When make your own board game, there are always some pricey custom board game. Take Warhammer 40K for example, the base pack will cost a few hundred dollars, expansion packs to buy one, models to buy one, peripherals to buy one. Suddenly realized that it seems to have spent tens of thousands of dollars?

Maybe this is the legend: Warhammer 40k, the model will be 40k (6k U.S. dollars).

Not to talk about this kind of model big pit, table game world also has a lot of pure card woolrich outlet, such as three kill, UNO. their price is very cheap, tens of dollars or even a dozen dollars can hold home

Most of these cheaper custom board game have one characteristic: only custom game cards.

So the question comes? If I want to design and develop a custom board game and then sell it hard, do I only need to buy these objects? The answer, of course, is no.

The objects inside the board game box are just the cost of materials and are only a small part of what it takes to produce a  customizable game board. If you’re an owner who wants to produce a custom board games, there’s no way you’re going to pay for just the materials. On top of that there are costs for copyrights, text, art, warehousing, transportation, publicity, after-sales, and there are taxes.

You can analyze the development of custom board games to selling split into several large modules, so it will be easier to understand:

Make your own board game , material costs

When analyzing the cost of materials, it is important to find a table game with a full range of items. For example, the 5kg big box of “Time and Space Chaos” is said to be all-encompassing, with extremely rich contents and items. Let’s analyze the cost one by one:

1. Board game box.

Currently common tabletop game boxes are heaven and earth cover, that is, the bottom of an uncovered cardboard box to pocket all the things, the top of a slightly larger cardboard box to fasten. The general material of the game boxes is gray board covered with coated coated paper, and the cost varies by size.

2.liner.

Need to control the cost of the game will choose a minimalist 400 grams of single-sided coated paper liner, and try to simplify the design of the liner in order to reduce the cost of labor (preferably only need to fold, and then splicing, the cost of pasting the paper liner with the blister is no different); and those who are sold easily three to five hundred big guys (especially with the model) will not care about the cost of this, the general choice of a more reliable quality of flip-molded blister (plastic) liner.

3.custom playing card deck.

The cost of the main difference in paper, size (shape) and layout. Paper common blue-core paper, black-core paper, coated paper, cardboard, the price decreases in turn, the quality is the same. Size (shape) affects mainly the cost of the knife mold, special size (shape) need custom knife mold, choose the common size (such as Wanji card 88 * 63) can use the existing knife mold, save a lot of money. Platting refers to the different custom game cards need to row a few layout, the same number of cards, the more different cards, the higher the cost of nature.

4.Costom Token.

The common token material is 1.5mm gray board double-sided mounted 250g gray background white board, the cost according to the number and layout of different. In addition to plastic and wooden token, the cost is also climbing high. Of course, the most cost-effective way to save money is the market procurement of suitable gadgets as token, such as beautiful and practical plastic crystal is actually a fishbowl stone in the flower and bird market.

5.Model.

The cost of the model according to the size, material and fine distinction, if you need to make molds if the cost is generally in addition. Model material is also very much, commonly used resin or plastic, generally turn the mold or industrial 3D printer production.

6.Map.

Commonly available soft maps of coated paper and hard maps using grayboard. Gray board maps are generally laminated with coated paper on the front for printing patterns, and laminated with black specialty paper on the back to ensure strength. Some gray board maps need to be folded, the increased labor is also part of the cost.

7. Instructions.

Instructions are generally printed on coated paper or offset paper, some short instructions are folded in a single sheet, and longer ones will be in the form of a booklet.

8.Custom dice.

Depending on the size, material and whether customized patterns to determine the cost.

9.Heat shrink board game packaging.

Commonly used for the outer packaging of board game box and the wrapping of the adult knife decks.

Having said that, what is the exact amount of these costs?

This is based on the printing volume to determine.

With industrialized production, naturally the larger the volume the lower the individual cost. Most printers start with a print run of 500 copies, and the following data also gives an approximate valuation according to this quantity:

Box (300 * 180 * 50mm) 10 yuan; liner (400g coated paper) 1-2 yuan; card deck (blue core or coated paper, the size of Wan Zhi card) 10 yuan / 100 sheets; gray board (200 * 120, including the cost of the knife mold) 3-4 yuan / sheet; gray board map (300 * 500 or so) 8 yuan; instructions (10 pages, coated paper) 2-4 yuan; custom dice(2 cm non-customized) 0.1$/pc; heat shrink packaging 1-2$.

But the cost of the model will be more complex, will be based on the material, the fineness of the requirements of the price ranging from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars, in general, can be controlled in the $ 10 or so.

Calculated this way, a box of medium/large box of tabletop game materials containing plates, 200 print playing card, and the right amount of token dice costs more than $40. With a print run of 1,000, the cost of a single board game box would be around the early $30s. Increased print run costs will continue to drop, and most tabletop game sales will stop there.

Make your own board game ,the cost of art

A good first impression will make people interested in understanding a game, and art plays an important role in this “first impression”. The art cost of a custom board games is generally divided into 2 parts, original art and UI.

The original art includes the card art for each card, the board game boxes, the manual, and the characters/scenes on the layout. According to the market of original art, the price of small original art is 800-1000$/artwork, which is almost the bottom line of the price of original art. Of course, there are also many material sites where you can buy various original paintings already painted directly for relatively low prices, but you can’t always find very suitable ones.

Marvel’s original art has always been known for its beauty, and some of the most popular original art can be auctioned for tens of thousands of dollars : 

Good UI design can make the game look very comfortable at first glance, prompting people to go further. It’s not easy to put the names, costs, descriptions, and artwork on a card in the right way, and it’s even more of a challenge to make the whole game consistent from the board game box, to the manual, to the custom game cards, to the artwork. Depending on the amount of content in the game, the cost of a set of UI design can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.

Hearthstone Legends’ simple and distinctive UI is a model for the industry: 

There was once a classic comment:

Art has killed countless interesting souls.

A lot of board game ideas get stuck at the art level, and for an indie game with an uncertain future, a minimum art cost of tens of thousands of dollars is an unbearable weight.

This is why there are very few indie TCG/LCG games; a set of several hundred original drawings equals hundreds of thousands of dollars in art costs. Arcane Steel is one of the few successful indie LCG games in the last few years, and the design team put in a huge amount of manpower costs to train their own team of artists almost from scratch. This allowed them to get a batch of good quality original paintings at a relatively low price, and this model is almost unrepeatable.

Create your own board game, design and copyright costs

The materials and art mentioned above are the outer part of the game, while whether a board game is interesting and deep enough depends on the inner part of the game: the mechanism and rules. Designing a perfect set of game rules is a huge amount of work, and the numerical value of the game requires designers to spend a lot of time to constantly test and improve. The cost of brainpower aside, the background of the game requires a lot of text to support, manuals, print playing card have a considerable amount of text, and the rules of the game, keywords and so on, in order to ensure the accuracy of the description requires a great amount of proofreading workload. Although this part of the workload is borne by the designer himself, generally do not need to pay extra, but the game cost should be calculated in the calculation of design costs.

In addition to attracting players with good art design, the use of popular IPs can also increase the amount of attention for the game, and even cause die-hard fans to rush to buy. Using popular IPs involves paying a royalty fee to the copyright holder, the exact amount of which depends on the popularity of the IP and the psychological expectation of the copyright holder. If a finished board game is directly imported, there is also a design royalty (or license production fee) to be paid to the original publisher. Therefore, many board game settings use the original background (IP) or the Cthulhu mythology of such free open IP to save costs, which is one of the reasons why there are so many Cthulhu series of board games.

Create your own board game,transportation and storage costs

In this era of package shipping, people tend to ignore transportation costs.

The global tabletop game customization industry has a well-developed logistics industry, with low shipping costs and pretty good timeliness. But the good price does not mean that the courier fee can not be charged, a box of board games often have a few kilograms, the buyer is a little far away from the courier fee of dozens of U.S. dollars is a common occurrence. High profit board games are fine, the price of 30 to 50 dollars at the beginning of this part of the need to seriously measure the logistics costs.

Table games belong to perishable goods, players on the integrity of the requirements are very high (such as the octagonal tip, the film is undamaged), which led to a crazy rise in the cost of packaging, bubble wrap, tape and corrugated cardboard boxes needless to say, the elaborate will be eight corners of the set of plastic protective sleeve. If this part of the cost is included in the transportation costs, from the printing plant to the warehouse trucking costs are not worth mentioning.

Often the big brother sunshine wall full of board games, but you should not understand what the concept of 1000 sets of board games. Find a picture to popularize, war drum society’s war flag game “burning continent”, 1000 sets of more than 5 tons:

But the domestic board game market is not big, the sale of 1000 sets of board games is a long process, whether retail or wholesale to other dealers is not a day’s work. A long term warehouse is needed to keep these goods. The cost of storage is about 1$/㎡-day, which is a small expense. Of course, if the quantity is not big, it is also a good choice to put it at home or board game store.

Publicity and after-sales costs

As far as the current board game market is concerned, the publicity of board game sales is still in a very backward stage, almost like word of mouth.

When a new customizable game boardinterview, the dealer will usually post in the community or social media advertising. This kind of publicity is straight to the target group and potential customers, the efficiency is very high but it is very difficult to have a new source of customers, which is the reason why table game dealers will establish community groups to maintain old customers. There are also some who will find well-known players to write unboxing reviews, sending sets of games is the basic operation. When the word of mouth opens up, players will spontaneously start to help publicize/analyze.

Because of the backward way of publicity, this part consumes mainly labor costs. And after-sales is also a process that relies on human resources.

The most common after-sales problems include board game boxes damages and missing accessories, which are part of the cost, whether or not the cost can be passed on to the courier company and the manufacturer, the distributor needs to resend the product to the player. After-sales needs to be online for a long time to solve players’ problems, which requires dedicated staff – again, a cost. 

Reduce costs

If you are an independent board game designer with a good idea for a board game, cost will be a problem you have to consider. Materials, copyrights, and art can be counted as hard costs, and the retail price reaches 2.5 times the hard cost before there is a more reasonable profit.

But the board game circle is not big, those players who often buy board games, they are as good as the excellent board game producers in the circle. For the original game that is not yet well known, the low price policy is very necessary, otherwise players are more willing to go to buy a well-known masterpiece at the same price.

There are many ways to compress costs. In terms of production, the plates can be printed on slightly less expensive coated paper, which is also of decent quality; the token is designed to be smaller so that more can be cut down per edition. Art costs can be compressed by reducing the number of non-synonymous cards in the design, and the original drawings can be done in less demanding styles such as Japanese, Q-version, and line drawings.

Of course cost solutions can also consider crowdfunding, setting a reasonable target amount to cover off the portion of the cost that must be paid to help designers turn their ideas into reality.

From design to production, even if it works, the process is still hard work for the naked eye. This is probably love, right?

KylinGame Professional board game maker.Bringing Your Game Design to Life Fast.

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