Who should I approach over a new game idea?
Mabon Dane
idea who I could approach with this idea? I would also like to know if
there are any specialist board makers around. Any help would be
appreciated.
Mabon Dane
John Cartmell
Does it *need* a non-standard board?
Does it *need* non-standard pieces?
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Mabon Dane
different colours made up of 24 smaller glass counters and 2 larger
glass counters. The game has been play tested for over two years and
is fast, simple and addictive. A prototype exists.
Mabon Dane
Peter Clinch
coloured glass marbles are commodity items. Flattened ones that don't
roll around are Out There, or Splotter wouldn't be using them in their
games (a small Dutch game company run as a hobby by folk with other day
jobs). But could you use, for example, draughtsmen (which come
naturally in two colours and you can simply stack two together to big a
Big Piece)?
Wooden boards will require a degree of special manufacture. If you can
use a printed board you can bring down the costs considerably without
necessarily coming out as low rent: have a look at DVONN (see
www.gipf.com) for how good an abstract game can look. This uses a
printed board and stackable Bakelite pieces (which look and feel superb
to play with).
Kris Burm's GIPF games show that good abstracts can be made and sold
viably (don't expect to make lots of money, "viably" for these games
means "may not make a huge hole in your pocket").
Pete.
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Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net p.j.c...@dundee.ac.uk http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/
John Cartmell
It's not as bad as I feared.
It's possible that the biggest mistake is in calling it chess-like:
1. from what you say above there are only two distinct shapes of pieces.
The six shapes of chess makes it more expensive to manufacture;
2. chess pieces are expensive to make but are made at criminally low prices
in China so you cannot possibly compete if your customers think of it as a
form of chess.
And does it *have* to be glass?
Having cleared that:
Is the board a plain grid? ie little artwork required.
Can the pieces be simple counters/pawns?
Then - do you want to sell the idea to someone or do you want to sell
boards/pieces that someone manufactures for you?
Mabon Dane
with the edges of the squares cut into the wood. I would be looking to
someone to make the game but would not sell the idea at this stage.
Mabon Dane
Mabon Dane
Mabon Dane
Peter Clinch
We're out of the realm of games and into manufacture. I'd suggest you
start hunting about for someone who does mass production of shaped wood
(laser cuts????) and find out what sort of costs are involved (though
since I'm not in the wood cutting business it's entirely likely this is
the wrong process...).
If you can cut depressions into the grid you can use marbles which are
very easy to come by in different colours and sizes.
John Cartmell
In that case you're in the wrong place. Effectively all you need is someone
to produce wooden artefacts. By the sound of it, mainly complex routing.
Not cheap.
I'd use a printed board that was laminated but then I'd sell the game for
5-10 GBP rather than 50-100 GBP.
Kevin J. Maroney
<p.j.c...@dundee.ac.uk> wrote:
>We're out of the realm of games and into manufacture. I'd suggest you
>start hunting about for someone who does mass production of shaped wood
>(laser cuts????) and find out what sort of costs are involved (though
>since I'm not in the wood cutting business it's entirely likely this is
>the wrong process...).
>
>If you can cut depressions into the grid you can use marbles which are
>very easy to come by in different colours and sizes.
You (the designer) might want to talk to Enginuity Games or Kadon
Enterprises; the former has recently published some relatively
inexpensive wood-and-glass games (notably Three Stones), while the
latter publishes gorgeous but more expensive wooden and acrylic games
like Kites and Darts and the Game of Y. They might be interested in
your game (though Enginiuty mostly publishes games by its founder,
Andy Daniel, they might be branching out), but more importantly they
might be able to help you find a manufacturer if you decide to
self-publish.
http://www.gamepuzzles.com/
--
Kevin J. Maroney | k...@panix.com
Games are my entire waking life.
Games for Sale: updated 4 July 2004 <http://www.maroney.org/kevin/games-for-sale.html>
mike.wellman
Pacru (www.pacru.com) board is made using MDF and a matrix bed router, the
tiles are pre-existing mosaic glass tiles (getting our tiles made to
specification would not be realistic). The board ends up very attractive
but very costly to make and so very expensive to the customer (£120 / e180 /
$220). In the UK we didn't find any specialist makers of general
wooden-type gameboards as such - the volume required in such items is so low
that it gets done alongside other manufacture (e.g. furniture). We found
our manufacturer by approaching a firm that imports and sells the equipment
that would be needed to make it (a computer controlled router), and from
there tracing firms in our region who had the gear. From original
prototype to manufacture took us some considerable time: the manufacturer is
unlikely to see you as a customer who is going to generate regular work yet
they need to be interested in producing a quality product for you.
A few key questions - which we asked ourselves and it will be some time
before we know whether we got any of the answers right!
How are you going to market a new game that is expensive to make? How will
anyone know it is any good? Can you find someone who will make it in a
short run (50 games or less would be a handy start) so that you can really
test the market before investing a fortune in manufacture? Do you want to
be a publisher or just the author/designer? Can you play the game using
pre-existing pieces and a simple (i.e. flat, high quality cardboard,
plastic, laminate etc) board? What is the result of play-testing that
version - and do the people who have play-tested that version want to buy it
when it is "just" the gameplay in a pleasant presentation they are buying,
rather than the gameplay and a beautiful object? Is it those beautiful
objects you want to see out in the world, or would just the game be enough?
Can you create a prototype that people like to play which could be made
simply, so that the publisher wouldn't be anticipating a manufacturing
headache? Have you had it tested it by games players who have played other
contemporary abstract games (see for instance Clark Rodeffer's list of
abstract games suitable for tournament play on boardgame geek)?
I think there are few companies who are interested in abstract games because
apart from the classics they don't generally sell particularly well, and
there isn't the developed market that there is for "German" style themed
games. I believe the largest publishers of new abstract games (who will
also sort the manufacture) are
PIN http://www.pintoys.com produce the games in Thailand
and GIGAMIC http://www.gigamic.com/ I have no further info
If you haven't already read one of the books about getting somewhere with a
game (e.g. the game inventor's guidebook by Brian Tinsman) then that might
be worthwhile.
Good luck!
Mike Wellman
Mabon Dane
guidebook by Brian Tinsman.
Mabon Dane
Jonathan C. Dietrich
Should things not work out for you publishing your game, please consider
releasing your game to the community possibly using a creative commons
license. <http://creativecommons.org/> By releasing your game to the
community, but retaining commercial rights, you may find get valuable
feedback about your game, gain a group of fans, develop a name for yourself
in the community, and possibly even attract a publisher even though you had
previous difficulties.
Just a thought.
JCD
--
contact me at jcdietrich (at gmail dot com) not the above spam trap
George D. Phillies
ranks blocked off.. You will have to suffer with different colors rather
than different sizes, but I believe poker chips are available in a fair
range of colors other than the traditional ones.
And if you sell it with draughts boards and overlays, you can also use it
for chess, checkers, and ultima, whose rules could also be included.
(printing a go board on the back is also plausible, but you would need to
add stones).
George Phillies
Editor, Game!
http://www.gametableonline.com/?url=game
Stephen V Cole
you mention (so I wouldn't be interested in pubishing it), I can perhaps
offer you a bit of advice.
1. Every year, hundreds of companies print thousands of games. The
designer of every game thought his game was fully playtested, lots of
fun, adictive, and likely to sell a million copies. Sadly, all but two or
three of them were wrong. I get two or three games a month unsolicited
from designers who think that their game is just THE thing to be printed
right away. An awful lot of them have "strong preferences" for
manufacturing techniques that might be practical if somebody with a ton
of money was going to make 100,000 copies in China and sell them into
30,000 stores. I usually print two or three thousand copies and sell them
to 20 wholesalers who on a good day place them into 300 stores.
2. There are several different industries within the overall umbrella of
"gaming".
The big guys (milton bradley and the like) only buy games through certain
agents. Those agents are the gatekeepers, who answer 1% of the mail they
get, select a dozen or two games to present to the big guys, and only a
few of those actually get printed.
The "adventure gaming industry" (see GAMA or Game Manufacturer's
Association) is very entrepreneur driven. Just about every game company
in GAMA was founded by a game designer who couldn't get anybody else to
print his game. While your game (chesslike) isn't the kind of game 98% of
companies in GAMA print, the fact that so many game designers had to
start their own companies to get into print should give you some idea of
how tough it is to get any game company to buy an outside design.
There are other parts of the "gaming world" such as computer games, video
games, etc. which aren't relevant here so I'll skip them.
3. You might want to go to the GAMA trade show in Las Vegas in March.
You'll find 200-300 game publishers in one big room and can do what 50
other designers can do, walk around with the prototype of their
unpublished game and see if anybody offers a deal. Note that expensive
manufacturing such as you "would prefer to see" is pretty much going to
ensure nobody offers a deal. If you can find parts that are available
"off the rack" and if you can have your board done in laminated cardboard
instead of wood, the number of companies that might be intereted in a
game of your type goes from zero to maybe ten or twenty. If you say "I
have ten grand to invest in production and need somebody with established
marketing and distribution to partner with me" the number of companies
who might actually offer you a deal goes from zero to five or ten. It's
actually pretty easy to get a deal at GTS if you have a workable game and
the money to print it. If it's your money on the line, we don't have to
sweat the risk. Remember that you're asking somebody else to bet their
money on your idea.
4. It takes a while to get a game on the market. If you walked into my
office and had a game I wanted to print, I'd need at least three months
to have my own playtesters work it over to ensure all the rules are there
(and those playtesters are kept busy, so I'd have to wait 1-5 months
before a couple of groups could even start, plus the three months of
testing). Once the testing says "go" any company could not print the game
for at least 100 days as the wholesalers need time to convince stores to
buy it. Even then, most of us manufacturers have games scheduled for 6-12
months out and there might not be time in our schedule for a release
exactly 101 days from completion of testing. If you're paying the
manufacturing it becomes possible to get much closer to 101 days as it
doesn't have to be programmed into the budget.
I wish you the best of luck. Where you're going, I've been. I sent my
first few games to every company in the industry "way back then" (late
70s) and barely even got the courtesy of "go away, kid" from them.