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Hi, Tony:

Being involved in trying to get a small board game company off the ground myself, and just beginning to learn my way around the very bottom of the NY metro area game industry, I have to tell you I know that most efforts fail, and in particular, chess variants are a great way to fill your garage or basement with unsold merchandise. It is extremely difficult to make money with a chess variant. I've been involved with IAGO [Int'l Abstract Game Org] for a few years now, and have met or dealt with several people who had 'the next chess'. [None regulars on this site.] None of them have, or we'd know about it. 

Okay, that's the disclaimer, and it's all true. Please look into the industry before you invest. Given all that, I started by saying I am doing a small boardgame company, and have found out a few things. Yes, the hard way, or a hard way, certainly, in every case. I will lay out a few things for anyone who is interested, then ask you to email me, as anything more than I will say generally here would be outside the scope of this website. 

When you are making a board game, for an idea of cost, you need to be guided by the purpose of the board game(s) you are actually making. Are you prototyping, creating a small number for playtesting and advertising, or going whole hog, and making 5-10,000 games or more? And why are you doing it? What is your budget? Let me put that another way: how much can you afford to lose on this? Expect to lose [except secretly] and fight to win. They say determination is important. 

Let's look at those numbers of games another way. How will you manage to get all of those games sold/used? First, build the prototype. This you should do yourself, and the very first attempt should be paper and pencil. [This does include things like colored pens and stickers and game bits just lying around, unused, suffocating in their boxes...] It just needs to be good enough to show your buddy or brother or cousin, and get them to play some to test the concept. If they don't sink it, draw up around 3 of the very best but very minimalist boards you can, to the exact size you would want 10,000 of them done professionally. [This is often determined by packaging constraints.] Then put together about 5 sets of the best-looking pieces you can, and start playtesting in earnest. 

If initial playtesting goes very well, your next step might be to produce 25 or so semi-professional to professional-grade good-looking games. Get them out to game groups to play and get comments. Do demos and leave a game with contact info and questionnaires. Follow up within a month. Run contests/tournaments at places like cons and game stores or wherever your target audiences hang out. This gets all the bugs worked out and gives you some idea of how the public likes it. 

Assuming things go well, you want to do a small to very small production run, say 100-1000 games. There are boutique companies you can use, but they are expensive. At that level, you might have to do it yourself, or pay/go into partnership with someone who already has a small game company. You become your own distribution system, trying to sell your games at conventions and to game stores, and it isn't at all easy. What you're doing at this level is trying to make a name for yourself and draw some attention from an established company... who will pick up your game and sell it far better than you could, and you'll still probably only make pennies per game. But that doesn't happen all that often. 

All the cheap Chinese companies want to do minimum runs. The minimum sizes I saw were 5000-20,000 games. This is a largish run. How will you distribute these games? The big toy companies have contracts with thousands of stores to show their items, so when they make something, it is already going nationwide in stores. With advertising. Don't do this. Go back to 100 games. Make and sell those. Then either quit, change your methods, or make and sell another 100 or more. Your key to volume sales is distribution network, and that means hooking up with someone bigger, realistically. The games you produce have to be good enough to help that happen.

Prices? For the initial prototypes, under $10-20 dollars - plus travel costs to show it off. The 25 decent games would be maybe $200 - a few hundred. The 100 pro-looking games might go $2000 - a few thou. This all depends on size and components, and quality of components. These are roughly my costs for things from 1 to 100. After that, the Chinese are a few tens of thousands. Again, it depends heavily on components and quality.