Why Making Board Games is Difficult in the Modern Day

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Brian McIver, GoLocalWorcester Contributor

Not so long ago it wasn’t easy to make a board game. Sure, you could get some scraps of paper or some plastic army men and a piece of cardboard, but then that’s basically where it ended. If you really wanted to make that game a reality that had it’s own custom pieces, it’s own actual game board, and a wide audience you had to raise money. Meaning, you had to raise money the old fashioned way by getting loans or selling your creation to investors. Thankfully thanks to technology and crowd funding it’s easier than ever to get a game made, but there are drawbacks.

3D Printing

While 3D printing isn’t really a new technology, it began back in the early 80s, in recent years the cost of the devices has dropped drastically, and devices in some cases can be as small as pen. 3D printing is now being used in a huge swath of industry from Nike in use in shoes, to car and truck manufactures making body modifications before production, to animators making stop-motion films. Because of the ease of use and affordability of 3D printing game makers are now using this tech to make fully fleshed out pieces for their games. This gives game makers and game testers the ability to get a better feel for how a game will play and changes can be made quickly and cheaply.

Crowd Funding

Crowd funding has blown up in the last few years with several websites dedicated to taking your money and giving it to the projects and causes you feel deserve it. And again this new way of obtaining money for your dream project is being used in a wide variety of ways. From funding your neighborhood little league team to funding full-fledged movie productions crowd funding has become the way to get a project the money it needs to get off the ground. This is especially true for board games. Hundreds of board games are now crowd funded with several of the top moneymakers being card games, board games, or miniatures games. In fact the number eight on the list of all time highest grossing items on any crowd funding site is a card game known as Exploding Kittens. Of course having Mathew Inman of the wildly popular The Oatmeal comic series as one of your creators kind of helps push name recognition.

The Problem

The biggest issue that has evolved here isn’t just an issue with board games, but with the crowd funding model that so many creators have come to rely on. Not all games can be as big as Exploding Kittens, in fact many games fail to make it to market and die after their initial run, or in some case don’t even make it that far leaving funders with nothing to show for their enthusiasm but an empty pocketbook.

Of course the chance for failure is there with anything, and good games don’t spring out of the ground like a Cabbage Patch Kids. They need creative people and adventuress people willing to back those ideas for the next Exploding Kittens or Conan. Have you backed any games that have made it big or did your game flop like a Magicarp? Let us know in the comments.