Say that the retail price for a board game is $100. Either way, some portion of the profit of selling board games goes to the developer, to the publisher, to the retailer, and to a middleman called the distributor, who holds the inventory and handles some of the shipping.įilippi told Polygon it’s a simple question of margins. That might be Amazon, or it might be a local game shop. warehouse or pick them up from their retailer of choice. When they’re ready to ship, players can order them directly from a U.S. Games are manufactured overseas, for the most part.

Developers pitch a game to publishers, who then help fund development.

The board game industry has a fairly traditional model when it comes to the product pipeline. So it’s kind of an amazing feeling.”ĭespite that success, Flyos decided to go in a different direction when it pitched its latest project to Paradox Interactive, which bought the Vampire: The Masquerade license in 2015. “We actually saw our game - a tower of games - disappear in less than 24 hours. “We were able to get Asmodee as a distributor and they drop-shipped everything for Gen Con 2018,” Filippi told Polygon during a Zoom call. The crowdfunding platform has been the engine behind a resurgence in tabletop games over the last decade, but for Canadian game maker Flyos, the rubber really met the road when Until Daylight got picked up by a proper publisher.Ĭharacter art for the Malkavian clan. Their first two board games - a fast-paced family title called Kiwetin and a card-based zombie game called Until Daylight - were both modestly successful on Kickstarter. We sat down with Flyos Games to learn more, and to tease apart the economic realities that are changing the landscape for high-concept board games.Ĭhapters is the third game by Thomas Filippi and Gary Paitre, two French designers who live in Montreal. As with many other high-concept tabletop games right now, Chapters’ developers say it’s simply too big and too expensive to ever come to retail. Vampire: The Masquerade - Chapters is a campaign-in-a-box in the style of Gloomhaven, a role-playing game that doesn’t require a game master to run. There’s a new tabletop game on the way that’s set in the universe of Vampire: The Masquerade, but if you don’t shell out money for it now, you might never get the chance to buy it at a store.

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