Questions about production:

[Nihilistiskism]

As someone who designs games as a hobby, I'm always curious to know about the production methods that go into a game. In looking at Mage Wars, I'm simply flabbergasted at the seemingly endless nuances of production that have gone into making this game so exceptional "out of the box."


[ul]
  [li]Cards[/li]
  [li]Punch-Boards[/li]
  [li]Dice[/li]
  [li]Wooden Tokens[/li]
  [li]Binders[/li]
  [li]Foldout Board[/li]
[/ul]

In doing my own production analysis, I was unable to find a production house that could incorporate all of these different elements into a single box. Not talking prices, here, just...unable to find a house that could do it all.

I'm curious how difficult it was to get this game produced.

1) Was a production house found that "did it all?"
2) If not, how many separate production houses manufactured how many different components?
3) If following 2, how were the separate components brought together? Was this done in-house, or was there a primary producer who coordinated the various elements into one box, then shrinkwrapped it?
4) (touchy subject) -> Price point? Obviously I could reverse engineer a projection on how much it costs this company to produce a single copy of Mage Wars...that's not my question. How, erm, compromising did this company have to be in regard to getting everything done at a reasonable price per unit? I'll explain: Typically, with any sort of mass production, PPU goes down at rough margins per 1k units (somewhere in the neighborhood of a 10% reduction per unit per 1k units produced, to a cap). Without knowing anything about the funding potentials for Mage Wars, this is an impossible guessing game for an outsider. When looking at all the fundamental elements, how much did this company have to "work with" the primary production house to get the overall pricetag down in relation to PPU?
5) (open-ended) -> How would things have been done differently assuming there were no limitations on options or funding? That is to say; would MW look significantly different if money had been no issue, and there was a magical production house out there that could literally do "anything" you wanted done?

Thanks for the insight!  

-nihil

[SeanDeCoy]

Nihil -

These are some pretty great questions and I'll try to be as transparent as possible.

1. We manufactured all of our products using a company called Cartamundi USA, this was a huge plus for us because we wanted to manufacture domestically, and they are also based in Dallas, which is where we were. The majority of our pieces were manufactured in America, which was important to us as well. They were great to work with, and it was awesome being about to drive up to the factory and watch cards get printed out.

2. So - Cartamundi handled all of that for us, occasionally, I believe, outsourcing a couple difficult to produce items to other companies, but they were our main point of contact.

3. Generally what happens is that all your parts are shipping to a central place where they are packed out by your primary manufacturer. Cartamundi did this for us.

4. This was a pretty long process. We definitely got bids from several other companies and did our best to compare their work, process, quality, timeline, and price. The one thing I can't stress enough about this process, though, is that we fought incredibly hard for quality every single time. We pushed back on several items that prototype at a quality that wasn't up to our standards. We opted for molded dice over printed dice, we went back and forth on the spellbooks several times to get the highest quality plastic and sleeving we could, even things like the markers and game box got a lot of attention to ensure that they were of a high quality. In fact, based on our numbers - Mage Wars should retail for a higher price than it does, however, we never wanted to sacrifice quality and we always wanted to make the game easy to afford. These were incredibly hard decisions, but being players ourselves, we fought hard to make the game accessible and deluxe.

5. Honestly, I'm incredibly proud of the components we put in the box - and we definitely didn't leave anything out. However, if we're talking about just a dream/wish list of components that would've been amazing to include, but probably would've been cost prohibitive I can tell you that Mage Miniatures would've been pretty cool, status boards that had dials, so that you could turn them and never worry about bumping your cubes, texture spellbooks that felt like real leather - stuff like that. We're actually looking at all of those items now for promos and prizes, but for the base game would've put too much strain on the players financially.

Let me know if you have any further questions - and best of luck with any games you're currently developing! The best advice I can give is to be detail oriented and shop around. Never sacrifice on quality, and try to constantly ask yourself what does a player want?

[Nihilistiskism]

Thanks for your time. I'm always interested to see how my competi..., erm, eh, friends in the industry, handle their business models.  

j/k

-nihil

[SeanDeCoy]

Ha! No problem. I generally think that the more players know about what we do, the easier it is to explain why we made one move over another, released one product instead of another - that way at the very least you can see the logic we used. If we made a bad decision, we can learn from it and we can show you where in the process we made an assumption. I think that more players get upset by not knowing what the hell the publishers are thinking, than they are by a bad decision made by a publisher who can explain how they came to that conclusion.