Kim Long of Westboro Games. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

Board games like chess and backgammon have been around since before the pharaohs and have been found in ancient sites from all four corners of the Earth. Even with the popularity of video games today, it's safe to say board games will always be with us. Over the past 10 years, Kim Long has developed her board game, Logos, and learned some tough lessons along the way. After developing a prototype, testing it with focus groups, hiring a game consultant and outsourcing manufacturing to China, she is now selling her game to several independent stores in the Ottawa region, but has shied away from the larger retailers. She told the OBJ why.

OBJ: How did you develop the game?

LONG: I am very fond of Scrabble but I wanted to develop a game that appealed to people who loved games but had something different.

In my game, you have a die with four different categories. One is "logos" and if you land on that you randomly pick letter tiles out of the bag provided. There's nothing to hide like in Scrabble, everyone sees what letter you have. There is no actual board, you just use a table ... Then you start the crossword puzzle where all words have to connect with at least one letter.

Other categories (on the die) include spell/define and synonym/antonym categories. They work with a pen and paper where you have to write down a word. If your opponent lands on spell/define, I would pull the next card from the word sleeve. I tell them if it's a noun, or verb ... they would write it down. If they spell it incorrectly they get no points and they can double the point value if they want to define it. Then it's up to me to decide if they defined it correctly or I can challenge them.

OBJ: How did you develop the game?

LONG: I started throwing around prototypes about 10 years ago and the prototypes I had back then were quite different from what I have now. That's a process. While I was doing this, I was going on with life and trying to raise a family and helping to run a family business. The bulk of my full time work would have been with Simply Wood furniture that has been in Ottawa for 20 years ... I continue to work there.

I have two diplomas from Algonquin College, I graduated 30 years ago in advertising and marketing. I worked for the Consumers Association of Canada and ran their marketing department. Helping to run the family business helped me with development and how to start a business. I also have a background in English literature from Ottawa University, which gave me confidence in vocabulary.

OBJ: Did you seek any outside help?

LONG: Over time I worked with prototypes that involved fairly small amounts of money. I had the good fortune to get in touch with Tim Kimber with Plasmart in Ottawa. He has his products in Mrs. Tiggy Winkles' and all over North America.

I hired him as a game consultant to give me some final direction. He said "This is a good game, there is room for this on the market." But he said, "Your game is big, you have a lot of components and it's going to cost a lot of money to make." There's a magic number, a price point for games entering the market; it's $29.99. People will walk into a game/hobby store and see $29.99 and they don't mind spending that money without knowing a whole lot about it.

I pared down some of the components and when I did that, I realized I didn't need those parts. So by making the players use a table instead of a board, I eliminated the need for a board to play on.

The next step was approaching people about having the components made. That was a learning curve. I really wanted to have it made in Canada, but that was a real eye-opener; that was not going to work. It meant by the time I had put a game put together it was going to cost $100 at the retail level and people would not spend that. I had to look overseas.

OBJ: When you have something as complicated as a word game to sell, how do you pitch it to retailers?

LONG: When I pitch to people to sell my game, I find it works beautifully to sit down and play one quick round with the dice. They can visually see it and if they have any questions I can clear it up right there. That works really well.

Mrs. Tiggy Winkles' is selling it and was a real benchmark for me because that's where a lot of gamers go. The local bookstore Collected Works agreed to take my game, and the owner is going to have a game night where people can come and try out the game. Leishman Books, Sunnyside Books, Algonquin College sells it. Our Natural World in Carlingwood sells it. I will also be approaching social clubs, schools, seniors' residents and community centres in the new year.

OBJ: Will you be looking to expand to bigger retailers?

LONG: There's a huge market, I'm not really crazy about selling my game to the big box retailers. I think they have a place, but their volume is so big and they undercut the efforts of the independents. I would really like to keep this at a level that I'm at right now, but maybe at a bigger scale across Canada.

I want to make money like everyone else, I just don't want it lost on the shelf of a big box retailer and I don't want to undercut my smaller retailers.

THE EXPERTS SAY

When selling your product, whatever it is, the key to any distribution strategy is understanding the purpose of the distribution within the overall marketing plan and the reasons the business chooses one or more methods over other available options.

How a sole proprietor or company chooses to get the products or services out there can include a vast array of tactics and strategies.

But the really important question to answer is "why?" Why are you in this business in the first place? By truly understanding why you are in business and your intentions and aspirations in the immediate and long-term, you are more likely to know why you are choosing the distribution methods you are – or are not choosing, for that matter.

When you take a look at this, what will become very apparent is any incongruence between why you say you are in business and any fears that may be holding you back.

For example, if going national will help fulfill desired outcomes like contributing to the wider good or having bigger market exposure for wider sales, but the chosen distribution channels are smaller scale, there is a mismatch between ideal and actual that will ultimately bite back. The reverse is also true. Entrepreneurs need to know both the "how" and the "why" in order to create criteria on which many important business decisions can be made.

Nancy Morris, Ottawa-based achievement specialist

It's amazing how many people I see who have taken their products overseas and after six to eight months they just can't get the quality right. If you're a major manufacturer putting tens of millions of dollars of business into China, you'll get priority in the plant. On the other hand, if you have $100,000 of product being manufactured, you're going to get bumped very quickly, and your product may not get the care and attention that is needed. For the smaller manufacturers it's very tough.

Deciding to manufacturer locally or overseas depends on how a company differentiates itself. Differentiating in price is hard because somebody is always going to be a little cheaper. In my frame, it is service, quality and a features are much better differentiators than low prices.

But it's tricky in retail because you have competitive pricing and you have price points you have to meet. So even though your pen might be different from the other guy's pen, I'm still not paying $16 for a pen. So even though it has $16 worth of value, you just can't sell that up.

The main thing I would recommend would be to leverage marketing skills to stay out of the price war. It's a war you can't win. With the Wal-Marts of the world setting prices, their lowest prices are the law.

Andrew Penny, president, Kingford Consulting