Board Games

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Rathar

Rathar

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Heyas! Steam name Aremanios and would love to make friends to play games with on Tabletop Simulator. We/I play a lot of worker placement type things like Agricola for example (yammers on forever about all these other games as well, on and on) but hey if I'm on lets do/learn how to do something. Definitely a learning curve thing going on and some games such as Scythe have way better AI than others but it works pretty dang well.

Hope the Not Going Out ffs is going well.
 
faille

faille

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techraptor.net

[Updated] CMON Audit Could Shut Down Company | TechRaptor

A CMON Audit is potentially putting a tabletop games publisher in danger of closure and it's not entirely clear what's going on. Several issues have cropped up over the last few weeks. Firstly, the company announced that an audit would cause them to delay the release of their yearly financial...
techraptor.net techraptor.net

not sure if this should be here or in the kickstarter thread
 
T

Taim

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Omayga said:
I've been playing quite a few games of Everdell lately, the family seems to enjoy it. Artwork is cute and the setup and play is pretty easy, my 10 year old caught on quickly. There is enough cards that you can get pretty good replayability through the base game. We opened up the Pearlbrook expansion and played 3-4 games with that and it adds a nice extra layer. Will probably look to trickle in Bellfaire and Spirecrest expansions over the next 8-10 playthroughs

all in all, I am pleased with the game, its still competitive but nobody is ever really out of it, all of our scores have been decently tight, no huge blowouts.
Click to expand...
Everdell has amazing visuals, no doubt. If you want a slightly more challenging, but way less pretty =/ game, look up Maracaibo on board game geek. Players are privateers in the spanish carabean (theme ala Sid Meyers Pirates). Tons of cards for engine building. Combat to ingratiate yourself with the old world (English, Spanish, French) and can even go hiking thru the bush in South America. Everything you do makes you points, can you make the best engine? That said, the game is only 4 turns long, and it has a learning curve. However, once you learn how it plays, it is a thing of wonder, just not beauty.
 
Rathar

Rathar

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Busted into the Table Top Simulator thing on Steam. Pretty nice assortment of stuff out there.
 
Njals

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Not really sure it belongs here but did a quarantine game night with Microsoft Teams and the Jack Box Party Pack to great success. I say great success because half of the group barely knows how to turn on their computers. Launched the game on Steam and streamed the game screen to everyone on their tablets/laptops while we played on our phones based on the streamed screen. We had 8 total players across 4 shared screens and it worked perfectly. We mainly stuck to the trivia game due to the fast pace but all of the collection worked flawlessly. I did connect with the less tech savey ahead of time to make sure they could turn on their microphones and see my screen ahead of time being the only caveat.
 
Hateyou

Hateyou

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Well Gencon is canceled, in August. I can’t believe how fucking scared and pathetic we are. I have seen some companies state in the past that Gencon sales are the only reason they can stay in business, those four days make up so much of their yearly revenue. Oh well fuck em I guess. :mad:
 
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Ninen

Ninen

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As a nerd, I don't wish death on many nerdly things or makers of nerdly things.

that said, if you're business model is *that* coupled to a single event, you may have a systemic problem you probably should get resolved.

I'm really surprised that some of these $150+ boxed game makers don't work on having product available at other price points: Aka, make a:
$20 version with just the rules and a board you print out (you figure out your own tokens and dice)
$30 version, same as $20 but here's token art to print out too.
+$5 add on: official box with bits and bobs sorting.
+$15 add on: hq, glossy and felted cardboard board.
+$20 add on: makerbot files to 3d print your own mini's.
+$40 add on: we'll ship you mini's and dice.
...
...
Full price, everything professionally made and stuffed into a box, buy and go package.
 
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Hateyou

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Eh I don’t wish death on anyone, not sure why you said that.

Not every company is like that, but very small companies are. They kickstart something because they don’t have capital / don’t want to do loans. They get a ton of extra copies they don’t have warehouse / storage for, them sell them all at Gencon to keep them going until their next project. It’s not a great business model, I agree, but it’s how some of them operate and it’s worked for years. Until now. Smart ones will figure out a way to get by I guess, others won’t.
 
Warr

Warr

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Not gonna lie, it's been sort of a golden age for board games but there's also been quite a glut of them in the past few years, fueled in large part by KS. So I'm not entirely disappointed by the news.
 
Mizake

Mizake

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Ninen said:
As a nerd, I don't wish death on many nerdly things or makers of nerdly things.

that said, if you're business model is *that* coupled to a single event, you may have a systemic problem you probably should get resolved.

I'm really surprised that some of these $150+ boxed game makers don't work on having product available at other price points: Aka, make a:
$20 version with just the rules and a board you print out (you figure out your own tokens and dice)
$30 version, same as $20 but here's token art to print out too.
+$5 add on: official box with bits and bobs sorting.
+$15 add on: hq, glossy and felted cardboard board.
+$20 add on: makerbot files to 3d print your own mini's.
+$40 add on: we'll ship you mini's and dice.
...
...
Full price, everything professionally made and stuffed into a box, buy and go package.
Click to expand...

Speaking as a businessman, that is not a sustainable model, especially for a small company or an individual. That is too many SKUs for starters. Also, the reason the $150 big box is available for $150 is because they are contracted to print a certain number of units.....usually in the thousands. So they get a scaling discount based on volume - good ol'
"economies of scale". If you were to only print 10 copies of the box, the game likely will cost $500-$1000 for only those 10 units, maybe even more. They will have to be hand-made because no factory is going to do a production run of 10 units when they can run 1000s of units for another project and make substantially more money for themselves.

With the way you have it listed, the game maker will have zero idea how many of each SKU he/she will be able to sell. Either he will have to try to produce hundreds to thousands of units, and hopefully sell through.....or produce units at individual quantities, and at a severely marked up price, therefore earning no profit.

This is why KS is successful for board games. It gives the designers a way to more precisely gauge how many units they can sell, so they can go to the factory and order a specific number of units they know with certainty they can sell. The factory can give them an accurate cost, discounted based on volume. Can you imagine trying to do this before KS was a thing? You would have to risk your own money, GUESS how successful your game is going to be, and hope that you could sell all the copies you made. Otherwise you would be stuck with a huge inventory and have to sell all remaining copies at a loss.
 
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Ninen

Ninen

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Mizake said:
Speaking as a businessman, that is not a sustainable model, especially for a small company or an individual. That is too many SKUs for starters. Also, the reason the $150 big box is available for $150 is because they are contracted to print a certain number of units.....usually in the thousands. So they get a scaling discount based on volume - good ol'
"economies of scale". If you were to only print 10 copies of the box, the game likely will cost $500-$1000 for only those 10 units, maybe even more. They will have to be hand-made because no factory is going to do a production run of 10 units when they can run 1000s of units for another project and make substantially more money for themselves.

With the way you have it listed, the game maker will have zero idea how many of each SKU he/she will be able to sell. Either he will have to try to produce hundreds to thousands of units, and hopefully sell through.....or produce units at individual quantities, and at a severely marked up price, therefore earning no profit.

This is why KS is successful for board games. It gives the designers a way to more precisely gauge how many units they can sell, so they can go to the factory and order a specific number of units they know with certainty they can sell. The factory can give them an accurate cost, discounted based on volume. Can you imagine trying to do this before KS was a thing? You would have to risk your own money, GUESS how successful your game is going to be, and hope that you could sell all the copies you made. Otherwise you would be stuck with a huge inventory and have to sell all remaining copies at a loss.
Click to expand...

I guess I figured that no one factory is going to handle all the bits and bobs. the dice place isn't likely to be setup to do felted game boards; the book binder isn't likely to do mini's. Etc etc. So rather than contract with *someone* who subcontracts all the other places (let's be real here, everyone involved is almost certainly in the alibaba ecosystem) and then gets paid to build and shrinkwrap boxes; the businessman does it himself. Sure, a bit more work perhaps some storage space, but at the end of the day he's got a pallet of minis, a pallet of game boards; etc etc. Hell, if they want, ship all that shit to Amazon and let them warehouse it (for an uglier cut of the pie of course) And in the format I described; some portion of your orders are going to be purely digital goods, which we can assume will have a pretty decent profit margin if your content people are paid some form of lump sum and/or residuals.

I'm not knocking KS for allowing real people to be the angel investor for those using it; or even trying to replace it. But in this day and age of print on demand publishing; chinese makerbot factories, et all; there's got to be a better solution for nonKS situations than the all or nothing of shlepping 50 lb complete set boxes to game stores and praying they convince one of their couple whales to put down the bills.

Edit: looking into Amazon's own print on demand service: a 40 page black and white softcover rulebook costs $1.33 to print. I find it hard to believe that a $5 or $10 markup over the PDF copy won't make a profit?
 
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Hateyou

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Ninen said:
I guess I figured that no one factory is going to handle all the bits and bobs. the dice place isn't likely to be setup to do felted game boards; the book binder isn't likely to do mini's. Etc etc. So rather than contract with *someone* who subcontracts all the other places (let's be real here, everyone involved is almost certainly in the alibaba ecosystem) and then gets paid to build and shrinkwrap boxes; the businessman does it himself. Sure, a bit more work perhaps some storage space, but at the end of the day he's got a pallet of minis, a pallet of game boards; etc etc. Hell, if they want, ship all that shit to Amazon and let them warehouse it (for an uglier cut of the pie of course) And in the format I described; some portion of your orders are going to be purely digital goods, which we can assume will have a pretty decent profit margin if your content people are paid some form of lump sum and/or residuals.

I'm not knocking KS for allowing real people to be the angel investor for those using it; or even trying to replace it. But in this day and age of print on demand publishing; chinese makerbot factories, et all; there's got to be a better solution for nonKS situations than the all or nothing of shlepping 50 lb complete set boxes to game stores and praying they convince one of their couple whales to put down the bills.

Edit: looking into Amazon's own print on demand service: a 40 page black and white softcover rulebook costs $1.33 to print. I find it hard to believe that a $5 or $10 markup over the PDF copy won't make a profit?
Click to expand...

I’ve seen some Kickstarters do this and they’re always very low demand. One recent one that came to mind was Dice Throne adventures. It came with painted minis so mini painters were clamoring for a new SKU with unpainted so they could save money and do their own schemes. So the company made a new SKU for $21 less (like 9% less than painted iirc) and they got a whopping 141 people on it, on a campaign that had around 12k people. So they brought in $3k less, and now have to manage a new SKU/process, for 1% of their customer base.

This isn’t the only example I have seen but the print and play options you are suggesting are always very low demand on these big Kickstarters. I’m sure there is some small profit in it, or people wouldn’t do it at all, but suggesting that it is a business model that would surpass an event that accounts for 30-40% of their annual sales isn't realistic. The demand just isn’t there.
 
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Angerz

Angerz

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Ninen said:
As a nerd, I don't wish death on many nerdly things or makers of nerdly things.

that said, if you're business model is *that* coupled to a single event, you may have a systemic problem you probably should get resolved.
Click to expand...

That single event, and Essen in Germany, are where i buy most of my games for the year, since that's where they release. And I am definitely not alone in that, with as many people as I see toting away 5 to 10 board games, if not more. So the consumers play a part in the ecosystem. Games release at gencon, games preview at gencon and you can preorder. All of these sales go directly through the company, no distributor, no middleman, which I assume maximizes the money they make. Plus just picking up an older game at their booth, but again, with no middlemen involved.

And its not just direct sales on the floor. I probably buy 6 to 10 games at gen con, a few new RPG releases, but then pre order one or two more games that I have demoed and add a few more to a list to buy upon release in the coming months. That hands on info is invaluable to making a decision to buy a game, I can't trust DiceTower and the rest of youtube for everything.

It's the ecosystem they've built. Hopefully they can adapt for this year and hype up some releases throughout july and august and still get those sales.

On the topic of board gaming in the present, anyone using BoardGameArena.com? It has been what my gaming groups have been using on our usual board game nights. It's pretty slick.
 
Fyff

Fyff

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I've worked Gencon a number of times for a bunch of different companies. The millions of dollars that changes hands that weekend is staggering.
 
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Hateyou

Hateyou

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Fyff said:
I've worked Gencon a number of times for a bunch of different companies. The millions of dollars that changes hands that weekend is staggering.
Click to expand...

Gencon is the entire reason Indy expanded the convention center, and were planning on expanding it again. It’s the largest convention Indy has and brings in $70m in revenue to the city. It is indeed ludicrous.
 
Hatorade

Hatorade

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Awwww yeah:
1590072220852.png
 
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