[Read our full Froggy Bazaar series here: www.pineislandgames.com/bazaar-diaries] As I wrote about last week (in a regular blog post), as a game evolves through the development process the goals of your playtests, as well as the target playtest audience will change. We’re now at the point for Froggy Bazaar where I need to broaden our play tester base (beyond my immediate circle), and so have a few important questions to answer. What is the medium of playtesting? Who is playtesting? What are our goals for playtesting?   Playtesting Medium We enlisted the help of Tabletop Simulator ..read more

I want to highlight an upcoming game that I’ve been following for awhile that really demonstrates a great way to bring a game to market. A slow, and steady approach to building community, developing a game, and making an awesome product.   Edward “TK” King started his publication journey for Galactic Cruise around the same time I started our journey with Nut Hunt. I remember fondly the early days of us on the Board Game Design Lab Facebook page talking design tips, sharing prototype pictures, and learning the ins and outs of bringing a game to market. We took different routes with our ga ..read more

I got an email earlier this week asking two questions. Where can I find playtesters for my game? How do I prevent playtesters from stealing my game idea? When I get these questions, they are often together – so while this article is mostly focused on how to find playtesters, I do want to quickly address why you shouldn’t worry about your idea being stolen. If this is old hat to you, then skip on down to the playesting section. Ideas are Worthless There is essentially nothing you can do to prevent someone from stealing your game from a mechanical perspective. You cannot copyright it, and ..read more

[Read our full Froggy Bazaar series here: www.pineislandgames.com/bazaar-diaries] One of my biggest lessons learned from publishing two board games (and counting) is to start thinking about the big picture earlier. That is, to define the overall brand direction for the game including identifying its target gamer (see our article on psychographic profiles), and its market comps. Having a good handle on the overall direction and vision for the game can help direct all of your future decisions from art direction, to marketing, to target MSRP and what that means for component skew and even box siz ..read more

[Read our full Froggy Bazaar series here: www.pineislandgames.com/bazaar-diaries] I’m working on a game that I expect us to bring to market in 2024 or 2025. It’s called Froggy Bazaar. Now that I’ve been through this process a couple of times, I thought it would be elucidating to write a series exploring – in real time - the entire process of bringing a game from an idea to publication and beyond. Just a frog doing frog things… My goal is for this to be a resource for other publishers, where we delve deep into everything from balancing the game, to building a budget, hiring an illustrator, fin ..read more

I’m working on a new game (I’m writing a series following the process), and so am revisiting all of the stages that it takes to bring a game from an idea to publication (and beyond). The early stages of design involves a lot of playtesting and prototyping – and that prototyping evolves over time as you get closer and closer to publishing your game. So, let’s talk about it... Stage 1: Pen & Paper The first stages of playtesting are to figure out two things. Is the core mechanism fun? Does it work? You don’t need a lot to answer these questions – some paper, a pen, and spare bits. The ..read more

We just got back from a pretty incredible Gen Con, we sold out of our physical copies of Nut Hunt on Friday (only two days into the con!!) and had a great time growing our fan base and taking late pledges for Sigil. We had a couple of big personalities working our booth, and it was interesting to see how each person’s pitch / teach varied, but how they were all successful. These are some tips I picked up from watching our team. Selling out our last copy of Nut Hunt at the con Before we get into it, keep in mind that these are tips for pitching to consumers, a pitch to a publisher or even dist ..read more

Sigil goes live on Kickstarter today! The game has been in my hands for over a year (we signed it in February 2021). In future articles I am going to go in depth on the process of bringing a game through development. We were pretty good about tracking our tasks, using SmartSheets to map out how graphic design, illustration, rule book editing, manufacture querying, video editing, content outreach, and everything else flowed through our pipeline to make an awesome game. But, Sigil didn’t start with me. It wasn’t my brain child, and while I helped tighten the game up around the edges, the design ..read more

A lot goes into making a board game. From design to development, marketing and of course manufacture. In the past I wrote about the distribution pipeline (see our article: Supply Chain A-Z), and decided that it might be helpful to dig a little deeper into the actual process of manufacturing a board game. The Pipeline Let’s take a closer look at each of the steps in the process… Print File Review: The publisher sends their print files to the manufacturer. They are checked for formatting, and to make sure components fit the manufacturing specs – i.e. margins are correct, die cutting is tenab ..read more

IV Studios (the creators of Moonrakers) is foregoing traditional stretch goals in their ~$1 million Fractured Sky campaign. This is an unusual move, and to understand it we first need to understand what stretch goals are, and why they matter. What is a Stretch Goal? Stretch goals are component upgrades, additional game content, or add-ons that are unlocked as a campaign reaches a higher funding level (or hits other milestones like social media stretch goals). The theory behind them is that as a game acquires more backers and funding it starts to benefit form economies of scale. Its per game m ..read more