My son and I have developed a new board game. And I know everyone thinks their game is good, but I really believe ours is. I'm 51 and my son is almost 24 and has just graduated from college with game design as his major. Unfortunately he was promised a connection into the game board world, which fizzled out. So now, it's totally up to us to get this game into the game world. We've done all the steps to make sure this game is ready to face the world....tested by strangers and altered when necessary...meets a wide variety of players....2 to 6 people can play...even if you are losing throughout the game - you can come back and win the game in the end, it has an easy and fun level - as well as a challenging & exciting level, easy to read instructions, easy level takes about 30 min. to play - and of course longer for the more challenging level, game shouldn't be too expensive to buy for the customer. We've even made sure that aggressive players with chilled out players can play together and no guarantee who is going to when. The game is different every time due design of board...so you never know what to expect. Can anyone help us out with the next step...Being our first time out there, I'm afraid we wouldn't be successful in having the game made ourselves, yet not sure how to get a game company to look at us...any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Getting a board game developed
If you want to go with a publisher, try emailing some publishers that take outside submissions and try to set up a meeting at an upcoming con. If they don't do con meetings they may ask for you to email your rules, and if they like those, have you send them a prototype.
If you're thinking about self publishing, read this over: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/322382/game-design-self-publishing-a-res...?
It's difficult to give much more advice without knowing more about the game, as not all publishers publish all types of games. Best of luck!
Hi! I would really suggest to find a publisher and not to go self-publishing in this case.
If you think your game is good the best thing is to choose the right publisher.
We could try to help finding one if you can just give us some more information (without revealing the rules if you do not want so); for example:
- is this an abstract game? Or it has a theme?
- is this a card game? How many cards?
- which is the age range in your opinion? 8+ ? 12+ ?
- is this similar to any famous game? ("more like poker than chess", for example)
- are all materials language-independent, or are there for example cards or boards with text?
- can you make a list of materials? (like: 110 cards and 50 tokens in two colors)
The more information you can give us, the easiest is for us to give you an advice about a good publisher; for example it's not useful at all to send a children game to Alea, or a wargame to Haba, to name two.
Please note that in my case I have more knowledge of European publishers (in particular Italian and German companies), so please let us know where are you from, so people from your country can be more useful.
Best luck to you!
You could alternatively try out a service like ours: https://www.thegamecrafter.com
Or you could run a kickstarter campaign.
Or you could run a kickstarter campaign.
Kickstarter campaings are not «publishing campaigns». They are fund-raising campaigns.
I warn this because i see alot of people refering to kickstarter (either when advising towards kickstarter or when saying they are going to "publish" their game through kickstarter) as something that publishes your game.
Hi. Thanks for responding! The game is fantasy, with a little bit of comical situations thrown in. It is an actual board game, but the board changes due to the tiles that make up the pattern, which are shuffled before being put on. I would say the game was for 8+ (but would take an adult to play with them) - as it has an easy level that they can play with assistance. We are living in Denver, Colorado. I haven't seen a game like this before, that's why we are eager to get it sold...we also have ideas for sequels to the game. We did get a patent on the rules, but I hesitate to say much. The only parts are the board, tiles, dice, your character to move through the game with, and the rules. I would be interested in publishers as well as places you could trust to get the game developed yourself - from what I've read so far, it looks like Germany and China have good companies, but I was hoping for something a little closer to home. I'm wondering if it is possible to get a game published as unknown game developer...if it is, I think just getting started, it might be the better way to go.....we are really just trying to check out all of our options.
Thanks for your time, it's greatly appreciated!
Mary