The Advantages of Paying for your Final Prototype for your Board Game.

Foreword
To preface this post with a bit of justification and clarity. I wanted to discuss the pros of ordering professionally made prototypes over making prototypes of your games for yourselves, with the rationale being that there is something to discuss: which means that we have to talk about the pros and cons of this course of action. Getting your prototypes professionally made costs money and can sometimes be very expensive, depending on the game. That's the main barrier to entry for most up and coming designers. Secondly, to shed some light on my experience, I will be talking about three of my games I have prototyped myself, or in fact, had prototyped by a manufacturer. Finally, to be doubly clear, these pros are regarding final prototypes, not your first, second, or tenth prototype. This prototype is the one you will take pictures of, show at conventions, and send to reviewers.

Prototypes for Langskip that arrived today (as of writing this post) along with my cat, who is aptly named Thor.

Edit: Just as an additional disclaimer, only pay for prototypes once you believe that the design portion of development (both game and visual design) is complete. Not doing this would most likely result in a lot of wasted money. Here is an article I wrote on how to save money when manufacturing your games. 

Reasons why you should pay for a manufacturer to make your final prototype.

1. Instead of spending a lot of time making your prototype look suitable for marketing (this could be in the form of touching up in Photoshop or investing a lot of hours into making 3D renders), you can use the prototype you paid for. 
2. A fair amount of reviewers consider the quality of components, even if it is just a Kickstarter preview. I had a review from What's Eric Playing a couple of years back, and he outrightly said that the quality of my handmade prototype for Blockers affected his opinion. Most reviews won't be so forward with this, but the quality does affect the outcome. 
3. When communicating with the manufacturer who makes your prototype, you can better understand what will work in the final product and what won't. For example, with my upcoming game Langskip, I had to change the art on the board and the size of the player pieces, just so all components would fit in the box size that I wanted. So instead of marketing artwork or piece dimensions that were going to change, I am aware of an accurate depiction of the final product. 
4. At conventions, instead of coming up with excuses as to why the artwork is a bit fuzzy or why the cards are all cut slightly off, you can instead allow players to engage with a fair representation of the game they will back on Kickstarter or sign up to a mailing list for. I'm saying this from experience with my first game; starting things off with a potential customer by saying, "Ignore the quality, the final version will be better" is a great way to get on the back foot early. 
5. This point is more of a justification with regards to the money spent. I also plan to cover the marketing budget of my previous game, Food Time Battle in Space, more in a separate post. Still, I will say that I spent in total about £1000, including a £750 marketing grant for Facebook advertising for that game. Both the money spent on prototypes for reviewers and the conversions from those reviews are incomparable, in a good way. I spent roughly £180 on seven prototypes. That plus shipping came to about £200. The conversions I got from Facebook was a shockingly low six people. From the review videos, it was almost fifteen people. There is a critical mass where this snowballs that I didn't have the budget to hit, but if you have to decide where to put your money, put it into reviewers over Facebook ads.  ​

The standees in there oval plastic holders. The reason for the need for oval holders was due to the dimensions of the board and the size of the rows on the board.

All components fitted very snugly in the box.

If you want to subscribe to the BGG page for Langskip, click here.

​Those are my top five points for paying for a manufacturer. There are a bunch of caveats with this, of course. For example, if you are terrific at making your prototypes and have expensive card printers and even more expensive 3D printers, it might be better for you to make your prototypes. Also, it matters a great deal what components your game has; companies that manufacturer prototypes only have and use a select few components (and are rarely open to making unique ones just for a small print run), though if you build up a good relationship as I did with mine, then they might be more open to this. For example, with my upcoming game Langskip, they invested in oval plastic standee holders that they are now going to stock for other games as well, just because my game precisely needed oval standee holders. 
Also, as just for a little top tip for finding a manufacturer, try sticking to your own country. I know it might be easy to head to The Game Crafter and make a game quickly, but shop around and see if you can find one closer to home; it'll about half your costs just from shipping alone. If you need any advice on manufacturers out there, comment below on this post. Also, if you have any experience working with manufacturers to create prototypes, and you want to share your experience, comment below on this post and let's all learn together!