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How To Manage A Portfolio Of Established Board Games

One of the best features of the board games business is that once established, Board Games can sometimes just keep selling and selling year after year. Clearly you have to launch a fair number of games before you stumble across a ‘perennial’ seller, but once you have one or even several in your portfolio business will become easier and your business will also be secure, because your game is known and trusted by both game players and retailers.

If you sell mainstream mass market Games though, you may need to protect yourself from the toy effect – mass market retailers are often conditioned by the toy business and its endless cycle of new product launches. Therefore, mass market retailers are conditioned by the toy business into constantly seeking ‘new news’. If you have a top seller this probably won’t affect you, but if you have a stable of solid dependable board games but no big hits you can over time lose listings as ‘shiny object syndrome’ strikes and buyers chase new over dependable.

Our team has managed some of the biggest evergreen board games out there including Monopoly, Clue/do, Risk, Game of Life, Payday and others. This experience combined with more than 20 years of working in and observing the board games business leads us to offer the following suggestions for successfully managing a portfolio of established Board Games:

1. Accept the ever-present need for ‘new news’

It’s an old cliché, but the saying ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’ applies in this case. Rather than thinking you can just leave everything as is forever more, you will be more successful if you embrace the mass market requirement for novelty. This doesn’t need to represent fundamental change, but maybe just an added gameplay feature, a packaging tweak or something along those lines. This then allows you to show that you aren’t just selling old fashioned products but that your company and your products are moving with the times.

2. Understand, manage and exploit product lifecycles

Not everything lasts forever. Once perennial classics do sometimes fade away if not managed well. The trick to managing this situation is to not try to do everything all the time – understand the product lifecycle. Even for your most classic games think about a 3 to 5 year lifecycle. If you have done nothing to the Game, the packaging or the marketing in 3-5 years then you should probably consider it!

3. Utilise brand extensions effectively and with realistic ambitions

One way you keep freshness in your portfolio is to launch new brand extension products. The biggest and best examples of this strategy would be the new ‘headline’ version of Monopoly which tends to launch each year. Whether it is a rule refinement, and added feature or theme, Monopoly is one of the best managed board games in the business. Even if the traditional version of Monopoly is not changed that much over time, each and every year new innovation and extensions are launched to keep the brand fresh and interesting. Clearly this iconic Board Game brand will do things on a scale few can match, but there is a lot to be learnt from the way the Monopoly brand is kept relevant after all these years.

4. Sometimes a game needs to go away to come back stronger

Sometimes a Game has a tough year, or just starts to fade away a little, and if the above tactics don’t work, then maybe the game needs a break from retail. Everybody loves a comeback story, and one quirk of human nature we have seen repeatedly is that at the time of a board game receding from the high position it may have held, people only see the negative movement. A few years later though, the memory has faded and maybe the buyers have moved on, and then you can go back and resell the product back into retail based on where peak sales were. We have seen this happen so many times, so it would seem that there is something in this strategy.

There are of course many other facets of managing a portfolio of established Board Games, but we only have so much scope in these articles, and of course we need to retain some key success factors for our clients. For now though, the above suggestions may help those struggling to progress an established collection of Board Games.

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.boardgamebiz.com/index.php/board-game-business-consultancy-services/

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The Best-Selling Board Game Of All Time Is…?

If you guessed that the best-selling board game of all time is Monopoly, that’s a fair guess and a very common one – but that’s a wrong answer! When we ask this question some people also ask if the answer is Trivial Pursuit or Clue/Cluedo (Clue in the USA, Cluedo in Europe & mostly elsewhere). Think about it this way though, Monopoly having launched in the 1930s and having been a best-selling board game ever since had a massive head start on Cluedo (launched in the late 1940s), and Trivial Pursuit which achieved mass market popularity in the 1980s.

There is no doubt Monopoly is one of the all-time best-selling board games, but it is a comparatively modern game when compared with the actual best-selling board game of all time – Chess!

Chess is a game which has evolved over a very long time into the current version of Chess we have known since the rules were standardised in the 19th century. Earlier versions and precursors of Chess date back to Spain in the 15th century, which was when the playing pieces we know today were defined, and before that the basic premise of the game is known to have been in India in around the 6th century.

In case you are thinking that somehow we asked a trick question due to Chess having been around in some form for more than a millennium and therefore must have sold many copies in this time, there is no trick! Even today Chess sells many millions of units around the world each and every year. It is hard to quantify just how many copies the game sells since it is considered a generic gameplay i.e. it is the equivalent of open source code in computing – nobody owns the intellectual property for Chess, and therefore anyone can make a version and sell it. Therefore, the total Chess game market is so fragmented and global that it is not going to be possible to know exactly how many copies the game sells…but we have read data sources estimating that around 3 million copies of Chess sell every year in the USA alone. And bearing in mind Chess is a truly global game, you would have to think that the global total is at least double that amount.

Which makes Chess not just an old classic, but also an ongoing massive seller. Needless to say, the competition is rife, but regardless Chess is one of the most stable underlying pillars for the global board game and has long since proven that its impact is timeless and seemingly eternal.

There are several reasons why the gameplay is so compelling, but not the least of these reasons is that the gameplay has been play tested to near perfection over more than a millennium! Which yet again goes to show just how important playtesting is to ensuring a board game stays around.

At this point we obviously don’t know which of today’s board games are going to stand the long-term test of time, but we can learn a lot from the ongoing success of Chess!

Why Board Games Instructions Are A Game’s Biggest Marketing Opportunity Or Risk

Of all the elements that go into a Board Game, the element which gets far less attention than it deserves are the instructions. Clearly the instructions are incidental in terms of the gameplay mechanism and the general concept of the game, but they are absolutely integral to the gamers experience.

Rules which are hard to read, overly wordy or which don’t quickly summarise the main rule ideas in a visually compelling way will cause more impact in terms of future sales of the game versus even the most robust of marketing campaigns. There is a basic truth underlying board games marketing – you sell more games by getting more people to play games and have a great experience so they will tell their friends. That is the bottom line! Forget fancy social media campaigns, forget gimmicks and forget nearly anything else. To sell more of a good game you need to get more people playing your game, then the players themselves will do your marketing for you.

So, if your instructions do not get people up and playing quickly & with least stress then they are actually acting as a barrier to everything else you want to do. Good instructions will (for most games) allow for 2 types of instruction readers:

1. TOPLINER – these gamers just want to flick through the instructions to get the basic idea & then use the instructions as a point of reference if there is anything they can’t work out. This type of gamer is most likely to set out all the contents of the box & try to intuitively work out what happens in what sequence.

2. DEEP THINKER – these gamers are normally the minority, but they will interrogate every line of the instructions in great detail and work out in their minds first how to play the game before doing anything else. With these gamers, the instructions had better hang together robustly without contrasting/unclear points, because they need laser precision in terms of the gameplay patterns, interactions and mechanisms.

There may be some reading this who are fans of ultra-involved board games, you are likely to either be a TYPE 2 – DEEP THINKER, or you need to have gameplaying friends who are so you can get them to absorb the instructions and show you how to play.

For most games targeted at a mass market audience though, you need to write your instructions primarily from the point of view of TYPE 1 – TOPLINERS. You need a quick start callout, which looks graphically different and which summarises getting started & the key phases/movements of the game.

The bottom line on board game instructions is that if you don’t get people quickly past the instructions and into playing the game, you may have lost them. The implication of this is in one sense not a disaster – they might just not play the game and leave it in a cupboard, but where it really hurts you if your gameplay is compelling is that they won’t tell anyone about what a great time they had playing the game, which means you fail to get the knock on effect of one satisfied gamer selling your product for you to other people.

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