The Game Crafter : Make and sell your own board games

Last week I heard about The Game Crafter.  This new service allows people to create and publish their own board games through this print on demand (the final product is only printed when an order is placed) website, think Cafepress for board games.

The Game Crafter helps you sell your game idea on their site and you share the profits but keep the game rights.  You simply upload designs, pick the components, and they’ll sell the game and split the profits with you, 50%.  That may not sound like alot but keep in mind there are no up-front costs and you do not have to share a  percentage with publishers/distributors and retail outlets. This service could also be great for prototypes of your great new board game idea to then show other game publishers, because you retain the rights to your game.  There are some nice videos on the website that walk you through the steps.

Looking around their shop, they only have a few games offered, and these are made by those from The Game Crafter.  Over in the comments area of a Tech Crunch article about this service, Doug Bell, from The Game Crafter, had this to say.

“We just opened, give it some time. Our internal team has a couple people designing some games, but we were spending more time making sure the website was as ready as possible. I personally had no idea this would take off so quickly. Chalk one up to the speed of the Internet. I thought I had a week or two to put the finishing touches on my game before anyone noticed.”

Looking at their website, I see a nice selection of parts for a board game too.  It looks like they will be improving customization and offerings in the future too.  For instance, I’d like to see a wider selection of parts (I hear they will be adding more) and nicer looking boxes.  Though boxes tend to increase game production cost.  As a hint for future game designers, costs are big in development and selling your idea to publishers.  So depending on what type of game you want to create, try to keep the costs in line with your audience.  There is a nice cost calculator on their site to help.

With the pupularity of more independent designers with sites like CafePress (for merchandise), Etsy (for handcrafted items), Lulu (for printing), and even indy video games at Xbox, it will be interesting to see what people can develop and now have an easier way to put their game together and introduce it to the world.  You can even work with your own game group or workplace to develop a custom game.

What game would you make?

Note : for those interested in the ideas behind game design take a look at the many articles about game design at Yehuda’s blog.