Last month I had written about the opening of boardgamesmaker.com, a new game manufacturer where you could spec everything out transparently before having your game professionally manufactured. It’s a great idea, so I had written them to get some sample materials from them to check out the quality. I received a box, board, cards, various tokens, dice, stickers, a rules sheet, tiles, a spinner, a pad, and some pawns.

So how is the quality? Varied.

The box was structurally sound, but still felt a bit too thin. Same with the cardboard tokens. The board stock was really nice and heafty, but wasn’t printed. It had a sort of applied top to it that felt, and smelled, horrible.

That’s the bad. The rest of the components were actually really well made, and of a very high quality. Tiles were thick and felt nice, the cards, while thinner than I’d expect, felt like they’d hold up well with time. The wooden and plastic pieces were also sturdy and had a good feel to them.

Would I recommend BoardGamesMaker for a new game? I don’t know. This is professional manufacturing, yet feels like a small jump up from a POD place like The Game Crafter. Maybe if the prices were a bit better I’d say go for it. It’s certainly easy to get everything laid out, quoted, and printed, but you may be better off doing a bit of grunt work and going with a different manufacturer.

Samples of BGM’s materials were sent free for review.

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Boardgamesmaker.com has just launched today. This isn’t a Print on Demand service, but a full-fledged board game manufacturer based out of Hong Kong. What’s great is that all prices are up-front. You pick your materials, quantities, and get a price based on what you’ve chosen. No quotes, no turn around times. A summary of part pricing can be found right on their Prices page.

I’ve reached out to them to obtain some print samples to see the quality of their work, and will report back if they decide to send any!

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