Category Archives: Marketplace

The Economics of Gaming: Tariffs

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This is a second article on the economics of game publishing, following up on The Economics of Gaming: Manufacturing two weeks ago. The previous article talked about the high investments required when you’re printing your game and why that can lead to accidental scarcity of a game — against the wishes of any publisher.

If I were to offer three big picture insights related to manufacturing, expanding on what I wrote in the previous article, they’d be these:

  1. Board game publication is not a hugely lucrative business (unless you’re Hasbro, or maybe Asmodee).
  2. Board game publication has very low margins, which means that a little financial mistake can set you back a lot.
  3. When a publisher charges a price for a game, that’s usually because it’s the price they have to charge in order to afford publication.

So keep those truths in mind as we dig further into the economics of game manufacture by discussing another topic that’s been in the news lately: tariffs. Continue reading →

The Economics of Games: Manufacturing

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As game consumers, we typically only see the end-point of the long process of bringing games to market. And, when there’s something we don’t like about that end-product, it’s easy to criticize, even if we don’t understand the whole process. In fact, there’s been a lot of criticism lately about a certain game that has been very scarce in the marketplace, and I can already see criticisms starting to bubble up concerning the big price increases that are going to occur in the United States if Trump’s tariffs happen as announced.

So I wanted to deviate from my more common focus on game design this week to talk about game manufacturing, particularly the very real costs and the very real risks that are implicit in publication. (This will be probably the first of two parts: tariffs will follow, assuming they’re still an issue in two weeks time.) Continue reading →

Role-Playing Games: A Primer

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Not for KnucklebonesI was very pleased in late 2007 when Knucklebones magazine commissioned me to write not one but two articles for their May 2008 issue. I was less pleased several months later when it became clear the Knucklebones had ceased publication … and positively bitter  a bit later when I started to hear rumors that these articles had been commissioned to aid in the sale of the magazine — though my editor said that wasn’t actually the case when I queried her.

One of the worst things that can happen to an author is to have a finished work sitting around, unpublished. Sure, I love to get paid for my writing, but I love even more to have my writing read by others. Unfortunately, My May 2008 Knucklebones articles sat around for a long, long time. My editor at Knucklebones convinced me to leave the articles with her for a whole year and a half, saying that the magazine was going to be relaunched and/or sold, and so the articles would eventually be published.

They never were.

Seven years after I wrote those unpublished articles, I’m collecting all the boardgame writing that I own into a single web site, and so you can now to read my primer on roleplaying for board game readers for the first time. There’s one other unpublished article, on Atlas Games, which will appear in the January 2008 archives. —SA, 1/12/15

Role-Playing Games: A Primer

In early 1974, Tactical Studies Rules — who would later become known as TSR Hobbies — published an innovative new game named Dungeons & Dragons. Authored by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, it was the earliest public release of an entirely new type of entertainment, the role-playing game (or RPG). Continue reading →

A Roleplaying Interlude

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AD&D Dungeon Masters GuideAs I’ve written before in this column, my first love was always roleplaying games. Though I’m sure I played games like Stratego and Twixt before I ever touched an RPG, it’s the roleplaying games that I really remember playing throughout my youth.

Dungeons & Dragons was the first, but there are many games beyond that, and even before I moved to Berkeley for college I played a decent share of them including the science-fiction game Traveller; Stormbringerand Hawkmoon, both based on the works of Michael Moorcock; and RuneQuest, a fantasy game that I found odd at the time, and that I’ve grown much more enamored of since.

In the last couple of years I’ve grown closer to roleplaying games again. My best friend and long-time gamemaster left the country, and so I stepped up to run a regular game, something I hadn’t done in several years, and that rekindled an interest in me. Board and card games are still my largest recreation today, but RPGs are there every week, and they get an increasing amount of my enthusiasm.

So, with all those things said, I’m going to take a bit of time today and talk about RPGs — from the perspective of board gaming.

Continue reading →

Economics, Technology, Philosophy, and Law

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There’s an old joke that goes like this:

“I’m running a store, but I lose money on every product I sell!!”
“So how do you stay in business?”
“Volume!”

This article is about gaming and all those things that appear in the header — economics, technology, philosophy, and law. It’s more about the roleplaying industry, which is having a tough time in the modern market, but a lot of the discussion could apply to Eurogaming as well — particulaly the niche sort of Eurogaming that we’re more likely to enjoy and that’s also less family-oriented, more strategic, and thus less likely to appeal to the mass market.

So accept my caveat that they may not apply 100% to the normal topics of this column, but nonetheless I think it’s related.

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The Year in Review: 2005

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Another year is behind us, and as January slowly dawns over the horizon of the twenty-first century, our ever-human instinct is to look back and reflect upon what the previous year brought.

It was, in general, a year of growth and change for the gaming industry. I’m not convinced that any true classics were produced last year. I think that Caylus will ultimately prove too long to support its continued rating as a top-10 game. However, there were a decent number of good, gamer’s games which I’m happy to own and which will continue to occasionally hit tabletop for many years.

Continue reading →

Supporting Your Locally Owned Game Store

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I moved to Berkeley in 1989 and discovered a game store called Games of Berkeley, located near the corner of Shattuck & University Avenue — at the edge of the downtown drag in Berkeley.

I was neither particularly impressed nor particularly unimpressed with GoB when I first arrived. It seemed about on par with the game stores that I’d frequented before I went away to college. They got the newest products in promptly and had a decent depth of back stock. I mostly bought roleplaying games at the time, but I’m sure GoB had a decent selection of the Avalon Hill and Milton Bradley board games that were common at the time. And I know that they had an overdecent selection of science-fiction books, puzzles, and kites. (Yes, kites. Lots of them.)

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The Problem with Indie Games

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Last Thursday I played my first game ever of Mall World. It’s a game that I was really enthused to pick up when it was released by Rio Grande Games. The tile-laying was probably what appealed to me first; I like building games. However when I saw the first pictures of it, with its geomorphic tile designs, I was totally won over. It looked neat.

It arrived at my door as part of a large box of games. I quickly ripped through all of them, ogling pieces and reading rules. But afterward Mall World began to gather dust as it sat atop my to-play pile, for days, weeks, and eventually months. I took it out a couple of times to play, but it was rejected each time. At least once this was because I didn’t want to play an auction game with the minimum number of players, but more often there was another reason that I couldn’t bring myself to play the game: the rules.
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