Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Board Game
James Mathe | January 2013
So, you want to start a board game company? I could go into a page of details of
each of these bullet points below (and maybe I will in the future), but for now I
wanted to just take the 10,000 foot view of what it takes to make a hobby board
game these days. I have done this now for over 14 games. This process can take 1
year to complete. Printers take 60-90 days and overseas shipping takes 21-30
days.
Hire an artist
§ This will only be the raw art, a Layout designer will plug into the game
design
§ Box cover $100-500
§ Game board $100-300
§ Cards $25-50 per low detail, $50-100 for larger art.
§ Everything needs to be done in 300dpi & CYMK colour.
§ Use resources like Elfwood and Deviant Art to find artists.
§ GMG Artist List
Hire a manual editor / writer
§ Designers can’t write manuals. Get a professional to help.
§ Here’s a great article about rules writing by Seth Jaffee.
Sell to Distributors
§ If you don’t have a fulfilment company working for you, you need to
contact distributors yourself. ACD, Alliance, GTS are some of the larger US
ones. Esdevium Games and Brave New World are big in the EU. Lion
Rampant in Canada.
§ http://www.impressionsadv.net/index.php?p=distributorlist
Accounting
§ Don’t think the fun is over, you still have to make all the royalty and tax
payments