China Manufacturer

Well, I have a board game in production in China at the moment. I haven't received the final product yet, but the prototype they sent is very good. The printing is excellent all around, the colors are bright, the box is sturdy, the board is well-mounted. The cards are a bit thin, but that's because I went with 12-pt stock rather than true playing-card stock.

I went through MJS Creations (www.mjscreations.com), so I haven't had direct contact with the Chinese company. So far my experience with them has been positive -- they've been quite forthcoming and responsive, and everything has gone smoothly so far.

For costs/production runs, I'd recommend you contact MJS -- they can give you an estimate or a quote. They were significantly less than the quote I got from Delano (a domestic manufacturer), which was the only other manufacturer I found willing to do a small print run (< 5000 copies).

If you’re willing to share, I would love to hear about your game. Also, how do you plan to distribute your game?

Excellent job on the art, Emphyrio! It sounds like a fun game with good potential.

A lot of the games shown on the MJS Creations site have some pretty dodgy graphic design, which has been a bit of a turn off for me. It will be good to see what they can do for you in terms of the underlying component quality. Post pics when you've got them and share what info you can when you can.

Best of luck with the initial print run,
Rob

Having playtested John's game a few times, I can enthusiastically recommend it. It is fun to play and scales well from 3-6 players. The real strength of the game is the tight balance between the 6 planets. John has done a nice job giving them different abilities that really complement each other, and part of the fun of playing the game with less than the full 6 players is exploring the different ways that a given subset of the planets interact. (The game may be sort of like Dune, in which to really get the full experience, you need to have all 6 present). I plan to buy a copy as soon as it's available.

Oh, and just to keep on topic, no, I don't know anything about China manufacturers.

-Jeff

I filled out a quote form with them about a week ago, still haven't heard back.

How long do the quotes take?

Carl

I think it depends how busy they are. I'd say if you haven't heard back in another week, give them a call.

I posted some pix at http://www.venusneedsmen.com/about.html (click for larger images).

I used MS Word as I was developing and playtesting the rules, but once I had them in near-final form I put them into Adobe InDesign for better control of the layout. It's expensive, but I found it fairly easy to use and much less frustrating than Word to do anything more complicated than a single column of text.

If you'll have it available by july, count me in too. I'm visiting USA then, and am planning on buying two or three games. I'll be glad if yours can be one of them. I'll want a signed copy. :-)

Seo

The shots look great and make the game look like a lot of fun. If you don't mind me asking, I'm sure all of us are curious about the per-unit costs on this (knowing that this was a very small run, of course). What do you think you the costs would have been through MJS had you gone for larger runs of 2,500 - 5,000?

Excellent work! Let us know when your online store is up and running as it sounds like you've already got some customers lined up. =o)

I'm glad you're interested! I should have it available to sell sometime in June, and I'll be happy to sign copies. The MSRP is $29.95.

It's kind of tricky to figure the unit cost, but here goes.

The unit cost MJS quoted me for 1500 units was $5.98 + 1.50 shipping. For 3000 units it fell to $5.03, and for 5000 it would be $4.10. That includes the box, platform, board, rules, deck of 88 cards, and assembly, but not
the plastic rocket ships, mini poker chips, and ten-sided dice. MJS said they would have to make these custom, which would have involved an additional tooling charge of $3000+. I was able to get these components (bagged) from Rolco for $2.31 per unit, plus another $0.96 to ship them to China, so in fact I might have done better to have them custom-made.

So far we're up to $10.75. By comparison, Delano quoted me a unit cost of $11.58 for 1000 units ($8.63 for 2500, $6.86 for 5000), not including "cost of proof, freight & overrun", and they got the quantities wrong for the playing pieces (4 per unit rather than 30 per unit) even after I asked for a correction. That did include playing card stock but square corners (rounded corners added another 24 cents). Delano does manufacture domestically, however, so you can put "Made in USA" on the box.

Then there are the fixed costs. MJS charged a flat $2265 for plates, films, and dies, and I spent about $2000 for the artwork and graphic design (though I ended up doing a fair amount of the graphic design myself). I won't include the cost of Adobe CS2 or the memory upgrade to run it, since that's general overhead. But amortizing the fixed costs over the 1500 units adds another $2.84, bringing the grand total to $13.59. And that doesn't include any marketing such as convention expenses or ads. So at my target MSRP of $30, if I sell to a distributor at 40% of MSRP, I'll be losing money -- but I can make it up on volume, right? :-)

I could have boosted the MSRP to $35-40, which would yield a small profit on distributor sales. But at that price point, I think people start expecting fancier components -- full color throughout, playing card stock, maybe wooden pieces. Also I get the impression it's tough for a brand-new company with a single product to get picked up by a distributor in the first place. So for now I'll go with direct sales and see how it goes. At least if I lose money I can deduct it on my taxes.

I'm looking at the whole thing as a learning experience, and I've certainly learned a lot! But on the whole I've enjoyed it (so far, anyway), and it is quite a thrill to heft the prototype and admire the manufactured components.

WOW! Thanks for sharing so much detail in your post.

Thanks,
JR

Several posts above mention doing so, and Braincog relates his experiences with it over in this thread.

You may have better luck clicking the "PM" button below one of their posts and sending them a Personal Message with the request, in case they're not checking this thread. That's what I meant to imply, sorry I was vague.

Hi Neto,

I do remember asking for a quotation from Insight. I don't have the details with me but I will ask my partner, who's responsible for contacts and quotations, and i will give all the details i can get for this company.

Watch this thread, I'll get back to you.

soulbeach

No, we haven't worked directly with manufacturers in China. This is something we're looking into. We might go in China if we can establish good contacts there. We have a few leads for contacts but they need to be "worked in". This is one of the next steps we intend to take.

We only asked for quotations from what we call "game agents", trying to get prices for complete games: packaging, printing, tooling, diecutting...We on the other end, would receive the games, store them, sell them :)

This is our 1st game, so, our experience is still limited but growing :)

I'll keep you posted

soulbeach

Do you think it would be wise to contact Insight reps in China which would make costs factory costs so to speak?
BGG