Board Games Manufacturing Tips – The Value Of Shopping Around

One of the areas of the board games business which tends to get the least attention, especially from management is manufacturing. There are so many critical things to focus on with a board games company, selling – getting your games listed by retailers, creating or sourcing the next new hit games concepts, managing staff, and so much more. The reality is that most companies tend to stick with the same old board games factory unless that factory screws up and starts to fail to deliver.

While this inertia is perfectly understandable, and while there are a lot of benefits from building a deep and long partnership with a games factory, the reality is that there also considerable benefits to be derived from not allowing that factory or factories get too comfortable. The primary drawback of getting too cosy and too engrained with one board games manufacturer is cost effectiveness. It is just the nature of how business works and how human minds see things, but a new customer will always tend to get better pricing versus an existing one, unless the existing customer takes active steps to keep the supplier on their toes.

The primary way to keep your factory on their toes is to shop around a little. While it may not be practical to shop every single product around, it should be considered best practise to at least benchmark quotations from your current supplier against pricing from their competitors. Where a board games company has not had quotes from another supplier for some time, it is not uncommon to find that they are paying between 5-10% more than they could be.

Having said all this though, it is a mistake just to make everything about pricing, because above all what board games companies need from their factories is capacity and reliable supply. Board games have a highly seasonal selling dynamic with board games, and the challenging cashflow cycle which in turn leads to stock being ordered close to when it is needed as opposed to well in advance. Therefore, any supply chain disruption can have very costly consequences. And for this reason, we would normally recommend that aside from really small or very new companies, any established board games business should have at least two factory partners. This offers the ongoing opportunity to ensure pricing is reasonably sharp, but also offers supply chain diversification and risk reduction.

For those toy companies who sell board games also, the mindset tends to be heavily influenced by the toy business model, whereby tooling is necessary for plastic injection moulded products. Moving tooling is in itself quite a process, whereas duplicate tooling is costly and so these factors tend to lead to more inertia in terms of manufacturing location for toys. With board games where there is typically a small print set up fee, there is less reason not to consider multiple sources where it makes sense.

The bottom line here is that board games manufacturing is a critical part of the recurring board games business process. Sticking with the same single supplier all the time can lead to strong relationships, good understanding and easy working but it also comes with risks – risk of paying too much for manufacturing and also in terms of lack of supply chain diversification.

We help board games companies save money on manufacturing. To date our clients have saved more than $10m. If you would like to discuss your board games manufacturing requirements with us, please get in touch via the ‘CONTACT’ page on this site.

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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. 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!

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Four Proven Ways To Extend Board Games Brands

BOARD GAME BRAND EXTENSIONS

One of the best aspects of the board games industry from a business model point of view is that once you have established a successful board game in the market you can often spin off different versions of that game which stand a better chance of succeeding each time versus launching an entirely new game. This is because both consumers and retailers know and trust both the quality & experience that the brand will deliver.

Taking a quick look at the board games market, it is easy to observe four fairly straightforward ways to extend board games brands:

1.       Spec/price point variance

This way of extending board games brands is simple. You add or remove contents to increase or decrease the price point. Obviously you need to adapt the gameplay & instructions accordingly! This method of brand extension can open up new distribution opportunities: for instance, if you have a premium brand, you may open up discount/bargain retail channels via a down specced version of your game. Or conversely, if you sell primarily in budget retail you might be able to secure listings in upmarket department store chains by creating a special version with a higher specification and higher price point.

2.       Different gameplay format

If the original version of your game is a full board game, maybe you could extend via a dice game version or a cards only game. This way you can add some incremental sales opportunities. Beware though of cannibalisation with this method i.e. if you sell a new dice game version of your game successfully but people just buy that instead of buying the original version of the game that hasn’t necessarily helped you to move forward!

3.       Themed/Licensed editions

The classic example of a board games brand with ‘themed’ editions would be Monopoly. Whether it’s a new version for the Olympics or for a new movie, Monopoly has long since proven that one board game brand can sustain many iterations with a different theme.

4.       Digital versions

Digital gaming is a major business. Digital extensions of board games can be successful and bring new people into playing the original version of the board game. The major challenge though is that the digital world goes far deeper in terms of interactivity, depth and physical environments versus a board game. We’ve seen some dreadful ‘ports’ of board games which just take the same game & stick it onto mobile, console or online gaming. The game then tends to play badly because it is too shallow and basically not a compelling experience on a digital platform, so it can be easy to deliver a bad experience with a digital extension to an established board game.

We run a Consultancy business helping board games companies to grow. We have experience of most major board games markets around the world and our team has developed more than 200 board games including versions of classic games like Monopoly, Clue/do, Risk, Game of Life etc. For more information on our services (including our Export sales Consultancy) please just click here: https://www.kidsbrandinsight.com/services/ 

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