3,973 people played my game 11,512 times. It cost $350 and 6 hours of work.

If you’re a small board game designer or publisher, you have a marketing problem. 4000 board games are published each year, many of them by creators with more reach than you, and you probably don’t have the marketing muscle to cut through the noise.

Your problem is worse if you want to run a Kickstarter campaign, because you have to find an audience before you run it. If you launch cold, you’ll likely bomb.

What to do? The usual advice: go to game conventions, and get people to play your game.

That’s fine advice. The best way to get people interested in a (good) game is to have them play it. But conventions cost major time and money.

I recently found a much cheaper way, by getting people to play my game online. I’m sharing it so other game creators might benefit.

What did I do?

I put my unpublished game Blooms on the world’s largest platform for playing boardgames online: Board Game Arena.

If you don’t play there, you may not realize how large it is. Over 700,000 games are played there each day, and it has 1.6 million users.

Last year I learned third-party developers can put games on BGA, so I asked the BGA admins to introduce me to a developer who might be interested in putting mine up.

They did, and he agreed to implement my game for $350. I spent 6 hours giving him guidance, and then it was done.

Since then, 3,973 people have played Blooms 11,512 times. That’s 3 cents per play, a number still dropping as people keep playing. That’s orders of magnitude more cost-effective than the convention circuit.

Was it a fluke?

Seems not. Recently I launched a second game on BGA, called Circle of Life:

It cost another $350 and 3 hours of my time. Since it launched in October 2019, 4,113 people have played it 8,150 times. It’s on track to do better than Blooms.

Are the games just amazing or what?

I think so, but neither is a sure hit: both are abstract strategy games, which can be hard sells. You can read about Blooms here, and Circle of Life here. Here’s what they look like on BGA:

Blooms:

Circle of Life:

BGA players tend to play Eurogames, which my games aren’t. So it’s possible a Eurogame could do better than mine have.

Other benefits of this approach

Not just marketing. Others:

Playtesting : I can review all those thousands of games, and due to BGA’s ranking system, I can review high-level games between extremely skilled players. That’s an insanely efficient way to hunt for problems in game design.

: I can review all those thousands of games, and due to BGA’s ranking system, I can review high-level games between extremely skilled players. That’s an insanely efficient way to hunt for problems in game design. Market research : I can connect with all those players and learn about them. I can understand who my potential customers are at a scale and level of detail I never could by pre-marketing in the conventional (pun!) way.

: I can connect with all those players and learn about them. I can understand who my potential customers are at a scale and level of detail I never could by pre-marketing in the conventional (pun!) way. Landing page traffic, SEO, and email signups: Because BGA linked to my landing pages as the rules-source for the games, traffic to my landing pages here are way up. That includes long-term traffic from Google searches. For example, the Circle of Life landing page used to get less than 10 uniques/day, and now it’s getting a steady 80 uniques/day. Email-signups from those pages are up too.

I hope this strategy will help one of my readers as much as it’s helping me. Good luck.

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