How to Save Time, Money and Energy when Manufacturing your Board Game.

​Foreword
Making a game for your friends and making your game for the world are two completely different tasks. However, this isn't THAT blog post. Instead, I want to talk briefly about ways to save time, money and energy (the big three) when making a game that you know you will send to print one day.
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Just as a bit of me and why I have some insight into this area of board game making, I have to date dealt with six different manufacturers, four Chinese, one American and one British, and I have produced four prototypes and two published products (soon to be three). I have made the mistakes, I have made the errors, the very costly errors at that, so hopefully, through this post, I can save you some time, money and energy, so you can better spend that on doing something we all love in this community, making games!

Just a quick note, I will be mentioning my upcoming game Langskip in this post a lot. This is only because it is a game I just recently sent off to manufacturing, so I have up to date information and images regarding such process. This is in no way a marketing post. 

Tip 1 - Use a template first (or make sure your artist is using a template first). At the beginning of my game development journey, I cannot tell you the number of times that I had to change every single card in a 

200+ card game because the manufacturer gave me a template that didn't work well with my cards. This image here is what a template looks like; it has a bleed, cutting-line, and safe zone. Make sure all essential art and text is in the safe zone, and make sure the art and text are central to the cutting line, and all your cards should come out looking beautiful. Just make sure that you create the cards with this template in mind, rather than after the fact; otherwise, you could add ten plus hours with every iteration you send to the manufacturer, which brings me to my next point.

A card from one of my games, Langskip (unreleased).

Tip 2 - RGB vs CMYK. Unfortunately, if you use Photoshop to create your game as I do, you will run into this problem. Most likely, your files for your game will be default set to RGB. This is great for your marketing, your Kickstarter and your social media, but it is terrible for printing. Almost definitely (it's happened to me a couple of times), your manufacturer will send you an email with "we cannot print this" if you send them a bunch of files in RGB. That's why making two versions of your final assets, both RGB and CMYK, will save you a lot of time. You can do this quickly enough by taking the PNG of either the RGB or CMYK, opening a Photoshop file set to the other format and just dragging the PNG onto the canvas. Having these duplicates of every asset in the game will save your time later when you will 100% need them for either printing or advertising. 

Tip 3 - Ask for quotes from manufacturers before finalising the artwork for your product. This idea relates to my last post and creating gateway games with fewer components first, but the long and short of it is this: if this is your first game, you need to make sure it's not going to cost too much. Therefore, commissioning artwork for boards that might be too big or creating tokens that are too intricate could cost you both time and money. On top of that, every single component can affect the size of your box, so getting a quote for your game is wise for more reasons than just finding out the price. When inquiring about a price for your game, especially if you have a good idea of how many components you will be using, the manufacturer will give you quite accurate measurements for components that you will need to readjust the art for if done after the fact. I've had to do this many, many times. I've had to change an entire layout for the box art to fit on the box the manufacturer quoted me. Ask for these quotes first, and then make the art later. 

From the images on the right you can see the slight changes I had to make due to the box size having to change after changing the components in the box.

Artwork before being retrofitted onto the template.

Artwork after being retrofitted onto a template.

Tip 4 - Don't use your physical prototypes for principle playtesting!!! I add three exclamation marks here because I see this happen all the time. If you want to do this, you either have way more money than sense, or you want to have a physical version of your game rather than minimise costs to increase profitability. Use Tabletop Simulator, Tabletopia, and Board Game Arena to prototype your games, get them playtested to high hell and get them good enough to be at least reviewed. Of course, when you have these prototypes, you are more than likely going to find an error or two; that's fine, you can fix a spelling mistake, and that won't change the balance of the entire game leading to weeks of cascading playtesting sessions. Just don't start with an expensive prototype, end with it. 

To conclude, this has been a short post about easy pitfalls you can fall into and how to avoid them when taking your game to manufacturing. This hasn't been a post to improve your design skills or question the industry in any large way, it's just some tips you'll fine obvious in a few years, but if you are just starting out I believe you could really benefit from this advice.