*tarify
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
90 points (95.9% liked)
Board Games
1480 readers
14 users here now
Let's Play a Game! A place to discuss all things board game, regardless of genre. Everything from Scrabble and Catan to Ark Nova, 1830 and beyond is fair game! That means we have blackjack. Bring your own hookers, sorry.
Rules:
- Play nicely with others here.
- Discussion should be at least somewhat related to board games and all that entails.
- Self-promotion is allowed within reason. Don't go overboard!
Other comms that might be of interest:
Other boardgame comms:
- !juegosdemesa@feddit.cl (Spanish)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Terrified of being tariffied.
Isn't this, at least partly, a design issue? Game designers create their games without concern about the economical side of the problem. They create astounding little bits and pieces to make the game desirable but a lot of this could be simplified without sacrificing the mechanics. The dice are a prime example...
It's a lot like what happened in the video games and the rift that appeared between AAA games and indie developers.
A lot of the games I possess are beautiful but have a ludicrous amount of accessory stuff. Eventually it gets lost and replaced by coins and painted pieces of wood without making them worse.
I suspect that until now all these tidbits were a great way to justify the high price of the games.
No, and they should be designing their game to be exactly the way they want, with no consideration for psycho governments whatsoever.
There are many people for whom the nice bits and pieces enhance their enjoyment of the game. I'm certainly one of them. I know others who take it a step further and will buy games just because they're pretty / cute / whatever. It's not a design issue, it's appealing to a larger market.
If you're "appealing to a larger market" by making the game so expensive that only a few can afford it, are you really getting a larger market? Or are you just deciding you want to cater to rich folk?
I'm with @drolex here. I think it may be time for board/card/whatever game designers to return to basics: making games that people play, not the board game equivalent of a coffee table book.
'So expensive that only a few can afford it' is pretty hyperbole. Boardgaming is one of the cheapest hobbies you can have, especially on a cost per time basis. I would much rather pay an extra few bucks for nicer pieces for a game that I'm going to enjoy for years and years.
I happen to run a boardgame club, and I can attest that pretty much everybody I've talked to about this topic feels the same way. Given the choice between a classic game with cardboard chits or a newer game with the same mechanics and prettier pieces, we're playing the new one every time.
Haha yes, I play all of these boardgames more than once!
Our club copy of Bloodlines has gotten about 20 plays since we got it 2 weeks back 😂. Granted, that's something of an outlier.
How much did the deluxe version of Ogre cost again?
No idea, had honestly never heard of that game before now.
$150 for a game consisting entirely of cardboard, essentially.
I'm not sure what your point is? According to bgg, it released in 1987 at a RRP of $17. I'm hoping the message is that my collection will pay for my early retirement.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameversion/141924/english-deluxe-fourth-edition
The point is these are games MADE FOR RICH PEOPLE. You know, like I said at the beginning of your blank incomprehension:
If you’re “appealing to a larger market” by making the game so expensive that only a few can afford it, are you really getting a larger market? Or are you just deciding you want to cater to rich folk?
$150 for an all cardboard game. Now let's talk Star Wars: Imperial assault:
- core game: about $110
- dice for everybody? That's an extra $12 per.
- want expansions? That's $50 to $75 each. If you want all of them, that's about $375
- want the "ally and villain packs"? That's $15-$22 each. If we just count the ones still in print: That's about $598
Fortunately all of the skirmish maps (at $25 each) are out of print so we've saved ourselves a further $325.
So the complete game, with all published parts currently available, is over a thousand bucks, which is utterly ludicrous for a mass market game that won't even be remembered in a couple of decades (and whose components will have long rotted away before a century is out.
How ludicrous am I talking? For the price of this game that won't survive a century as any kind of cultural icon (and whose components likely won't last more than 30 years) I can buy a bespoke Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) set made of knotty red sandalwood with ornate, handmade mother-of-pearl inlay.
But this isn't the entry price to play the game. If I just want to see if the game is even something I'm interested in, I can get a perfectly functional set for a little bit over fifty cents:
And even this el-cheapo set will outlast, probably, the thousand dollar Star Wars game aside from the thin board (which you can replicate easily with a piece of scrap wood, a pencil, and a ruler). And I also know the actual game will have legs considering the first known set of components was found in the archaeological record at 900 years ago or so, while mentions of it in literature go back almost 2500 years.
So here we have a game accessible to literally anybody ranging from the budget-conscious to the æsthetic fetishist, and that has proved popular across wildly different social classes for well over a thousand years. THIS is the kind of thing I wish the game industry would return to instead of ludicrous stuff like Star Wars: Imperial Assault, or Kingdom Death: Monsters, or Cthulhu Wars, or even the humble old Ogre. (In defence of Ogre, though, I have to say that at least it once had a cheap edition, and may still have.)
TL;DR summary: Stop making games for just rich folk if you want, you know, to expand the hobby, especially now that Trump's tariffs are killing everything.
You know, like I said at the beginning of your blank incomprehension:
Tone, please. This is a friendly discussion, there's no call to be getting riled up. If you are, I suggest stepping away for a bit, or just dropping it entirely.
As should be clear from my previous comment, I had no idea what your point is because
- You brought up a game I had never heard of
- It's a game that's 4 decades old
- It released at a pretty average price
- It's currently a collectible, not a game in print / circulation, hence currently costs a lot
1st thing aside, I think it's fairly obvious why I had no idea what your point was.
Anyway, moving on. We're discussing the trend of the hobby as a whole. Not a single cherry picked product. Your argument and example is also pretty disingenous. It's an entire series of products that's been releasing in bits and pieces for a decade. A similar counter-example I could bring up would be Magic The Gathering. How much would it have cost to buy every single card WotC has released in the past 10 years? And that's just cardboard. Obviously, cost of physical components has very little to do with RRP in the case of these games. Which invalidates the whole 'Games would get cheaper if they used cheaper components' argument.
These companies would argue that you're not paying for the cost of the physical product, you're paying for the design work, marketing, etc that goes into each release. Which to be fair, does exist to some extent. That said, the franchise owners are fairly obviously milking them for money hand over fist. The thing is, that's hardly applicable to boardgame publishers as a whole.
Your other example, Chinese Chess, is also pretty bad for reasons: As you point out, it's been around for millenia. Nobody's getting paid to design and market the game. Without the need for marketing, distribution (which mostly involves getting it onto shelves in front of eyeballs and is essentially just another form of marketing), and royalties, modern games would also cost a fraction of what they currently cost. With the downside that, y'know, game publishers everywhere would starve to death and the entire game industry would collapse. I do think distribution takes way too huge a cut of the final cost, but that's a major unrelated tangent.
TLDR: Respectfully disagreeing with your argument thus far because it's pretty irrelevant to the actual topic at hand. I do actually agree that prices are going up, I just don't think you've done a great job arguing your point. I'd love to continue discussing this, in a friendly manner. Actually, hold that thought. I'll probably create a discussion post for this. It's fairly interesting to see what people are thinking about this issue.
If you think thousand dollar games are a necessity for modern publishing, I'm sorry there's absolutely no common ground your or i have. Buh-bye.
I'll thank you to not put words in my mouth, as I said nothing in my comment beyond pointing out why your argument was faulty. With that said, I don't see this conversation going anywhere fruitful now, so good day to you.
That stinks...
Scyte is 90€ but if I printed it all at home (printer+3d printer) it would probably be 20€. A rough version of it, sure, but 20€.
Make it serial in a factory.
You're only considering material cost, not time cost of employing someone to operate the machines. Also your system is not really scalable - it would take a long time per unit, making the labour cost even more significant per unit. There's also R&D, distribution, marketing, etc. all before any profit is made. Also, as you mention, the quality of 3D printed pieces would be much poorer.
I find board games simply overpriced, they're mostly paper and plastic, and r&d is now much reduced, since 90% of new games simply a mix of already published games with nicer drawings.
Well yeah, 90% of the market is overpriced crap - that's not unique to boardgames, although like you say it's understandble how when the material cost can be low. But there are some game makers that do really make the effort, and in particular when I looked up what Scythe is and all the pieces it comes with I feel it's probably not too unreasonable to ask a higher retail price (although I saw them available for much less also).
Quite a few publishers have written about their costs and how the tariffs impact them. The actual cost of a $90 game is something like $15, and the rest is labor, distribution costs, and profit. I personally think the distribution costs are way too high and could stand to drop a lot, but I don't know the details well enough to comment. Regardless, there's no reasonable way to drop the manufacturing costs significantly.