your theme is off, if your gameplay has fundamental flaws, if your product is likely to have any commercial appeal or not. You don’t have to come to us for (paid for) advice and feedback on your product, although you can if you want, but there are many industry source you can validate your Game with first before you start incurring major costs and ordering inventory.

The bottom line then is this: the answer to the question of ‘So you invented a Board Game, Now What?’ is that you need to validate the potential for the Game and seek feedback from the market – both consumers and where relevant to your proposed business model, from Retailers as well. The ‘Now What’ should not lightly be the fact that YOU like your Game so much that you’re going to order 5,000 units of it, at least not until you find out if other people share your enthusiasm for your Game! Please don’t make the same avoidable mistake that so many Board Game startups make…

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