Game Board Boxes

jpog, some quick thoughts:

A couple people here have mentioned using plastic boxes from Placon. Unfortunately, they don't have one that fits your dimensions well, and the larger ones (8.5x11) are fairly flimsy (though the smaller ones are nice).

I think custom boxes are expensive, no matter what. Full color ones certainly are, at best a buck or two for a few thousand. If anyone has leads on people who'll do 1 or 2 color box printing for less, I'd be interested as well.

Envelope printers seems hard to find, I think small-time printers represent an industrial segment that's only sort of found its way online so far. I could dig out my notes on a few I have found if you're interested and there's probably some local to you if you call around. Personally, I think for those dimensions (bigger gets too flimsy) and components, an envelope can work out well. I have a bunch of envelope printed games I've bought, and in many ways they're nicer than mailers with stickers pasted on. If memory serves, I got a quote at one point for a two-color, large envelope at something like 50 cents each for 500.

jpog,

I think you would actually want to ship in a bubble envelope or a corrugated cardboard mailer (folding or box). My thought was that yes, it'd be a little redundant to print an envelope and put it inside a mailing box. However:

a. You can bury the cost for the mailer into S&H charges, which then doesn't affect the price in selling directly (e.g. cons) or to retailers.
b. I feel that a printed envelope looks nicer than a box with a sticker on it, but that's just my opinion.
c. The shipping box is going to get trashed, so you really need to have 2 containers.

Anyway, I found two promising leads when I was looking into this a while ago. One was Action Envelope, whom I believe said they could do (or had in their catalog) a 1 color 9x12 for $359.95/1000. Another was Argo Envelope, which quoted me a 2 color (black & 1 other), 11.5x14.5 for $205/500. Obviously you'll want different sizes & such and that'll affect cost, but I thought those numbers looked pretty promising.

Long story short, printed envelopes are something my little group's considering for some of our efforts. If you wanted to check out an example, lots of the CheapAss games are packaged like this. However, I think you could do one slightly nicer for no more cost. I have a Hamlet game made by some small company that apparently went under. It's in a nice, black-printed light-colored manila folder and looks very classy.

I'd be curious to hear what sort of results you get, but FYI that they (Cactus) seem to come in around a couple bucks for even relatively large runs (by their standards).

Hmm, anyone tried card boxes. It's what I use. You know, the boxes that come with those fancy birthday cards. They come in all shapes and sizes and are fairly cheap. I then just print an A4 label and cut to size.

Good for prototype anyway. Hope that helps.