How a game is made
When someone buys a board game, what they get is a box. Inside there is cardboard, cards, maybe a few wooden pieces and a rulebook. The whole thing looks as though it had always existed in exactly that form.
In reality, behind that box are a couple of years of work, a few hundred playtests and a stack of abandoned versions. We thought we would open up that process: partly because it is interesting, and partly because we get asked about it often.
1. The idea and the first prototype
The first version of a game does not look like a game. It is printed paper, hand-cut slips and pieces borrowed from some other game. We keep a box of loose components at home for exactly this purpose.
This is deliberate. A beautiful prototype is dangerous, because you get attached to it. Once a game looks finished, you start defending it instead of changing it. An ugly prototype is easy to tear apart and rebuild, and that is precisely what the first versions need.
The first playtest usually settles one thing: does the core idea work or not. Everything else is still open.
2. Testing, and more testing
This is the longest and dullest stage of the process, and it is what separates good games from mediocre ones.
Testing starts at your own table and then moves outward: friends, friends of friends, game clubs, people who have no idea who made the game. That last group is the most important and the most uncomfortable. Friends give compliments. Strangers tell you that the third point in the rules is unclear and that the game felt like it dragged halfway through.
The most important thing we have learned: listen to what a tester experiences, not to how they propose fixing it. When someone says "this needs more cards", the useful information is not the number of cards. The useful information is that the player was bored on their turn. The solution may be something else entirely. Often it is removing something.
Writing the rules belongs to this stage, not to the end. If you cannot explain the rules in writing without tying yourself in knots, the fault is usually in the game rather than in the text.
3. Graphic design
Only once the mechanics are locked down do we start thinking about how the game looks.
Board game graphics are not decoration. They are a user interface. A card has to say at a glance what it does, the board has to guide the eye to the right place, and the icons have to make sense to someone seeing the game for the first time. A beautiful game you cannot read is a failed game.
This is also the stage where the thing that makes a game ours comes in: the northern landscape, the colours, the subjects. It is not a theme glued on top, it is the reason the game gets made at all.
4. The factory and the sample copy
Once the files are ready, they go to the factory. Board game manufacturing is specialised work, done by printers who focus on it and know how to handle cardboard, card stock and small components on the same line.
The factory does not start with mass production, though. First comes the sample copy, the prepress proof: a single physical copy of the game, sent to Finland for inspection. It is the most exciting moment in the process, and often the most humbling. The sample reveals things you cannot see on a screen: the colour is a different shade in print, the card surface is slicker than expected, the box lid is too tight.
Checking the sample takes days. It is worth doing carefully, because this is the last moment to fix anything. Once mass production starts, no changes are made, because from then on a mistake multiplies into thousands of copies.
5. Production and pre-orders
Once the sample is approved, the factory runs the batch. From that moment to a finished game sitting in a warehouse in Finland takes months.
We do not spend production waiting around, though. Two things happen in parallel.
First: quality control continues. Contrary to what is often assumed, the prepress sample is not the only physical version we see before the finished batch. As production progresses, the factory sends us further copies from the actual print run. These matter more than the prepress sample, because they show what the game really looks like coming off the production line rather than assembled by hand.
From those we check the things that can vary within a batch: do the colours hold the same shade through the run, are the cards cut on register, does the lid fit equally well on every box. If something is off, there is often still time to act before the whole batch has been run. This is the stage where the difference between a careful and a careless producer appears.
Second: pre-orders open. The game goes on sale before it physically exists in the warehouse.
This is not a trick, it is a necessity. Production ties up the money for the entire batch in advance, and pre-orders tell us about demand before the first box arrives. It also solves a planning problem: without advance information it is impossible to judge whether a batch will last six months or two years.
We tell pre-order customers our honest estimated delivery time and update it if the schedule changes. Delays happen in production and in logistics. The only thing we can promise is that we will say so straight away, not only when someone asks.
6. And then it belongs to someone else
The last stage is the one a designer can no longer influence. The game is opened in someone's home, at a kitchen table, and the rules are explained by someone who read them five minutes ago.
That moment decides whether everything before it was worth it.
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