PNW Tabletop Game Market and Logistics
I attended the PNW Tabletop Game Market (sometimes called an Indie Night Market) at Pax West to sell Rex Regnat, my 2 or 4 player game about the Polish Constitution of 1791. It was a really grand time, and I learned a lot about the "pointy end" of game design, specifically, putting the games into the hands of folks who play them. However, I'm going to use this time to talk about the logistics of making board games, hopefully to aid folks going forward.
Money-
Printing games costs money. There are two common distribution models that I've seen, direct-to-consumer and traditional retail. A direct-to-consumer product is normally funded via something like Kickstarter, and then shipped to the customers directly. The traditional retail product is something that's printed, sold to a distributor, who sells to a retailer, who sells to a customer. These are the majority of the games that you see in stores.
To deal with a specific case, Rex Regnat is a relatively small footprint game (1 11"x17" board, ~1 sheet of cardboard tokens, 52 cards, 12-page staple-bound rulebook, aid sheet and box). As a small affectation, I also included a 16-page staple-bound history reference, but this was an overall small part of the price. Nothing wood, nothing plastic, and everything "off the shelf" as far as sizing, which heavily reduced the costs. My costs for printing a single copy from a local printer (who are very competitive) are about $50.
Printing 50 copies of the game reduce costs to about $40, which I feel is a reasonable value for the game. So, if I print 50 copies and sell out, I break even. If I don't sell out, I lose money, which is fine for a hobby project, but which won't work if I'm trying to stay in game design. If I scale up to the largest bulk discount (500+ units) with this printer (who, again, are amazing and very competitively priced for a domestic printer), I'd only be reducing my costs by 30%.
This is completely unworkable for any kind of retail publishing model, but can work for direct-to-consumer model, assuming you're able to scare up >500 pre-orders. Of course, doing that requires considerable work for marketing and fulfillment, which are things I'd strongly prefer not to handle.
If I use an overseas printer (even a fairly expensive one), my per-unit costs drop to about $3.50 per unit, with a minimum order size of 2000 units. Even with 100% tariffs, these prices can work for a traditional retail model. However, for me, as a hobbyist with a day job, the effort to ship and warehouse this many games is somewhat terrifying. Additionally, it would put a considerable amount of onus on me to find buyers for all 2000 games, which is non-trivial for a trick-taking game about Polish history.
For this reason, I am enormously grateful to Always Awake Games for running the PNW Tabletop Game Market. It brings a huge number of folks to bear without the designer having to do a lot of marketing, and works with quantities that I could fit in the back of my car. Long story short, I'm a huge fan of the Night Market phenomenon, and strongly encourage other amateur designers to consider applying for!