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The Important Role Of Pay Off And Climax In Board Games

There are many different reasons why people play Board Games and various different parts of Board Games play which are enjoyed. People aren’t all the same, so they choose to play and choose what to play based on often quite different motives. Historically, the archetypal driver of Board Games play for families was the mother of the household who would want to use board games as a way to bring the family together. While much has changed in society in recent decades, this role of the matriarch of the household is still a strong driver of Board Games play. But even then, this is an over simplistic characterisation of what drives interest in playing board games. Everybody is different, and therefore they are motivated by a number of other factors, and their choices tend to be different based on the complexity of the human spirit and personality.

Having said all that, one fundamental perennial factor is that those games which deliver a pay off moment along with a rising climax seem to appeal to something universal in all of us. A classic example of a game driven by pay off and climax would be Jenga. Jenga is a game which tests dexterity and visual analysis of a structure, which doesn’t sound that exciting, but the climactic build up to the crescendo of the tower collapsing is a thoroughly compelling factor.

More broadly though, aside from just the sheer climax of a game like Jenga, many long-term classic games deliver a pure moment of someone winning and someone losing. There are many examples of board games that don’t have this of course, but those games which don’t have a big pay off tend to need a really strong and engaging theme or a really compelling and engaging social interaction built into the gameplay.

When you launch your next new Board Game though, perhaps you could view it from the lens of whether it is delivering a compelling build up to a major event or win for one or even better all of the players! If we go back to the example of Jenga, the moment the tower collapses is a fairly shocking event for the person who touched the tower last, but for everyone else it is a moment of relief and ‘schadenfreude’ (meaning taking pleasure in the humiliation or suffering of other people!). There are many ways in which board game mechanisms can deliver this type of climactic event, and that is a long-term proven driver of commercially successful Board Games.

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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.

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!

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