❖ Version History ❖

February, 2024
In our last entry to the Design Journal, we set out to discuss some of our accessory designs for the major up & coming Phoenix Farm Kickstarter process. As we noted, it is so critical to the marketing campaign of the game launch to have some of these useful accessories designed & prepared so that we can take high definition photographs of all of the products to showcase their completion and their function; like the one featured in the image up above (of our final & completed design).

But what is the purpose and the difference of these “play mats” by comparison to what a player gets in the game box for Phoenix Farm? ~ Do they need these mats? What exactly is all the hype about? Well, Here is a quick test for your eyeballs. Take a look at this next pair of images and try to discern what is different about the two products, then we will get into their significance & how we did our next steps of prep:

In the first pair of images you can see the front & back of the card design, and then in the larger image you can see our completed “play mat” design. Can you see the differences? ~ They are subtle, but there are some critical changes! Here are some details:

In the play mat, the surface area a player has to display their personal game pieces is literally twice the size! This allows for so much more room to put down objects, but also leaves us some fun space for adding graphics too! In the neoprene play mat design, we get fun usage of Phoenix Symbols in the “Coop Slots” & the tools needed to take care of them in the “Shed Slots”. Additionally, in-between the top & bottom space of the play mat area, there are x3 positions on either side of the “Phoenix Feather Collection”, which is somewhat great because most of the time a player will only have 3-4 objects to place in this area (it is rare that they make it to 5), but sometimes a player does need x5 spaces to place game components in this area, and on the upgraded mat they get the space to do so!

Now that I have taken a second to describe these differences, take a look at how crazy different they are when they are literally placed side by side in the same image:

Isn’t it just absolutely crazy how different these look from one another now!?

When compared side by side, it is so super clear that the upgraded play mats are definitely nicer than the ones that come in the box. Not only that, but the larger ones are made from neoprene, while the in-game ones are simply card stock. All of these features make the play mats a worthwhile investment for the player that they can be proud of (and it makes it worth it for me as well, because it feels like a much nicer game when you have these than otherwise, but we don’t force them on the player & make the game super expensive!).

Now, in the other realm of this process comes the manufacturing needs. Normally, making gaming play mats for the board game world can be a pretty expensive process, and it come with some daunting MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) needs in order to get your product. But for Phoenix Farm, we actually had a pretty hilarious work around for this process… and it’s yet another great littler Design Journal Secret for those of you who are our dedicated readers: These are actually mouse pads! This worked out great for us because not only were they so much cheaper to get made than custom sized gaming pads, but they are made of the exact same material AND they just so happened to be the EXACT correct size that we needed these mats to be to fit all of the game data on them for the players!

Not only did this solve so many problems in our overall costs of production (and cost to sell), but these mouse pad play mats also can be ordered in practically any quantity for a reasonable price. We of course get a significant price break for ordering in bulk, but in order to get the marketing prep we want done for the Kickstarter Process, we can actually order only like x12 of these to prototype them for later at a great cost!

But before we put a close on this chapter of the design journal, here is a hilarious fast forward moment to much later down the timeline…. (Spoilers) Phoenix Farm does inevitably end up successfully getting funded in our Kickstarter Campaign. We need about x200 of the play mats to fulfill the Kickstarter & we wanted to get significantly more for the Renfaire shop as well… so our best price point in the bulk order was about x750 units… which looked like this when it arrived in the mail several months later from this point in time:

And once again, here we are with one more step checked off the list!

The Phoenix Farm Kickstarter prep work is coming together strong, but we still have a few tricks up our sleeve that we need to discuss! So be sure to tune back in soon for some more fun Design Journal storytelling, and thank you again as always for reading!