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Making Your Own Board/Card Games?
wrinkledshirt writes "I've been growing interested in creating my own set of board games, and I was wondering if people knew of good resources for how to go about doing this? I'd love to know information on good places to get cards printed, manuals printed, plastic pieces manufactured, boards created, that sort of thing. Many companies online offer to do all of these things for you, but I'm considering doing it all separately in order to cut costs. Since I've never done this before, I'm also wondering about sources that'll give you good ideas to consider as well as gameplay pitfalls to avoid. I know google is my friend, but I'm also wondering about people's experiences in trying to do this stuff on their own...?"
1. Involve a patent/IP lawyer from the outset so's you don't get ripped off.
2. I would self-publish and use places like WOTC, etc. only as distribution channels. The principles that apply to self-publishing of books (see "The Self-Publishing Manual") apply more or less equally.
3. There are a number of Indian co's that make boxes, inserts, print cards, etc. But I would use them only in a way that you don't get pirated, e.g. for game pieces or other stuff that disclose the game sufficiently to allow piracy. I would use one or more local printers to do specific items such as cards, boards etc.
4. All the above presupposes you have a good idea that does not infringe some existing product or copyrighted, etc. work.
Watch for the following pitfalls:
Parts of the game are worthless.
There are ways to do the opposite of what you're supposed to and benefit from it.
If the game includes secrets, there need to be tools to encourage players to keep them.
The game shouldn't "elminate" players slowly. Yes, I know monopoly does this, but those that are eliminated usually leave/sleep/watch tv and I think that's why games like Pictionary, Scattegories, or Trivial Pursuit are more popular.
Different, but not revolutionary. Just like most video games, you're better off doing a variation of something most people are familiar with than something new and/or complex.
You need to be able to sit down, read the rules, and understand the game in under 5 minutes.
Good luck.
It all comes down to your game design. Design your game. Write up your rules make your own gamne board by printing out what you design and pasting it on top of a peice of cardboard. Use checkers/bottlecapps for pieces. WHen you design how the game works, looks don't matter.
What matters: Is it fun? Teach others to play it. Let strangers play it. Sit in a College Student center and give away beer to those that play it. Tweak the game. MAke it more fun. I made a card game that I use in the classes I teach and following the habbit of making everyone play it and provide feedback (What did you like/dislike, I must have clocked thousands of hours of play testing.
After you have designed the game. Sell it if you are in it for the money. Game companies can market, produce and sell these things more successfully that you will out of your own basement. (Don't take it persoannly, I can't do it either).
By your question, it seems that you won't mind outsourcing everything. Maybe that will work. But it will be hard to find people to advertise it and stock it on shelves. If you are going to go stricktly mail order, how in the world am I going to find out about your game? Will you place an ad on slashdot, just like the think-geek BB-shooting-tank ad that I am ignoring at this moment?
Anyway. Good luck!
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
A while ago, I was enthralled with German board games (settlers of Catan and the like). I thoght it would be a cool idea to create a game that used commonly available pieces from other games (monopoly, chess, etc). and release the rules as an 'open source' project... and see what kind of variations it would spawn.
For the board, I just printed it out with our home inkjet and pieced the pages together on a piece of corrugated cardboard. For the pieces, I just used pieces from RISK. Everyone has some extra dice somewhere, and for cards, I just used a regular deck of playing cards and associated each card with the card it's supposed to be. (e.g. Aces are a "Gain piece" and 3s of Spades are "Move ahead 3 spaces") I'm planing on sending my game to Milton Bradley or some other company and requesting payment in royalties.
Making a boardgame, or any other type of game, is about 90% playtesting. Once you have a concept for the flow of play and the game elements, you can use pretty much anything to represent them during the testing phase. Don't put too much effort into the bits and pieces though. They'll change often during the development of the game. During development consider using whatever stock elements you have lying around. Playing cards with index stickers on the back are great. A whiteboard makes an easily changeable game board, and beads are great game elements during development and testing.
When setting about your game design, ask yourself foremost "What do I want the game experience to be like?". Important things to consider are the number of random factors and their effect on the game. Almost any game has random factors of some sortl; chess is a marked exception. The difference lies in the effect the random factors have on the game. Childrens games are often won or lost entirely by the luck of the draw, whereas adults usually require a game won by skill, not luck. In order to achieve this, you'll have to either minimize the random factors to the point where they don't influence the outcome of the game too heavily (drawing 'event' cards in a strategic game, for example), or make them so integral a part of the game that they'll become statistically predictable (production in 'the Settlers of Catan").
Another important factor to consider in your game design is the gaming experience. Ideally a game will have elements built in that retard the progress of players who are closer to winning. Often, in games involving negotiation, the retarding factor is the players themselves.When given the option, players will often turn down the opportunity to do business with an opponent who may well win the game as a result of his actions. If your game contains no such human element, consider using some form of exponential maintenance to slow the progress and make the playing field more exciting. Failure to do so can result in the winner of a game being decided very early in the game. This makes for an unplleasant gaming experience for all involved.
Most important rule of game design is KEEP IT SIMPLE. Anybody who's played computer games is used to a complex gaming environment, but such an environment does not translate to board or cardgames. Complicated maintenance tasks should be avoided, as should factors or variables that are complicated to calculate or whose effect on the gamestate isn't instantly clear. Remember, the best games are easy to learn, but hard to master.
Most of all, enjoy yourself! Designing board and card games is a fun, if challenging pasttime.
I want the fire back.
Spray Mount is to art production as Hummers are to commuting. The amount of shit you are putting into the air is absurd. Use rubber cement and a brush. Yes, it takes five fucking minutes longer. What, your art project didn't take days to design?
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
There are already lots of good posts on how to do a professional run at 1000+ copies. Before you get to that point, you should do a few dozen copies to test with friends and strangers at game cons using techniques like what Cheapass Games does.
:)
For decks of action or play cards, print on pre-perforated blank business card sheets. If you have a board that you play on, use the heaviest cardstock that you can run through your printer (8.5x11 probably). If you want a bigger board, use multiple sheets. Set up interchangeable board elements to hide the fact that you can't print one huge board (like the random placement of RoboRally boards). Use generic glass beads for tokens. For unique pawns, fold pieces of paper into an upside down 'V' shape with a picture on them.
Until you really fine tune the game to point where random people like it even with the Ghetto(tm) pieces, you shouldn't bother with anything pricey, like die cut decks, full color anything (unless it comes out of your own inkjet), or custom designed pawns. Board games tend to be very pricey to produce. Richard Garfield came to Wizards of the Coast with RoboRally and several other board games back in the early 90's. They told him that the board games were far too costly to produce. Eventually he came back with something much cheaper called Magic: the Gathering. It required over 300 different pieces of artwork, but only cost about $1 per deck, or $0.25 per pack to manufacture. Their wholesale price was about 4x that. Once Garfield's net worth hit 8 figures, he was able to produce the board games he originally wanted to do. Keep this in mind when you're trying to decide if the professionally produced decks and die cut pieces are worth investing in.
Anyone making heavy-weight perforated hexagonal sheets would be awesome, but that's probably too much to ask. It would significantly speed my dream of a Nuclear Winter of Catan game.
This is a great discussion and very timely for me! I'm working on getting a ccg published independently. I've already gotten lots of good info. Check the website: http://www.magewarfare.com. Here's the story so far: My son (who's almost 17) created his own ccg after getting bored with the existing ones. He came up with all the rules and the gameplay and I helped with some cards. When we had 500, we figured it was time to try it out. Our first step was to playtest. We put the cards in a database and used Word's mail merge to produce a whole lotta pages neatly arranged in tables with card-sized cells. We had that printed and cut at Kinko's (more on them below), put them in card holders (using cards from those other games for backing :-) ) and took them to our local comics/card shop and with the owner's support, enlisted some local gamers. We've been taking feedback and streamlining the rules (it was pretty complicated at first), while at the same time enlisting artists through word-of-mouth, our website and artist forums.
It's been about a year and we know have about 40 artists, 80+ pics (more coming in all the time) and a growing number of players eager for the first release. Thanks to a state-funded non-profit agency (http://www.microcreditnh.org), we also have access to some funding. We're still using "homemade" cards - though they look better now - but we had an "official" demo, with local press coverage.
We're working towards a spring release of a 280-card subset of the 500+ cards we now have. The reason for this is to keep production costs down. We did get an estimate for a full production run, including tuck boxes, etc., and that was in the $40,000 - $50,000 range, depending on how many deck variations we wanted. So, we're going with the subset and we will assemble decks and shrinkwrap them for sale locally, through stores on consignment. We will not be selling them ourselves; our job is to promote the game, not get into the retail business. Revenue from this will bring in enough to go into full production.
As for Kinko's, we've found the quality of service to depend primarily on who we deal with. There's one employee who can't even open files from a disk, so when she sees us coming, she passes us off to someone else. There are a couple of employees who've gotten to know us and our project and are very helpful and go out of their way to do good work. Plus, the regional manager has recently started helping out as well. They've already said they can't handle the commercial version, but for our home-made stuff and the posters we've done so far, they've been very good. And besides, they're open when I'm not working, which most other printers/copiers are not.
So, if you've taken the time to read THIS much, then perhaps you can offer suggestions, advice, thoughts...?
Thanks!
Kevin Barrett Mage Warfare http://www.magewarfare.com