Pros and cons of standardizing in board games

Standardizing - yay or nay?

To even begin the discussion about standardizing game components, we need to ask ourselves if this is an actual improvement.

Having dedicated lately more than the fair share of my time to publishing rather than designing, I realized that there is a downside of standardizing - it kills some of the creativity of designers (myself included) on the altar of delivering a marketable, user-friendly, industry standard product. The designer in me is trying to fight the other side of my board gaming personality (the publisher) screaming for more freedom and less standard components. 

I - the designer - wish to have a giant board in one of my upcoming titles depicting a detailed map of the world, something which would make the War of the Ring giant board seem average, but I - the publisher - will most likely deny this request on ground of being unreasonable, too expensive and almost impossible to manufacture.

And that's not all... I - the gamer - had the pleasure of opening 46 game boxes bought in Essen and some of them gave me great joy of discovering clever assembly mechanisms and cute little tweaks which made some games special right of the box, while some others had some of the most twisted annoying components that went straight to the "I am not emotionally equipped to deal with this" shelf.

So, perhaps there's a middle ground and an agreement can be sought by the dreamy designer, the pragmatic publisher and the exigent gamer. 

Almost two years ago when NSKN Games was even younger than today, we decided to approach board game publishing with a specific set of mind - making each game component as functional as possible and packing everything in the least possible amount of space.

Same size boxes

In a post on the NSKN Games website called "Less is more" we described this "discovery" and its core principles. We adheres to these principles fully and Exodus: Proxima Centauri (revised edition), Praetor, Progress: Evolution of Technology and Versailles - board games published by NSKN Games since then - are all built accordingly. Our two upcoming titles for the first half of 2015 - Exodus: Edge of Extinction and Mistfall - are following the trend and will have the same ergonomic design. But is this all we can do? The short answer is no, there's definitely room for improvement and this is what I want to explore together with you today.

Game components one by one - standard or not?

1. Game box - it's the first thing you and I see and 90% of the times the box is the decisive factor in our interest and later buying the game or not.

Image source: BoardGameGeek

My first few games were of various sizes and shapes, from the standard square Ticket to Ride box, to the monstrous Twilight Imperium "coffin" and the tiny Catan Card Game. Through the years I have become pickier and the box of Dungeon Fighter caused me head aches because it's just marginally larger than the standard square and yet it does not fit on my very standard IKEA shelves... so I had to let it go.

Image source: thebattlestandard.com

My plea if for standard boxes which save shelf space. Fantasy Flight Games - one of the trend setters in the hobby industry - has given up the iconic "coffin" boxes and switched to square boxes of various heights. I do not know the actual reason behind this move but I can speculate that they are standardizing and making their products gamer-friendly. Think only of Imperial Assault or Descent 2.0.

What is your opinion, do you prefer standard boxes or are you a fan of unlimited creativity and prefer cubical or cylindrical boxes?

2. Rules

Squares, rectangles, A5, A4, letter... the rules is modern games are all over the place. We at NSKN tried our own standard, 285x285mm booklets which are roughly the size of the box. It was or choice for the past 2 years because it allows large graphic examples, the page can be divided into 2 or 3 columns according to needs and it is cost effective.

Cost effective is one of the keys for small publishers like us to succeed. Once we evolved past the point of mere survival (as a company) we had the luxury of rethinking our publishing paradigm and look again for better solutions.

I have been advocating for "our size of the rules" for quite a while until I have recently made an experiment of my own: I took the rules of a random game, put them in both the large square format and A4 (which is almost the same as letter size) and read through them timing myself. Reading the same amount of rules text in A4 format took me about 25% less time. Therefore, the rules of our next game are coming in A4 format, even if that adds a few cents to our production costs.

Which is your preferred rules format? Do you even have one? Is this a key aspect for you when it comes to buying or even playing a game?

3. Boards

This is the point where the discussion gets complicated.

Having analyzed 50 games with non-modular boards published after 2012, I found the following distribution: more than 50% are a 4-fold square or rectangle, 30% are 6-fold rectangles and the rest are... all over the place. When it comes to modular boards, the most common shapes are rectangles, hexagons and starred hexagons, but the distribution here is too difficult to assess because of the wide range of options. Furthermore, less and less of modern board games have an actual board, with German style games sticking more to the original conservative model with an actual board.

I mentioned before that the designer in me wants a giant game board. I have spoken to a few manufacturers and the largest single piece board they can make is 100 x 70 cm and this is not really what I had in mind. Anything beyond that would require all kinds of non-standard "stuff" (I was afraid to ask) and the price would increase five to ten fold for a board just 1.5 times as large.

Comparing boards with the same total area, a 4-fold cut is 30% cheaper in average than a 6-fold cut thus the industry preference for the former. Even when it comes to ergonomics and table space, a square 4-fold cut seems preferable. And yet in Versailles we went with a larger 6-fold board very close to the manufacturer's upper limit because it suited better the game's needs. My inner fight between the designer and the publisher was a clear victory for the designer, while the publisher saw the margins decreasing under his eyes.

Using any standard game board will also save significant costs with the cutting knives when manufacturing with an established large board game factory. For small publishers saving this kind of money may very well make a big difference.

Modular boards offer a greater flexibility and sometime much greater replay value. They do not necessarily increase the manufacturing costs, but they usually do. Yet more and more designers and publishers walk this road, because creativity is no longer limited by a rectangle.

So... what is you view on game boards? With or without? Modular or classic? Does this aspect even matter when it comes to your liking and buying games? 

Conclusions?

Writing for quite a while now, I have only covered about half of the topics I had in mind. So. I'd love to see your opinions and I'll resume my train of thought next week.

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The battle for space

NSKN Games has already published two games which are considered by many “heavy games” or “gamer’s games”. While we are not disputing this statement, we realized that this is also the result of misconception brought to the gaming world by the size of the respective game boxes.

Warriors & Traders, our first release, is presented is a 35 x 35 x 8 cm game box, about 1.5 times the volume of a “normal” game box. Exodus: Proxima Centauri, our successful game released in 2012 has been dressed in a 40 x 30 x 10 cm box, another “monster” filled with several hundred wooden, plastic and cardboard components.

We realized how difficult it must be even for the friendliest of our fans to organize games of various sizes and shapes on a shelf meant to host hundreds of titles. Early this year we started a project meant to make our games stand out by not standing out as awkwardly large or too long or wide. With our engineering background, we tried to think outside the box so that we can fit large games in regular boxes. But this was not all. Not only did we decide to avoid any quality compromise, we also wanted to improve the quality of all components and to relocate most of our production from China back to Europe, so we can have a better control over the quality of our board games.

We put all these ideas under one umbrella which we called “less is more”. It became a company policy which we will adhere to from now on. So, let’s see what is this policy all about:

• top quality without any compromise – that’s something you hear every day and time will be our best witness

• maximum functionality - every component in every box of NSKN Games must have its purpose. From the final prototype of a working board game to the final printed version, we are still play-testing until we decide there cannot be less components. We are striving to avoid redundancy, so that we can simply provide all the components needed to play the game to its full extent. No more, no less.

• shape and size – with our gaming and our engineering background, we discovered we are very good at optimizing. We are considering the shape and size of each component and we are using every bit of space on our punch-boards until we are certain that the space is used optimally. while following the theme of the game.

• standard box, smart ideas – the quality, feel and replay value of a board game is neither increased nor decreased by the size of its box. Manufacturing companies are able to meet almost any demand, it is only up to us to come up with the ideal solution. We chose to fit our “out-of-the-box” ideas in a standard sized box, so you will discover our games to be carefully thought, but heavier (and please take the word literally) that your usual square-boxed board games.

• more cardboard, less air – a standard box has a volume of about 6000 cubic centimeters or 360 cubic inches. Most games use between one third and a half of this space. We decided to fill in as much as we need of this volume. We are not afraid of removing a cardboard insert and place as many as 15 punch-boards in a box on top of a few hundred wooden and plastic pieces. By giving large games in small boxes, we are hoping that our customers and fans will feel they get exactly what they pay for.

Our first experiment with the standard box is the Revised Edition of Exodus: Proxima Centauri. We are taking a risk going again the trend of the industry. Many publishers are going for non-standard sizes and even shapes. We also want to stand out, but through different means, some of which we've listed above.

We believe that this is a sign of respect for our fans. What do you think? Would you rather play, buy and store a special type of box or a standard one?

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