Category: Topic Discussions

Overproduced

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I am not sure if you've come across this before, but you may have heard some people on a podcast or in a tabletop games review video talk about a game being overproduced. Often the term is used in a negative way, implying that a game includes unnecessary components and therefore is more expensive than it needs to be. However, different people seem to apply this term to different games in different ways, so I wanted to look at it a bit more closely and see whether we can investigate what overproduced actually means and whether it is indeed a bad thing.

Plastic fantastic

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We all know that the use of plastics has become a huge issue. So-called microplastics, tiny particles of plastic, have been found in fish and other marine life, and more recently even in arctic snow. Only last week did the World Health Organization ask for "further assessment of microplastics in the environment and their potential impacts on human health." A lot of us have started replacing single-use plastics with recyclable alternatives, such as plastic straws with paper ones, or even plastic toothbrushes with ones made from bamboo. Yet, there is still a lot of plastic in a lot of tabletop games, and I want us to consider its impact.

Independent perceptions

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I think supporting independent game publishers, and I include self-publishers too here, by buying their games gives you a warm feeling. In many cases, your money goes directly to one or two people who you know by name, whose photos you've seen many times, whose newsletters you've read, who you followed on Twitter and who you've started to trust. If their game was published with the help of a crowdfunding platform, you will have lived through the journey of the game from its first public outing to the final, finished product. Yet, independent doesn't always mean small, and some publishers who seem to be large are actually only a handful of people. So if you like helping small publishers, because you want to know that your money goes to a couple of great people who deserve your support, you might have to think carefully.

Viewing platforms

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I recently talked about how some of us need to let people know what we're up to, by regularly sharing updates with our followers - see my article Image matters. Now I want to drill into this a little deeper and discuss the various platforms you might want to use. My focus is on tabletop game reviews, as this is one of the things I do, but you can apply the same ideas to similar content.

Image matters

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Unless you're a very outgoing person or working in marketing, you will probably not want to boast about your achievements, or maybe not even see what you do as worth mentioning at all. In fact, you might hate the idea that everyone expects that you constantly post photos and write updates about every little thing that happens in your life. I can see where you're coming from, and there is nothing wrong with that, but if you're a game designer, publisher or a press person, you will need to try and be somehow present, even if that feels alien.

Market prices

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When you look at buying a modern tabletop game, you will have a rough idea as to how much you think it is worth - or you will have some sort of budget in your head that you want to stick to, and which guides you to the sort of games that you think you can afford. Your price expectations will be based on things such as the quantity and quality of the components, replayability and probably also rarity or hotness of a game. Yet, the amount of money you're willing to put on the counter doesn't always match the real cost or value of a game and is either too much or too little in comparison.

I got a feeling

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Playing tabletop games is something we all enjoy in this hobby. That's by definition. Playing harks back to our childhood, and it is said that you learn a lot through play. So when a game reminds us of something from when we were little, it creates some extra magic. However, not everything in our childhood, or other stages of our lives, was positive. So there is some interesting interplay between our experiences and playing games, which I want to investigate a little further.

Limitations

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I was inspired by a comment on a recent Kickstarter campaign to investigate how a publisher's decisions about how a game is released can give customers the feeling of exclusivity in a negative sense, the fear of missing out, an opportunity for profit, and many more things that can negatively affect the opinion people have towards the company or individuals releasing the game. So let's look at how different choices can be viewed differently.

Community spirit

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There are a lot of great things happening in the tabletop game community, which is great and for a lot of us, playing games is about meeting new people, having fun and sharing a hobby. Yet, growing the community and showing people, who have never heard about board games, what it is that we all love about playing them, is a different thing and often seen as something that is up to boardgame cafes, tabletop evangelists or game publishers' marketing teams to achieve. However, we all can do something to grow the hobby and share with more people the joy of playing games.