How do I produce a board game?

Okay, so I thought that I'd add to this what are the next steps for each option.

1. Since you plan to self-publish, the first step is trying to *price* the cost to manufacture your game. You have all kinds of options like dealing with companies in the US that deal with China or you could even deal with China directly. If your game requires artwork, well you should try to find a *local* artist to help you out. Visiting local universities and colleges is a great way to find either a Liberal Arts Teacher or Student that might be willing to help you out. Next you should learn about Kickstarter (www.kickstater.com). This includes how to use the crowdfunding platform and how to price your rewards all the way to estimating the delivery dates of your games. Lastly when the crowdfunding is complete (hopefully successfully), after shipping the games, you should look to contact game distributors to see if you can sell your game further.

2. In this option, you need to find a publisher. Don't sweat it, it's a time consuming effort. Meaning? You need to deal with ONE publisher at a time. Don't send out 10 e-mail and then get 5 responses and ignore 4. Find a publisher who has either similar games to yours or doesn't have a game like yours. Those are two good options. Once you have found a publisher, try to find their *submissions* policy. If there is none on their website, write an e-mail explaining that you have a game and would like to know their submissions policy. Most publishers will respond to that e-mail no problems. From their response, you should know how to deal with that particular publisher... From there on, you are dealing with a publisher, take your cues from them. If you don't know what to do next, say so (in an e-mail). The publisher is there to determine if your game is good for them. You will most probably have to send them your game's rulebook and card samples (if your game is a card game). If there is interest in the game, you will need to probably send them a prototype of the game so that they can try it out (with your game rulebook). Take it from there and see if they are still interested (follow up). Lastly if they are interested in your game, you will need to negotiate a royalty in exchange for your game.

Good luck with your game!

Another viable option is print on demand. I've been really happy with The Game Crafter. They have a wide variety of parts available, easy-to-follow templates, and they automate the process of having a digital storefront & fulfilling orders. Because it's print-on-demand, there's no cost until someone actually orders the game. (OK, you do have to order one copy yourself before you're allowed to publish it - so I guess there's a small cost.) The components, particularly the boxes, aren't quite as high-quality as you'd expect from a commercial game, but for me it's an acceptable tradeoff.

Of course, I'm doing this as a hobby and not really trying to make money at it - your mileage may vary. I've made a grand total of about $5 from my game, and spent close to $100 prototyping and refining it.

See https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/city-center for my first game.

I'm a big fan of this question, so I'll ask it to you: "What do you want to get from publishing this game? Fame? Money? Experience?"

You could do that through a small publisher. You could do the game crafter, but that will be expensive for you. You will have to pay mucho money to get a few copies, and you can probably put it on consignment at a local store. But if you're going that route, just consider it an expensive hobby. Again, a small publisher may pick up your game, but if you shoot for large publishers, it will be no different a chance than getting a novel or short story published. Both can be done certainly, but if you want the sure thing, with very little emotional taxing, you can pay to put a copy out there. Kickstarter is the route where you can subsidize your game to some degree, and at least break even, but it's a lot of work and self-promotion.

If you really want that pride and experience, and don't want to have to handle all the business side of things, go for the large publisher. Shoot for the dream. Personally, I love getting rejection slips from fiction publishers. It always feels like I'm making progress towards being a professional author. I mean any author, say Stephen King even, got tons of rejection slips when he was starting out! Until then, I only have a few magazine published credits.

One of my clients (a game designer in Canada) told me if you put your game in kickstarter and succeed to get enough money to print it, then other publisher will not touch it. Because they think it will be a second hand game?

Is that true ?