Ep7: Publishing Board Games on Kickstarter with Dan Nichols

Join Josh on The Business of Gaming podcast as he visits with Dan Nichols from Gadabout Games in Austin, Texas. This episode discusses the process of creating a board game, how to use Kickstarter to bring your game to life and the challenges of the Kickstarter model for board games.

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Hey, y'all. Welcome to the Business of Gaming podcast. I'm Josh with Game Haven Guild, and today we're sitting down with Dan Nichols from Gadabout Games in Austin, Texas. He's designed and published several games, including Turf War and You Shady Pooch, with his newest game, Bad Deals, out now. Why don't you take us to the beginning? What got you in the mind state to say, I want to make a game? Delusions of grandeur, mostly, I'd say. No, I guess... For me, games have always been kind of a creative outlet and a creative hobby. When, you know, as a kid, we had all the standard board games. We played a lot of cards. We did, you know, Uno and Euchre and all that great stuff. And, you know, we were a little dirty. So eventually we discovered Magic the Gathering too. And I was like, that was just, oh, games can do this. Games can do these things. And Magic, it's a lot of designers kind of first addictive game because it's just designer catnip. It's rules. It is rules printed on cards. And you're like, oh, wow, I'm mixing and matching rules and I'm making different game states. And What if I made my own rules? What if I made my own cards? And so that kind of modularity of the game, it really invites participatory play and inventive play in a way that sparks a lot of young designers for the first time. So, you know, when I was in middle school and magic was like a new thing and it was hot, I would run home and I'd make my own cards and I'd write them down in journals and then they would never see the light of day. But I was still going through that activity and that kind of evolved a bit to working with like video game world editors, like big into Starcraft and Warcraft. And I would sit down there and make my own levels or make up new characters or new abilities or all that kind of stuff. I let that go kind of fallow for a long time, honestly. I was more focused on getting a career going, getting established, and all that good stuff. I kind of rediscovered board games and the board gaming hobby when I had moved down to Austin originally. I was maybe the mid-aughts. And some friends turned me on to Settlers of Catan, and they turned me on to Dominion. And I was like, oh, well, board games, they got something going on. And so, you know, as any kind of viral hobby does, I introduced my family to those things and started playing those things more regularly. And... I started doing little gifts for them, kind of harkening back to my old custom magic card days when my brother and his wife had their children. I made custom Dominion cards for them to celebrate the occasion. And, you know, fiddling with it, I was like, oh, well, I could make like a little custom Dominion set and I could print a little custom Dominion set if I wanted to. And then that kind of finally turned into, I could actually just make a game at this point if I wanted to. And that, plus a little COVID, a little lockdown, ended up let's start a business. Let's do this. Let's make some games. The first one you published is Turf Wars. Where did that idea come from? I mentioned messing with the world editors in StarCraft and WarCraft way long ago, and So I would be spending just kind of hours looking at these green rolling hills in Warcraft 3 and thinking about going and messing each other up and having bases and combat and conflict in that kind of setting. And it... put this little nugget of an idea in my head about kind of warring neighbors. And there's always that central tension with an RTS where it's, do I kind of stay home and build up my base or do I go out marauding or exploring or whatever it is that I'm going to do? And that idea kind of lent itself to an over-the-top comedic take of folks in a neighborhood having that same tension between neighbors of, well, I can stay home and work on my yard and guard my home, but I also need to work and make money and bring things. But what if my neighbor, who I am in this intense rivalry with, messes with my stuff while I'm gone? So that kind of bore the central mechanics of turf war. The next step of you've got the idea, you're working through it, you're showing it to family and friends, you're showing it to play testers. Yep, yep. So pretty much victimizing everyone in your nearby area by like, hey, want to play a game? It's going to be terrible. Please? Yeah. And so you shake that tree pretty hard, as hard as you can to get in as many rounds as you can. As I matured a bit as a designer, I started doing more with solo testing, more with digital testing as part of that upfront process to kind of work through a lot of those early kinks before I would have to bribe a loved one or subject someone else to the games in that state. But yeah, it's really like it's a numbers game. How many playtests can I get in? What am I trying to test? Who is ready and willing to do that for me? Now I work a lot more with the ATX game designers and playtesters group. They meet a few times a week here in Austin, try to go to as many of those meetups as I can. You know, both to see what other people are cooking up and get exposed to some different not ready for primetime ideas and to see what's working, what's not working and stuff. It's good to have a place to do that. Yeah, absolutely. That's an invaluable resource. You mentioned digital tools for playtesting as well. Is there something in particular you're using these days? Yeah, I've done a lot with Tabletopia in the past. I actually use it a little bit less now than I was, but it's just a very basic upload images, get digital cards in there, throw them up and see what's working kind of thing a little bit. easier to get up and running than Tabletop Simulator, but not as robust and not quite as player-friendly. Great for playtesting, though. What options did you look at on how to get it to market? Or was it Kickstarter is where it went? Is Kickstarter the plan from the beginning? Yeah, Kickstarter was a pretty early part of the plan. I was just doing web research, going through podcasts like Board Game Design Lab to to try and understand kind of what my options were, what different outlets were. I've always been pretty entrepreneurial, so didn't really back down from the idea of starting a business or working through manufacturing myself. And I knew that with this type of product, it being a small box card game, I wouldn't have to venture that much. I wouldn't have to risk that much kind of the time the worst case scenario wasn't that bad. And so, you know, wanting to get more exposure to different parts of the process, went out there and started looking at what are my manufacturing options for this? And I started with a lot of those print-to-order companies that I had been using, but pretty quickly found that those prices did not scale well at all. And that I could probably get a higher quality product and more of it at a better price if I went through an at-scale manufacturer. The manufacturer I... you know, I talked to a few different folks, uh, went through, uh, an industry association that's, it's, uh, unfortunately no longer operational, but, um, they, uh, they referred me over to the partner that I've used for all of my manufactured games now. Oh, so you had a good experience on the first one. You continue to use them. Yeah. You know, I found, um, the, the quality was, was great. Um, you know, timelines were, were fine. Costs were, were really solid. Um, and, Communication could be a problem at times, but there's not going to be a perfect relationship. Or if you are expecting a really high touch kind of service from a manufacturer, you're definitely going to be paying for that. Luckily, I had enough kind of design and print background competency that I had a lot of confidence in what I was requesting and the kind of specs that I was providing. And that relationship turned out well. Manufacturer lined up, you then go out and start your Kickstarter. Was there a process or did you have a mental process around how you wanted to go out and do that or start your Kickstarter, the marketing around it? For me, it was a lot of asking and absorbing and reading and researching and working out this process probably over elaborate grand plan and spreadsheet of what this Kickstarter was going to look like and all the things that I needed to do and lining up this piece and this piece and this piece and building up an email list and starting pre-advertising and making plenty of mistakes along the way there. So there was a pretty extensive process to get to the actual Kickstarter itself. And I would say that For that early game, I probably rushed it a little bit too. I was eager and hitting the accelerator kind of as hard as I could to see where I'd get. Going chronologically, the Kickstarter goes live. Yep. Any big surprises? Did you set up multi-tiering for it or how did you... I worked with a few folks to figure out kind of what is the right product mix here. And there were a few price points that really emerged as like, this is good, this is where you should be. One of the challenges with Turf War as a product in that format and one that I've seen a lot of other Kickstarters struggle with is the price point for a tuck box card game. It's 12 to maybe$17 is kind of that range that people are expecting for that type of product, depending on the size and format of the cards. when you're thinking about launching a kickstarter paying for advertising to go to that uh you know all that that kind of marketing and support effort that comes into it it's pretty hard to make that back on you know 15 bucks a pop and so uh Working with a few folks in the industry, a few consultants figured out, okay, well, having this kind of base level is good, but we need to expand both up and down. We expanded down to lower price points with a print and play version of the game that started emerging as kind of a bigger and bigger request. So we quickly added that and realized, oh, hey, there's this whole market segment that's not actually interested in a printed product at all. They want to make their own. And that was a great way to capture additional folks. And you'll also see with the Kickstarter people come in at very low pledge levels if they're kind of passively interested in a project. And maybe they want to wait for a pledge manager or they're not really going to commit to it until the thing funds. So it's a way for them to kind of bookmark it or toss a few dollars in and say, hey, I'm interested in this. Going up the scale, the$25 price point,$30 price point, that's where you're going to see the bulk of your sales on a smaller Kickstarter. That's both a price point that... People generally feel pretty good about paying that amount of money for a game or risking that amount of money on a Kickstarter and might never deliver, as some of us have been burned in the past. Or if you do get friends and family members in for that first Kickstarter, a lot of them feel very comfortable pledging at that kind of level to help support your initial effort. then you start getting into bigger tiers, right? And I think one of the things that was surprising to me about that first Kickstarter is, oh, hey, it's not just mom. I was going to give you a hundred bucks for this game. There are people who are going to be generally interested in the concept and into it, and they need a more deluxe product. They want to get a product that they can feel some more personal attachment to that they know is going to be kind of special to this campaign. And so that's where we created a deluxe edition of the game and went even further and made a$250 tier. And when you start getting into that, it's like, okay, well, what am I really doing for these people? So for that one, you would get a hand-picked gnome statue, some kind of ridiculous garden gnome for your very own lawn, as well as a prototype copy of the game itself. So stuff that you just would never get at retail or as part of any kind of normal buying experience. Kickstarter is an interesting kind of beast, but At its core, it is a very interactive and theatrical experience that people are looking for when they're participating in a campaign. And if you reward them with that, they will reward you back. In terms of rewarding, Turf Wars did fund over 200% that next day. It's done, funded, first things to call the manufacturer, or what happens now? Depending on where you start your Kickstarter, you've probably already done a proof copy with the manufacturer. It depends if the game is fully finished or not. I made a little bit of a mistake by getting a proof a little too early with Turf War and then modifying the product a bit during the course of the campaign. I hadn't fully kind of gamed out how I was going to manage it. modify the product at the time that the campaign started, which led to a really interactive campaign. And it led to folks having a lot of drive and being able to kind of steer the product in different directions. But it meant that the manufacturing cycle wasn't quite ready to go. As soon as I hit the getting back with manufacturer and putting together another proof and going through a final production cycle. The Kickstarter campaign itself, it goes through a few phases. So you get that right out of the gate kind of nail biter. Is this going to fund? Is it not going to fund? What's going to happen with this? And then it finally funds and you're like, oh my goodness, thank heavens it funded. And then you start getting into a little bit of a lull. And there are days where Uh, you don't have any new pledges and some of the pledges drop and it's just, so it's this insane nerve wracking experience right up until you get to the last sprint of the campaign again. Uh, and then you, you start to benefit from Kickstarter's algorithms again and you see some more traction and things start, start picking up. Yeah, exactly. It's about, uh, I think 48 hours from the end is when the last email that Kickstarter blasts out to folks who might have been following the campaign. So that really starts picking up steam again at that point. And you'll see some campaigns have actually a lot of their funding come in those final few days, or maybe even a majority of their funding come in the final few days. Most typical is kind of a big burst out of the gate. long plateau and then another little spike at the end, which is what Turf War did. Games get manufactured. They come to you. Can you walk through that process of then how do people get their games? Yeah. So, uh, you know, you're working with manufacturer. Um, we were using a Chinese manufacturer, um, and we also worked with a, uh, a distribution, uh, and fulfillment company based out of, out of China. So, uh, you know, we arranged for a factory pickup, uh, that they take custody of all the games. And then we set up the pledge manager for folks to go and enter their personal info and their updated shipping and get any kind of dues or customs paid through there for the countries that we were doing friendly shipping to. Pull some extracts from that, work with the shipping provider to make sure that, hey, all these games are going to the right people, we've got the right orders mapped to the right addresses, and blast those details out to folks through the Pledge Manager tool, give them their tracking numbers. After all that, there's still quite a bit of coaxing that you need to do with a Kickstarter because it is a pre-order, because you're collecting shipping information later, You do see a fair number of folks kind of wander away and forget or not check their email or not put in their addresses or anything like that. I think the last copy of Turf War that I shipped out was probably a year and a half after the campaign. And there might still be a couple people who just never gave me their address info or fell down a well or I don't know. I don't know what happened to those folks, but I thank them for backing. If you want your games, I still plug there. So that distributor, how did you find the distributor? Was that the manufacturer have some recommendations or is that through some of those industry contacts? Yeah, that was another one through industry contacts. So there's a few different companies out there that specialize in game fulfillment specifically. Um, the strategy that I was taking with tier four was, uh, direct shipping from China, uh, to folks. And there's really just two or three companies that, that will do that in a specialized way for, for games. There are a larger kind of group of companies that will do that for, uh, for direct to consumer e-commerce. Um, but yeah, we've found working with a game provider, they, know kind of how to package this stuff and and how to send this stuff out and they're they're accustomed to working with kickstarters and uh dealing with the kinds of product mixes that that need to to get packed together uh so it made a lot of sense to go with them um i don't know that that particular fulfillment model is still viable you know this was before um We saw a lot of serious spikes in fulfillment costs related to international events before we saw a lot of the customs landscape change as it has in recent months. And yeah, I don't know that you could follow that same recipe again. Post-Kickstarter getting fulfilled. Yeah. Is there a life for Turf War after that around other distribution methods, or what kind of happened to the game over the next two, three years? Yeah, so one of the things that happened during the campaign was getting some interest from a Thai publisher as well as a distributor based out of the UK. The distributor out of the UK ended up picking up the game, so we ran a large order, sent them a lot of stock, ended up in a three-year distribution deal with them. The Thai publisher requested print and play files and then vanished into the night, and I'm pretty sure there might be a version of Turf War Bootleg out there somewhere, but whatever, it's fine. Part of the game. Yeah, part of the game, unfortunately. And so those were major sales outlets for us. There's also a lot of direct-to-consumer support that needed to happen. So still did events and stores as we finally had inventory. Didn't have to give people this cockamamie sales pitch of like, hey, I know I'm showing this product to you in a store right now, but you can go to this other unrelated website that's not me or the store and sign up for an account. And in several months, you'll have the opportunity to order a product in several months that you'll then go to a pledge manager and fill out your details. So it's just this really weird, crazy kind of pitch that you're giving to folks. So it was nice to finally have the product and be able to be like, oh, yeah, here, this is$15. Thank you. Well, how does your distribution work today then at the U.S.? Are your product is getting shipped to someone here or do you have a big garage somewhere? Yeah, no, games in a garage and also just ship everything out of HQ. So we'll periodically go on. Hey, we're having shipping delays, free shipping for everyone, but it's gonna be a week or two. And that just means I'm on vacation, so I'm not packing boxes that week. But yeah, at this point, pack and ship everything myself. We're still working with a fulfillment company out of China to help direct large shipments of product and direct some international shipments of product. But otherwise, mostly focused on US market at this point. So Turf Wars success, next one you come out with essentially kind of a second edition Trick or Treat edition. Any big changes to that, or is it more of just a styling change to a Halloween theme? Yeah, so Trick or Treat was an expansion to the game, and that was something that was kind of early in development before the original Kickstarter ever hit. It was something that I had been playing with and experimenting with. So it was kind of ready to go in late stage. We knew we could get that out there pretty quickly. The second edition of Tour 4 was both a reprint of the new game, because we did not have any copies of the first edition to sell with the expansion at that point, thanks to the distributor. And it was also to clean up some rough edges that, you know, that's the thing with the game is that you look at it and there's something that you want to change with it every single time that you look at it kind of no matter what. But having the benefit of having it in way more people's hands, having some much broader set of feedback around the first game, You know, we've heard people really wanted four player out of one box. You know, we heard there were problems that some folks were having with feeling like some of the individual cards were maybe a little too mean or too sharp or too swingy. And so sanded down a lot of those kind of rough edges and worked on reformulating that base product to be four players out of a single box and then you shady pooch came out yep so brand new concepts had this been something you've been working on for a while as well or is it something that just kind of came up afterwards yeah shady pooch uh so shady pooching bad deals once upon a time were the same game which if you look at the boxes of each of those games you would say that's not true uh but it is it is they uh they both had their dna in um kind of a casual card game that I was playing with and kind of evolving and creating with friends who would sit down and come over for cards. There were elements of that game that were working, and there were different elements of that game that were working in a different way. So it was time to do a little surgery and pull those two halves apart. The first half of that became You Shady Pooch. And that was the more rowdy drinking elements of the game. Like all good names, a lot of the theming there was just puns. Just total goofy, how do we take our dogs that we're totally in love with and... uh, mix in like weird elements of drag culture and just total, total nonsense. Uh, and you shitty pooch was born of that. Well, after those three all successfully backed on Kickstarter, comic book boom came out and it did not get funded on Kickstarter. Yep. Can you talk to us about why, why do you think it didn't, but then what happens to the game after a Kickstarter isn't funded? It was definitely a disappointment. Uh, when that one didn't hit its funding goal on Kickstarter. It did have a higher funding goal than the other projects. It's also a much more complex manufacturer than those other projects. It needed a lot more original art than the other projects, so it needed the higher funding goal. There were some misfires with marketing. I think one of the things that I saw with it in particular is that the social media Kickstarter marketing is a struggle right now. I've bootstrapped a lot of my marketing myself. I've resisted using an agency. I've resisted using outside lists or things like that because I've run the numbers with it and it's would be exceedingly difficult to break even on the games with that kind of assistance. We've seen Facebook kind of collapsing as a place that people go for real content or real interaction. And that is somewhat reflected in advertising performance there too. A lot of advertisers are struggling on those platforms now, both to reach real people as well as to re-engage with their existing customers. And being an amateur marketer effectively, that was hard. That was a hard thing to go through. The other side is that it is a bit more of a niche product. So we've got a more expensive product. We have a more difficult product to market. We have a smaller segment that we're effectively marketing to. And I was still surprised when it didn't fund, frankly. But it is still a product that I believe pretty strongly in. And it's one that I think will do well in person or on shelf and be able to perform in ways that more convoluted sales pitch that you get with Kickstarter just isn't able to penetrate to that smaller audience. So you still did bring it to market. You've got it available. It is in the works right now. So we've got it going from the factory to distributor right now. We're expecting to open pre-orders on it soon, but I want to hear, yes, I have it in hand. It is in the warehouse. We're ready to start shipping it before I do that. Well, then tell us about Bad Deals, because Bad Deals did not go through Kickstarter. Tell us about that decision slash what's different and how you're distributing that. Yeah, so Bad Deals is another small box game, right? And yeah, I spoke a little bit earlier about the difficult financials of making a small box work on Kickstarter. You know, we've seen some divisions in the Kickstarter audience and there's an increasing amount of noise on the platform as well. So all that kind of suggested like, this isn't a good Kickstarter product. This is a fun card game. This is a great small box game. this is not something that has a thousand minis and costs a hundred dollars and it's got a license ip associated with it so there's a built-in fan base and you know yada yada yada this isn't something that i'm gonna buy a convention booth for to uh to support all on its own and so bad deals um became a way to start experimenting with some different manufacturing and distribution options. We didn't print that one with the manufacturer that we've worked with in the past. We did print that with a smaller order manufacturer. And it's part of an area of experimentation that I'm really interested in, in the industry of, hey, if we make 50, 100 copies of a thing, Is that something that is viable or as viable as making$1,000 or$10,000 of it? Certainly the profits aren't going to be the same. It's going to be a much lower profit venture, assuming it all sells out. But it is a way to get ideas to market a little bit more quickly to start getting these kind of smaller, edgier, weirder games out in the world. We haven't started really pushing bad deals yet. I haven't even sent a letter to... to my email subscribers. Sorry, email subscribers. I apologize. Podcast exclusive. Podcast exclusive. You heard it here last. Because we actually did post on the website that, yes, we were putting it out. But the plan has always been to kind of put that out there along with the comic launch and put marketing dollars against that. So having done this for more than a few years now, How have you seen the industry change that way? You spoke some about how Kickstarter is for sure changed and become just different, right? Anything else either from Kickstarter perspective or the industry in general that has changed over the years? Yeah, so I mean, talking about this kind of the make 100 model or doing smaller runs of games, I think one of the trends that I'm seeing right now is this kind of night market, indie market, thing kind of popping up. And I do feel like that is kind of the next, I'm going to take my game to Kickstarter. It's now I'm taking my game to this regional night market. That barrier to entry with crowdfunding has just become absurd. The amount of money that you need to kind of pre-invest in art assets, in campaign, in advertising, and manufacture samples, lining up reviews and all this, like you are, you're paying to just fully produce this game and then opening up a pre-order on this site where you're giving Kickstarter some chunk of your money and begging for attention against all this other stuff that is just going through the pipe a million miles a minute. And that's, uh, that's a really daunting landscape to be in as a designer. It's not one that's, uh, that's really conducive to getting great experimental indie games out there anymore. It's a pre-sales vehicle for larger manufacturers. And so what we're seeing now with these Tokyo Night Market inspired add-ons and marketplaces that ride along with larger conventions is space for designers to bring these weirder, rougher cut kind of properties, to bring smaller print boxes out to gamers. And I think that's really cool. I think that's kind of the next big thing that we're going to see and the next thing that we need to start embracing as an industry. Looking back to when you started, having done several of these now, what advice would you give yourself or someone else just starting right now You know, it's tough because you can give all the advice you want. It doesn't guarantee your past self is going to listen to you. They're probably going to make all the same mistakes, whether you want them to or not. But I'd say, for one, take a little bit more time in scaling up efforts. It's really tempting to... hit the print button and say, I'll take 5,000 or whatever it is. But when you're thinking about that kind of an initial burst that's coming through in Kickstarter, there's a little bit of a sugar high that comes with that. And you're not thinking, oh, now I've sold these 500 units and I only have to sell 4,500 or more. Great. There's a lot of drag that that inventory can have. Warehousing is expensive. Shipping is expensive. Remarketing is expensive. You don't know how much more it's going to cost or how deep your audience is or what that kind of full demand is yet. So that's the other thing that I think is exciting about more small scale manufacturing and more experimental manufacturing is that, hey, it's an easier to kind of scale and do market testing with activity. I don't think I'm ever going to be different than someone who likes to kind of do all the stuff on their own. It's one of the reasons why I haven't gone out to other publishers at this stage because I like having my fingers in every part of the process. But that kind of model is great for a person like me. to explore and get some new ideas out there. Awesome, Dan. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.