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...?"

Comments

History of Monopoly

[Skim123]

Check out http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121997 .htm. It discusses the interesting history of the game Monopoly. Yes, Monopoly's success made it's "inventor" Charles Darrow a millionaire, but a quite similar game, titled Landlord, was invented nearly 20 years prior.

Test first

[jmichaelg]

Before you bother to produce anything, try your game out on friends and friends of friends. If it falls flat there, you're not out anything. What will more likely happen is, by watching carefully and just listening, you can see things that don't quite work the way you thought they would. So you revise and try again. Keep doing it until you hear people telling you they played the game even when you weren't around to watch them play.

At that point, it's time to consider whether you want to self-publish or sell to a publisher. If you decide to self-publish, with a good game in hand, you're about 1/5 of the way to making money. Then you worry about production issues like you are now. Producing parts isn't tough unless you have to build molds in which case it can get expensive pretty quick. Boards, manuals, cards, boxes are all cheap to produce. Once you have physical product, you're about 1/3 of the way there. You still have to sell the game to resellers and to do that, you have to convince them that the game will move off their shelves better than what they're currently carrying. That's a tough road and requires a lot of patience and persistence to see it through. To get a feeling for the problem you have to overcome, put yourself in a game store and you see a new game on the shelf. Would you buy it if you know nothing about it? That's what a reseller is going to wonder and it's a fear you'll have to overcome.

So you finally land your first sale. Except you're not there yet. Somebody like Walmart or Target is going to want to know that you'll take the game back if it dies on the shelf. That means you won't see money from them until the product shows that it's moving and they're ready to reorder. It's when the second and third re-orders start coming in that you know you've got a product that'll sell. Self-publishing is a rush but most of the time you're worrying about keeping product moving more than you're worrying about developing a great game. Been there, done that.

hexagonal chess

[Anonymous Coward]

I came up with the idea (long ago), of a three player chess game based on a board of hexagons instead of squares. I even tried to market it through one of those invention marketing companies (waste of good money.) Then I joined the Air Force and got stationed, of all places, at the Pentagon. One of the first things I did was hop on the Metrorail to Crystal City and do a patent search of chess games based on hexagons instead of squares... I found at least twenty design patents for such games. And since the WWW has come into existence I've found at least 20 more such games. So much for my idea. =P

Turns out, creating a chess game based on hexagons instead of squares that has the same "flavor" as regular chess is no easy task at all. I am still trying to find the right combination of boards/piece arrangements.

Design

[colmore]

What kind of game are you making? I'd caution you against book-full-of-charts war/tactics/role-playing type games. They were popular in the 70s, but computers have more or less killed people's patience for that sort of thing.

The best games can be learned in 30 minutes, have no dice, or a very small chance element, can be easily portable, and play best with about 4 people.

Settlers of Catan (simple version, no expansion packs) is the best board made in the past thousand years. Chess & Go win in their respective epochs. If you aren't familiar with all three, you should take a pause before doing any further designing.

Other honorable mentions: Poker (some states allow poker gambling, but not other forms, since it's a game of skill and not luck) Bridge, Diplomacy, Nomic (not a really fun game, but useful as a designer to get you thinking about games)

Monopoly and Risk are terrible games. They both last about two hours longer than is actually fun. Their strategy is about three inches deep, and they rely *heavily* on luck.

Also, if you can come up with the next Asshole, the world will be in your debt. We always need more drinking games.

Do *NOT* Use Kinkos!

[weston]

I've worked as a project manager for a graphic design company -- brochures, business cards, letterhead, postcards, folders, book covers, whatever. And I can tell you that by far, I have had the absolute worst luck sending customers to Kinko's. They don't have equipment for doing die cuts or full-page printing. Often they don't have staff who know what Pantone Colors are or the difference between CMYK and RGB or what an EPS file is (or any vector artwork, for that matter). They're an overgrown copy shop with delusions of grandeur, not a printer. Any real printing services they offer, they outsource, and in either case, you're paying more.

We've had much, much better luck sending customers to Sir Speedy, Alphagraphics, and PIP. If you need to photocopy something, or you're printing a B&W PDF, by all means, go to Kinkos. If you need quality printing, don't touch them.

(And I might also note: don't even set foot in the building with the file. Mail them a PDF with your order, and come in a few hours later. Every time I've tried to use one of their computers to print something, there's been some sort of configuration problem that turned a 5 minute task into an hour. Every time I've given one of their staff a disk with a file on it, a similar event has ensued -- as recently as last night, I took a friend to a Kinkos where she had a three page Word Doc she wanted printed out. We left 45 minutes later with no printed document in hand, and eventually just drove back to my house (half hour away), used antiword, and had the thing in 5 minutes. I don't understand why this is -- I'm sure that we're not the first folks to walk in there with a Word Document, and most of my friends who've gotten jobs at Kinko's have been pretty sharp. But anytime I've done anything other than copy something, I've had a bad experience there.)