As I mentioned in the previous article, towards the end of 2019 we were hard at work creating the world of Limbo and it was truly looking like a very special place. I wanted to recreate a sense of wonder and adventure, with those ironic noir-esque undertones that I thought would fit the theme.

The worldbuilding was coming together very nicely and eventually we found a freelance artist that would do the job. The most suitable candidate was Adriano Villarraga, a brilliant Colombian illustrator and complete stranger to the board game industry. Together with the aforementioned Gerard Pamiés as an art director, we came up with the sweeping amount of 120 unique illustrations. Basically, all the extra cash I could muster was being invested into the artwork for a year and a half.

So whenever you were asked, what were you doing during the pandemic? I know full well what I was doing. I was starting a new job, temporarily back in my family household in Bilbao, and spending my 18h-23h and weekends managing the Limbo artwork or testing the game with Borja.

It's about time I talked about Borja Ayerdi. A lifelong friend since we were young spotty metalheads in our teens, my most nerdy friend and the person behind testing Limbo. Which qualifies him as the lead tester in our new publisher Unair Games as far as I am concerned. Granted the guy is a bit of a lazy sod, but he is also brilliant in his own capacity, we have a way of understanding each other that you can only develop during 20 years of friendship, and more importantly, making games together provides us with a good reason to catch up regularly amidst the chaos of grown up life. It’s easy to sometimes forget that this is the entire point for me - to share the process with people I love and care about.

Divergent Themes

But I digress. When I said I was bullheaded before, you guys have no idea. The truth is, as much as Limbo was a very attractive and different theme for us, talking about death and the underlying political messaging present on Limbo was being seen as a risky proposition by the publishers and businessmen we were talking to. This has been a major source of conflict for me over the years; I just don’t care for most board game themes out there - I want to do something different.

And this is where the issue comes from. We had a tangent conversation on the BGG forum with some very interesting remarks about the market dynamics of publishing board games. But I want to add a couple more thoughts to that.

As an author, you get paid for a design. Publishers don’t care for your artwork and very often not even the theme - unless you have already published the game and it’s doing well - occasionally not even then. In other words you sell the “mechanics”.

This can be perverse in two ways. One, once you sell those mechanics, they throw in some art and suddenly your game is in many ways locked in to that publisher. So even if a few years down the line the contract with the publisher runs out, it’s very unlikely that you’ll go through the trouble of redoing the artwork and remarketing the game. Particularly in this fast paced market where most games don’t make it past the first print.

The second way in which this is detrimental is even worse, at least for me. The fact that your theme is disposable means that no healthy individual would commit or grow attached to a theme until they sign a contract with a publisher or plan to self publish. The second one is kind of crazy in and of itself, particularly if you are planning to do it for a single game, where the cost of establishing your brand, and setting the whole business operations in motion completely eclipses the work of making games. It’s one of those where you wanted to do something creative and suddenly you find yourself doing spreadsheets all day long.

So basically, say you wanted to do this cool game about an ultra-capitalistic world of the dead, and say you carefully tuned in the card effects to match their theme. Well most likely, if you ever want to see it published by anybody, then you have to let go of your creative vision.

So how dumb is it to commission your own art when you are not necessarily planning on self publishing? Very dumb. But then again, isn’t it worse not to follow your ideas, isn’t the enjoyment in creating something in the process of doing so? Does everything have to be about min - maxing and avoiding risk?

To be continued…