Board Games

Boardgames are a tough business to make money in. Anyone can become a designer. The market has thousands and thousands of games out there. Gamers have shelves and shelves loaded with games. They put games they don’t like or don’t have room for out into the used market.

What this all adds up to is that your game has to really fight to get attention. The game mechanics and components need to be really polished. The artwork needs to be very compelling. Thematic games need to have interesting themes and stories. More abstract/euro games need to have really tight rules.

It’s tough!

As someone that works in print it is an all but dead industry. 70 percent of companies that were around when I started 20 years ago are now closed and there is so little profit in print that the companies that are left are constantly on the edge of collapse.

Especially for things like board games there are so many different processes involved including often some special processes to get to your final product. This sometimes means you need to employ more than one company to get everything finished properly.

All of these things add up to making it less and less profitable to do these things so the companies that still manage to release a quality product and manage to stay afloat have my utmost respect, it is tough!

As a retailer, our margins are ever shrinking too. So many of these companies sell on Amazon and in big box stores that slash prices, everyone expects me to have those same bargain basement prices.

That kind of surprises me.

When I think about board games, I think of:

• Printed boards.

• Printed cards.

• Molded plastic pieces.

• Maybe cut wood pieces.

• Maybe glass counters.

• Maybe plastic dice.

And all of these have to be put in a box.

But...how labor-intensive are these? I'd think that the printing would be pretty heavily automated. I don't know whether molded plastic needs a lot of processing (snipping seams or something?) or whether machines can bring a molded piece to a final state without human intervention.

kagis for an injection-molding plastic cost breakdown

https://www.omrajtech.com/composites-blog/cost-model-for-pricing-plastic-injection-molded-parts

Labor costs are associated with machine setup, operation, and quality control.

That doesn't sound like there's finishing costs involved.

Glass counters are machine-made.

I'm sure that cut wood pieces are done by a machine, or they'd cost a lot more and you'd rarely see them in budget sets.

Dice are done by a machine.

I guess that maybe a human could put N items of each into a box. That doesn't seem like a lot of labor.

Everything is getting more expensive as if these parasites are just endlessly leeching

Time to get into cards

the fact that you can buy counterfit tabletop games for a fraction of the price on aliexpress shows that there is no way to turn a profit in western printshops.