An Open Letter to Non-Gamer Journalists Researching Modern Tabletop Games

Dear Journalists,

Welcome! First and foremost, I want to thank you for considering modern tabletop games as a topic for your platform. There’s a lot to know about this industry, so today I’m hoping to make your job a little easier (and as accurate as possible) by sharing a primer of terminology.

Second, before I launch into this list, a quick introduction: I’m Jamey Stegmaier, and I run a tabletop game publishing company called Stonemaier Games out of my home office in St. Louis in conjunction with 2 other full-time coworkers. In recent years, Stonemaier Games is best known for a game designed by Elizabeth Hargrave, Wingspan (which recently eclipsed 1 million units sold worldwide), as well as two games I designed, Scythe and Viticulture.

Third, the popularity of tabletop games has been growing exponentially for well over a decade. Hobby game sales exceeded $1 billion per year for at least the last 6 years (icv2), the games category on Kickstarter has raised over $1.6 billion since their launch in 2009 (though they don’t separate tabletop from video games), and the social media hub BoardGameGeek is among the 5,000 most-visited websites in the world. Yes, there are far bigger industries, and the board game community is ready to welcome anyone and everyone, but this isn’t a case of overnight popularity.

Okay, let’s jump right into the process of creating a tabletop game featuring the term for each entity, roughly in chronological order.

The Process

1. Designer: Most games start with a designer who has an idea and decides to pursue that idea through the act of creation. This involves brainstorming, prototyping, local playtesting, iterating, more local playtesting, writing the rules, and ideally having at least one or two groups learn and playtest the game from the rules instead of having the designer teach them. The design process can take anywhere between a few months to a few years. A designer solely takes care of the game’s mechanisms and gameplay; that is, they are not adding polished art or graphic design to the game. Here’s a video I made about the design process.
2. Developer: This term is used differently in other industries, but for tabletop games, this is someone who takes a fully designed game and makes it more fun, balanced, and intuitive. Sometimes this person is hired by the designer, but usually the developer is someone at a publisher or hired by a publisher. My experience as the lead developer at Stonemaier Games is that game development is a significant portion of the process that involves an ongoing collaboration between the developer and the designer.
3. Publisher: A publisher is a company that coordinates and pays for the creation of the product (project management, marketing/advertising, customer service, communications, etc). They enter the picture either when a designer submits their game for consideration (unlike in the book industry, there are no literary agents to serve as intermediaries), when a publisher’s internal designer has a new game (e.g., I’m a publisher, but I also design for Stonemaier Games), or when a designer decides that they also want run a company and become their own publisher. The vast majority of game publishers are 1-person operations (and not their full-time job); at 3 full-time employees, Stonemaier Games is considered a “mid-sized” publisher. The biggest modern tabletop game company is Asmodee (though you could arguably say that Hasbro is also a modern tabletop game company). One particularly pleasant aspect of the industry is that publishers aren’t competitive against each other–we view each other as friends and peers, not rivals.
4. A Few More Notes About Designers and Publishers: If a designer submits their game to a publisher and the publisher decides the game is a good fit for them, they will acquire the rights to publish the game. Contracts vary from one publisher to the next, but a somewhat standard approach is for the publisher to offer an advance against royalties (e.g., at Stonemaier Games, we offer a $10,000 advance) and an ongoing royalty on revenue received (e.g., if a designer earns a 7% royalty and a game sells to a distributor for $20, the designer makes $1.40). All expenses related to creating, printing, and selling the game are solely incurred by the publisher, not the designer. Most designers have a full-time job, but some with evergreen games (either multiple games or a bestselling game) are able to make a career of it.
5. Solo Designer: At this stage in the process, many publishers will bring in a designer whose expertise is creating solo modes; that is, a way a single player to enjoy the game. Our data shows that around 10% of people greatly prefer to play games solo; there are even games designed to only play solo. There are a number of reasons that people might prefer to play a tabletop game solo, but I think the easiest way to think about it if that’s a foreign concept is: How often do you play mobile or digital games in real time with other players instead of playing alone against the AI? Probably not all that often, right? You’re a solo gamer and you didn’t even know it! :)
6. Blind Playtesters: As part of the development process, publishers coordinate an important step called “blind playtesting” in which they share digital prototype files with people around the world who learn the game on their own, play it, and offer their feedback. In a sentiment echoed by Stardew Valley designer Cole Medeiros, I personally prefer the results revealed by playtesting printed prototypes, but many publishers and designers also use physics-driven online platforms like Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator for blind playtesting. At Stonemaier Games, we pay our lead blind playtesters for the responsibility of playtesting a game 3 times over a 2-3 week period and sharing their feedback; each game typically requires 3-5 waves of blind playtesting.
7. Artist and Graphic Designer: Typically when a game is nearing completion, a publisher commissions one or several artists to create the illustrations (and sometimes the iconology) for the game. Sometimes, however, the artist is engaged much earlier and plays an active role in the worldbuilding for the game. Meanwhile–or soon after–a graphic designer creates the layout for the various printed components (cards, boards, rulebooks, etc), crafts the user interface, and prepares the files per the manufacturer’s specifications. Both artists and graphic designers are typically paid a flat fee, not an ongoing royalty.
8. Proofreaders: Like with any media, games need editors and proofreaders who can help to ensure that every aspect of the game is as clear, consistent, and correct as possible. This is much more than running a rulebook through a spellchecker; I’ve detailed what the process looks like in this article.
9. Crowdfunding Platforms: I’m inserting this here even though it can be placed at earlier steps of the process, and despite the rise of platforms like Kickstarter, Gamefound, and Game on Tabletop, many games are still published without any crowdfunding at all. The main reasons a publisher might crowdfund a game are to gauge demand, improve the product, build community, increase awareness, raise funds, and optimize region-specific shipping. Kickstarter alone has featured over 28,000 successfully funded game projects over the last 12 years. There is life after crowdfunding, though; after raising $3.2 million over 7 Kickstarter campaigns through 2015, Stonemaier Games has earned over $72 million in revenue from a combination of sales to distributors, localization partners, and consumers.
10. Manufacturer: This is the company that coordinates, prints, creates, and assembles the product; at Stonemaier Games, we work with a Canadian company with their primary factory in China, Panda Game Manufacturing. Most manufacturers do some amount of printing in house, but they often outsource the creation of specific components to a variety of different factories. This results in a key parts of their job being the vetting of those different factories and the final quality check and assembly. Manufacturing requires a minimum of 3 months, usually 4-5 months. While there are game manufacturers in other regions, China has become the go-to area largely because many of the components used in modern games are very difficult to source at scale anywhere else. The typical MOQ (minimum order quantity) is 1000-1500 games.
11. Localization Partner: Most publishers focus on producing games in a single language, opting to work with localization partners (other publishers) for other languages. For any new product, we gauge interest from our 36 localization partners, then we send them the source files for translation. When the localized files are printer ready, the partners upload them to our manufacturer, with whom we coordinate for a consolidated print run (saving partners the higher costs they’d incur if they printed alone and ensuring consistency across all products). Localization partners pay us directly for the manufacturing costs plus a royalty, which typically amounts to around a 70% discount on MSRP.
12. Freight Shipper: They coordinate the shipment of the product using boats, trains, and trucks (e.g., ARC Global). Freight shipping companies typically don’t own vehicles; rather, they coordinate that logistics of getting a container from one place to another. Ocean freight shipping from China takes around 4-6 weeks (or significantly longer during the current shipping crisis), plus time for the shipment to get through customs and travel via truck/train to the final destination.
13. Distribution Broker: This is a company (or someone with a publishing company) that coordinates the storage, sale, and shipping of games to distributors. Larger companies have their own warehouses and sell directly to distributors. Kickstarter-driven and direct-to-consumer companies have most of their inventory shipped to third-party fulfillment centers that package and ship their rewards to backers (we work with Greater Than Games for warehousing and fulfillment). A distribution broker acts on behalf of a publisher to handle transactions with distributors, especially if the publisher wants to sell to many distributors around the world.
14. Distributor: A distributor is a company that buys games in bulk from a publisher–usually at a 60% discount–and sells and ships games to retailers. They have specialized inventory systems to deal with an array of orders from hundreds or thousands of retailers each week, as well as sales and warehousing staff. Why don’t publishers sell directly to retailers? Stonemaier Games and some other publishers do, but retailers often just want a few copies of products from a variety of publishers, and distributors are good at making this process more efficient for both publishers and retailers. It’s also the involvement of distributors that often dictates the MSRP publishers select for games: A $50 game is sold to a distributor for $20, so the cost of manufacturing and freight shipping that game needs to be in the $8-$10 range for a publisher to make enough money to reprint that game (at scale).
15. Retailer: Retailers sell games to consumers. Other than the publisher itself, retailers are the only entity in the supply chain that sell games directly to consumers. Retailers can be online, local (FLGS = friendly local game store), or both, and some serve other purposes (board game cafes also focus on food and drinks, and bookstores often carry games too). Unlike some other industries, if a retailer stocks a game that doesn’t sell, they’re stuck with it–they can’t return it to the distributor or publisher. The biggest retailer for board games is Amazon, which I’m specifically mentioning here because 99% of the time when you see a game on Amazon, it’s either because Amazon has purchased that game from a distributor and is selling it as a retailer or a retailer is selling the game as a third-party vendor on Amazon. There are some publishers who sell their games on Amazon, but it’s quite rare (I tried it years ago for Stonemaier Games and soon gave up on it, as it’s a complicated and impersonal process). Our 2021 data indicates that 46% of people use online retailers as their primary source for buying games, followed by local stores (24%), crowdfunding (16%), and directly from the publisher (9%).
16. Consumer (aka game enthusiast or gamer): This is the person who buys the product: Even though the consumer is at the very end of the supply chain, they actually have the most power. If a consumer wants a product, all they have to do is tell their preferred retailer. A good retailer will try to buy the product from a distributor. If the distributor doesn’t have it, they’ll often tell the distribution broker or publisher that there’s a demand for the product, which can be the catalyst for a new print run.
17. Digital Developers (and a note about video games): There are an increasing number of games available on digital platforms, with the reasoning being that if a person plays a beautiful, fun digital port, they may also buy the tabletop version. A few publishers have in-house digital developers, but mostly publishers are licensing the digital rights for a game to a specific developer (or company). These full-AI digital versions end up available on some combination of Steam, iOS, Android, Board Game Arena, and other platforms. Also, if you’re just now learning about the popularity of modern tabletop games, you might wonder why they still exist in a world of fancy video games and addictive mobile games. I’d say that they’re simply different types of entertainment that serve different purposes, just like how the invention of microwaves didn’t eradicate ovens. Plus, many people spend all day in front of screens; tabletop games provide a refuge from screens, which video games do not.
18. Trademarks, Patents, and Copyright: Trademarking game names is common practice in the game industry; beyond that, very little is protectible (though it varies slightly by country). That is, you can use a mechanism in your game that you discovered in another game–that’s a good thing! I’ve only seen a few instances of patents in the game industry, and they’re always related to a specific component.
19. Conventions: Tabletop game conventions have grown exponentially both in quantity and size over the last decade. There are the huge conventions (50,000+ attendees) like Gen Con, Essen Spiel, and PAX, but also hundreds (perhaps thousands) of smaller events around the world (like my favorite, Geekway to the West in St. Louis). Some of these conventions overlap into general nerd culture–cosplay makes for great photos–but they’re often either much more about demoing/selling games or simply playing games for several days.
20. Reviewers & Media: Since you’re probably reading this as a non-tabletop journalist, I wanted to share that the board game media is incredibly important to the gaming industry and community. There are thousands of gaming blogs, podcasts, and channels, including several YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers (e.g., Watch It Played, The Dice Tower, and Shut Up & Sit Down). If you’re working on a piece about games to buy for the holidays, I highly recommend checking out at least a few of the reviewers on this list and this list.

I’m sure I’m missing something here, but this is a start. If you’re a gamer or creator, please let me know what I should add to this list to help non-gaming journalists improve the accuracy of their content. And if you’re a non-gaming journalist with a question about modern tabletop games, feel free to ask in the comments. If you have a question for a specific designer or publisher, I promise you that we are very accessible–we know that every opportunity to explain our wonderful hobby accurately and inclusively in non-gaming media is a precious opportunity.

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