How 1861/1867 was priced

While I certainly won’t be the first to talk about this, today I thought it’d be fun to write a bit about how board games are priced (or at least what’s “industry standard”) and about what contributes to the price of 1861/1867.

As some folks may already know, MSRP for board games is generally set to at least 5x the manufacturing cost. There’s obviously more to it than that and I don’t recommend anyone just set their MSRP to 5x cost and call it a day, but it’s a baseline many publishers follow. My original estimate for manufacturing costs was going to be around $15/unit and as I’m going through the manufacturing process with Panda it looks like I’ll be just under $16/unit. Earlier on I decided that setting MSRP to $80 would give me a nice, round number to work with and would give my customers a fair price based on my costs, but I didn’t expect to follow the 5x manufacturing costs formula so closely.

Kickstarter doesn’t really like you advertising what your MSRP is which is why I refrained from doing so during the campaign, but offering 1861/1867 for $60 was me giving a 25% discount off of MSRP (which is a similar discount to what most campaigns provide by my estimation). When I sell to a retailer, it is industry standard to charge 50% of MSRP. When I sell to a distributor, it is industry standard to charge 40% of MSRP. I’m giving them a wholesale discount because they’ll be buying in bulk and I want to help make the game cheap enough that they can actually make money on their inventory. I make the bulk of my money on games I can sell directly to a customer, but retailers/distributors make it possible to do a larger print run while also ensuring there is broader availability of the games.

So the MSRP is based on how much it costs to make the game, how did I come up with $16 per game? I actually can’t share my manufacturing quote, but I can certainly give you some ball park information about different components:

• Mounted boards: Each of these ends up costing around $1 each if they fold and $0.50 if they don’t fold. There will be 2 folding boards and 1 non-folding in 1861/1867.
• Charters/Player Aids: Obviously size dependent, but these are pretty cheap if they’re just being printed to heavy cardstock. There will be 36 mats like this in 1861/1867 costing roughly $1.50.
• Cards: I’m 140 including Ivory Core mini-cards which will be around $1.
• Paper money: Unfortunately, paper money actually isn’t cheap to include, after all it will be 400 sheets of paper the factory has to cut up and wrap. Paper money costs about $1 to include. There was plenty of hot debate over this during the Kickstarter, but the decision to include paper money was not negotiable for me.
• Wooden tokens: There will be ~100 painted wooden tokens included at various sizes which will cost about $1.50.
• Punch tiles: These are particularly expensive because you need to amortize the setup cost of the die cutter across each unit. There will be 9 punch boards in 1861/1867 which will cost about $3.
• Tile trays: These ended up being much more expensive to make than expected and helped me realize why others hadn’t done it before. Usually this process is used to make a single insert for the game, but for this I would need multiple trays and will likely have more than one mold for a lid. For two trays with two lids along with the costs to create the molds, this costs about $2 to include.
• Other costs: There are various costs I won’t go into detail for, but things like the sticker sheet, the rulebook(s), game assembly, etc. all add up and comprise the remainder of the game cost.

Obviously print run size and who you manufacture with will adjust some of these numbers, but the general breakout of what contributes to a game cost will probably stay consistent. Hope this was interesting!