Industrial Clusters & Board Game Manufacturing
When we RFQ manufacturers, I always ask which components are sourced versus manufactured in house. For our component skew - all of the manufacturers we’ve queried produce printed materials in house. Some source meeples, and most source dice.
I was listening to the Board Game Design Lab podcast (episode 273) and learned that I’ve had a fundamental misunderstanding about how sourcing components ties into the overall production process.
Brass, because… industry
The podcast guest was Hersh Glueck of Hero Time Manufacturing. His perspective is eye opening:
There are so many different types of machines and tools that we can use. A board game factory doesn’t necessarily have everything in house, because if you were cutting coins or tokens and if you are cutting a map tile, if you are cutting a box, all of these use different types of machines for cutting.
A factory cannot necessarily have all of this machinery. Different quantities require different machinery as well. […]
In China the way it works is by industrial zone. So, yes, I am a board game factory, but around me there are hundreds of different places that do different parts of the process.
So, for instance, if I want to make puzzles, I need a specific machine for puzzles. I don’t have it, so I need to go to that person next door to cut the puzzles.
Imagine one industrial zone that has hundreds of different [types of] machinery to use. Each board game, depending on the size, requires different machinery.
So you have the standard machines, but sometimes you have the unique ones.
And this is how we work on the board games. Even a big factory, a humungous factory, will have the coding machine, might have cutting machines, but even they have to outsource some parts of the production, because board games varies so much with print, lamination, with material. Every board game is unique.
If it wasn’t obvious already, I’m not an expert on manufacturing. But, I did do some digging to try and get a sense for how specialized machines are. NapCo is a US packaging manufacturer and printer, and on their website they disclose what machines they have at their two facilities.
I count 44 machines solely for making packaging and printed materials. No wooden meeples, no miniatures, dice, or metals (as far as I can tell). That is a lot of machines, and there are likely some printed components and methods that they aren’t even equipped to handle (see my article on the anatomy of a card for a sense of the breadth of printing techniques and finishes).
Industrial Clusters
Industrial Clusters are an economic phenomenon where business within an industry cluster geographically – like finance in London, tech in Silicon Valley, and apparel in Zhejiang. Geographic clustering offers a number of benefits: support industry, rivalry (driving innovation), scale economies, and a skilled workforce.
I found this excellent article on the formation and propagation of apparel manufacturing industrial clusters in China.
It provides insights into the benefits of industrial clusters, as well as some cultural context. What stood out to me in particularly, is the community and support among entrepreneurs.
As villagers often belong to the same family, they did not view each other as competitors, and helped each other in terms of capital, technique, and even customers. […]
In the process of his business expansion, he has helped numerous others to start their own business by loaning capital, sharing technology and market. These entrepreneurs help the development of Shengze as a cluster.
Components being sourced vs manufactured in house, is only a piece of the story. Factories will have long histories of partnering on projects. After all, a core benefit of an Industrial Cluster will be specialization, and a full supply chain – as opposed to there being one mega factory that can do it all.
Putting the Pieces Together
We have 3 owned factories: a plastic forming factory, a printing & packaging factory and a wood crafts manufacturing factory while keeping strong cooperation with more than 15 professional factories and tooling center professionally to manufacture and export around 1 million pcs of OEM/ODM game products per year. - Manufacturer Ningbo Lijia
Maybe, a better way to think about hiring a manufacturer is that you are hiring a project and production manager who will use their networks to source the right components for your game. Some of those will come from their owned factories, and other components and inputs will come from elsewhere. And neither is necessarily better.
