Pitching your board game design to publishers
I’ve been fortunate to have experienced most parts of the board game industry. For Fantastic Factories I co-designed the game, made the art, did the graphic design, and self-published. I’ve done development work on a few published and soon-to-be-published titles (Verdant, Knitting Circle, Point Galaxy, Propolis). However, the one thing I haven’t done is pitch a game to a publisher. This past weekend at PAX Unplugged was my first opportunity to do pitches so I wanted write about that experience.
First off, I was very fortunate to be co-designing games with my friend Randy Flynn. We’ve known each other for almost the entirety of our board game industry careers (can it be called a career if we don’t do it full time?) and both live in the Seattle area so it only took a minor alignment of the stars before we found ourselves collaborating on a game together. In fact, two games:
- Malarkey — a 3 to 8 player card game about bluffing increasingly larger bids about what cards everyone has.
- Avalanche — a 2 to 6 player card game about playing cards to lines trying to capture score cards. Action cards move the position of cards, and when a line is scored, cards can cascade down causing an avalanche of scoring events. Controlled chaos.
When is a game ready to be pitched?
At some point we decided the games were pitch-ready. They didn’t need to be fully finished but the important thing is that the design demonstrates a core loop that is ultimately fun and interesting.
I also believe for a game to be pitch-ready it needs to not have any glaring flaws or problems that don’t have obvious next steps for solving them. For example if one of the problems of the game is it ends too quickly or drags on too long, there better be some knobs in the game design that can be adjusted to correct the game length.
Additionally, the game needs to be as streamlined as possible. I think this is generally a good design principle anyways, but in a pitch setting getting to that fun with as few distractions as possible becomes absolutely critical.
Do your research
Once our games were ready to be pitched, the next step was targeting an upcoming convention. It’s possible to pitch games over email but I wanted to pitch games in person — especially if I was planning on being at a convention anyways.
For Randy and myself, that target convention was PAX Unplugged. It’s one of the larger board game conventions in the US and it attracts a lot of publishers. The first thing I did was review the vendor list to see what publishers would be present.
Then through a mix of experience/familiarity with those publishers I selected a couple dozen to do further research on to understand what kind of games they publish. Ultimately I was trying to envision what they might be looking for and if there were games similar to mine that they’ve published before. You don’t want to pitch a casual bidding card game to an RPG publisher.
Additionally, if you have a professional network or friends in the industry, pay attention to what it’s like working with various publishers. Do they have a good reputation? Do they pay royalties on time? Do they communicate well? Reputation matters in an industry as small as hobby board games.
Doing outreach
After researching publishers and creating a shortlist of less than 10 publishers, we began outreach. Admittedly we were a little behind and only started contacting publishers the week before PAX Unplugged to schedule meetings.
We checked the publisher website for contact emails. But in some cases Randy had contacts already from prior correspondence with that publisher. Also Cardboard Edison’s publisher Compendium is a very valuable resource for looking up publishers, their contact info, and whether they are taking pitches.
Since Randy had more notable design credits (Cascadia) he sent out the initial emails. Basically the email consisted of an introduction of who we were and what we wanted (to pitch game designs). We also included a short description of each game and the sell sheets. Here’s an example what one of our emails looked like:
Hello,
I am Randy Flynn, designer of Cascadia & Tabriz. I have co-designed two card games with Joseph Z Chen, designer of Fantastic Factories (cc’d on this email). We’d love an opportunity to show them to PUBLISHER.
Joseph & I will be at PAX Unplugged next week, and we see that PUBLISHER will be there. Will anyone be taking game pitches and have time for a meeting? Let us know if you do. I have attached sell sheets for each one and included details below. Also let us know if there is more information you would like in the meantime.
And here’s an example of a sell sheet. The intent isn’t to explain the rules of the game but to convey how the game feels while playing it as well as covering details such as player count and game length. In hindsight I should have also included component count (relevant to publishers) and our contact information in the sell sheet as well.
Preparing for the pitch
We set up a spreadsheet to track which publishers we reached out to and who we had meetings set up for. It was also a good idea to ensure that each meeting had a specified location and to check the the convention map to familiarize myself with where the meetings would be.
One thing I didn’t do but might have been helpful is to research the specific people we were meeting with in order to understand their role and position within the company. Understanding whether they were the owner, director of a games category, or general manager of a particular country/region can sometimes help in guiding the conversation during a pitch. Often times this gets covered in initial introductions anyways so it’s not critical.
I printed out a bunch of sell sheets but ended up not handing them out largely because I forgot about them and also since they didn’t have our contact info. I think leaving behind a sell sheet is particularly helpful if you don’t end up leaving a prototype with the publisher.
If a publisher is interested in your game they may ask to take a prototype with them or ask for the print and play files. Being prepared with one or the other or both is usually a good idea.
Luckily with Malarkey, the game components are quite simple so I actually made 7 prototypes to give away. Having extras on hand was actually helpful because we ended up scheduling an additional pitch meeting with a publisher after we arrived at PAXU.
Doing the pitch
From what I can tell, publishers don’t have a particular format for pitches and the meeting itself is very open ended. For a game as simple as Malarkey we mostly jumped right into a game and explained the rules as we went.
There are a few notable differences between teaching and playing the game with regular players versus with a publisher that you are pitching to. In hindsight these things seem obvious but aren’t always obvious in the moment:
- It’s okay (and preferred) not to explain every rule. Just explain enough to get into the game and other important rules can be explained as they become more relevant. Players sometimes like to have all the rules so they don’t feel like they are cheated from an experience but publishers don’t play to win, they play to evaluate your game design and there isn’t usually much time for that opportunity. Sometimes in your teach you might play a sample turn or round to demonstrate the rules. In a pitch, just go ahead and continue the game afterwards instead of resetting.
- You don’t have to play to win. You do want to demonstrate rational decision making but sometimes when you are faced with multiple viable choices, you can opt to select the one that will best highlight your game design.
- Don’t expect to play through the whole game. The goal is to get through the core loop once or twice — enough that the publisher understand the flow of the game and can identify the fun elements. The publisher will likely stop the game when they feel they’ve seen enough of it.
Once the game has been presented, it can be helpful to understand what the publisher is looking for and present your game — if possible — in such a way that it can be molded into the product they are trying to build.
What I’ve learned is that many publishers don’t think about game designs first. They decide on a product or product line and then they seek games that fit that criteria.
Explaining possible variations on your game design can help publishers envision how your game can fit into that product line.
For example with Avalanche, there’s 150+ cards. But if the publisher is looking for something closer to 120 cards, cutting player count could be an option. In Avalanche there are 6 different action cards (2 copies of each) but for each game you only play with 3 different actions. But cutting out that customization and selecting the 3 best actions, that can also cut down the card quantity.
For Malarkey, there are point scoring tokens. But the game functions just fine without them as well. It’s possible the publisher wants the most streamlined version of the game at the lowest price point possible. It’s possible to make a game like Malarkey into a $10 micro box game or a $20 small box game depending on a variety of factors. Understanding what the publisher wants helps you steer the conversation in the right direction.
At the end of the pitch the publisher may request to take a prototype with them or to be sent the print and play files. In the case of Avalanche, there was more interest than we expected and we had to hold onto a final copy of the game. We then circled back to give that final copy to a publisher after we completed all our pitches.
Follow up
After the show and after returning home and recovering for a couple days, we sent followup emails to thank publishers for the opportunity and to remind them we existed, but also to see if they had a particular timeline for evaluation or next steps. For publishers that asked for print and play files, we sent those out.
And after all that comes the hardest step — waiting…
