This indie webstore wants to help you make board games – and actually sell them

Shortly after UK Games Expo 2025 last month, I had a chat with David Pettifer, the founder of Bored Wreckers Marketplace. He’d launched BWM at the show, as a new marketplace for indie board game creators, aiming to help them develop and sell their own games. I was sceptical about its premise. Crowdfunders exist, and have created an explosion of new, self published games that shows no signs of slowing. What use was one more website to list on? But there’s more to it than that – a lot more.

If you’ve just invented one of the best board games of all time, you absolutely can make it real, and in some ways it’s far simpler these days than in past generations. The modern web offers you a zillion ways to crowdfund design and production costs, crowdsource playtesting, and do your own online marketing and sales, without signing your beloved creation over to a big company. Say that to any small time indie board game creator, though, and you’re likely to get laughed at. A lot.

An important thing about business is that if a lot of people are enthusiastically telling you something is a really easy way to make loads of money, then you’re already way too late to really easily make loads of money doing it. See also: dropshipping, cryptocurrency, and Non Fungible Tokens.

The reality is that, even if your game an utterly unique work of unimaginable genius, making it a reality is likely to be an excruciating slog. Getting the money to make it is probably easier than before (put a pin in that for later). But getting it made, packaged, shipped to the right bit of the world, priced, and delivered to customers is still fraught with hidden regulatory hold ups, costs, and assorted pitfalls that breathless TikTok influencers invariably neglect to mention.

And when it comes to actually selling the damn things, well, welcome to capitalism, baby! Yes, crowdfunding platforms and online retailers will list your games for cheap, and yes, you can run your own social media ads from your garage. But in all those online spaces, you’ll be whispering into a hurricane, out-spent ten times over by established companies gunning hard for the exact same nerdy customers you’re trying to reach. Your game could be era-definingly brilliant and still reach nobody.

From the perspective of gamers who want to try something genuinely new, and creative folks with an idea for a sick game of their own, this is rather a shame. Enter Bored Wreckers Marketplace: a tiny, six month old company based out of the UK, whose stated aim is to help “starry eyed” small, independent publishers navigate the rocky road from ‘having a great idea’ to getting a real life board game onto people’s tables.

BWM has only just got going, so there’s no way to know, just yet, how much of an impact it may have. But personally, I was intrigued by Pettifer’s intentions, and his perspectives on what it currently takes to make a successful new board game – crowdfunded or not.

Read on for our full conversation, edited for readability.

Wargamer: To kick off, tell us about what Bored Wreckers wants to do, in  your own words.

David Pettifer: Bored Wreckers Marketplace is an online store, essentially, where small, independent publishers who’ve designed some really awesome board games could go and list those games, like they might do on Etsy or Amazon or something like that; get those games out there and seen by members of the public; and hopefully make loads of sales.

The reason I created the marketplace was because publishing is quite hard, and lots of people get quite starry eyed about the idea of creating their own board games and publishing them themselves, but then don’t realize that they have to deal with a lot of very grueling topics, like VAT and regulatory compliance, which is what I’ve been dealing with this week.

I’d already gone through that entire process because I designed my own board game and was trying to sell it, and then I thought, well, there’s hundreds of other small, independent publishers in the UK alone that are trying to do something similar. Why don’t we stop duplicating all our efforts, and work together to create something that benefits everybody, and hopefully benefits gamers in the long run too?

You designed and published your own board game, Drags to Riches. What were some of those pitfalls that you hit and thought: something needs to be done about this?

So – you’ve designed your game, you’ve maybe found an artist to do some artwork, or you’ve done it yourself. Then you go find a factory, and you say, yeah, please, please manufacture my game. You then have to start thinking about things like: do I need CE marking, or UK CA marking, or the equivalent, to say this is safe to be sold in certain countries? Do I need a barcode? Do I need a SKU number? All sorts of nitty gritty details like that. Before you’ve even manufactured the game, you need to know how can you sell it legally, and what you’ve got to think about there.

I obviously had to do all digging around the internet to find this information and speak to other small, independent publishers who are going through the same process. The awesome thing about what we do is there’s a really amazing community of people out there who are all doing this and sharing that knowledge and advice – but there’s nowhere that it’s specifically written down.

There’s no no place you can go and say: ‘Oh, actually, this list tells me everything I need to do and everything I need to know about getting into board game publishing.’ That’s something I would like the marketplace to be able to do.

How do you get your games from your factory (most often, that’s in China) and get it to the UK? And then how do you sell it to places like the EU. And also by the way, did you know you have to pay [Value Added Tax] VAT on everything you sell into the EU, and also you’re going to pay import VAT when it comes in?

There are all these costs that you might not have considered, and it can really tank your project if you’ve not factored in things like that. It’s usually the regulatory stuff that trips people up, I think.

There are a LOT of games coming out all the time, including indie crowdfunders. With all that noise and competition, why should people – like our readers – start making their own games?

I mean, if you look in the art world, there’s a lot of art, isn’t there? Is there too much art? Should people stop making art? You know, should people stop writing books? I would say no. I mean, every story has been done to death, right? You watch TV series, you play videogames, and you’re like, I know this story. It’s re-treading old ground. Even the Lion King was just Hamlet, right? But people make new and inventive twists on ideas, they’re innovating constantly and engaging with new audiences, with something fresh.

So even though the market is heavily saturated, there’s absolutely a place for more games, because games are awesome and people have incredible ideas. I think that’s part of what’s important about what we’re doing: we want to level the playing field for indies so that their ideas stay on the market, because so many just fall through the cracks. We try and prevent that from happening, so that these awesome games stay out there and stay relevant, and people can find them.

Why should people make games? For the people making the games, you’re doing something incredibly creative. You’re bringing your ideas to life. And the awesome thing about publishing your own game is you get to retain that creative control and that creative freedom to bring the idea to life in the way that you envisaged it.

You could design a game and go and pitch it to a publisher, and they’ll take the game from you, and they’ll put their own stamp on it. And lots of people are happy doing that, but I think a lot of people, when they create something, it’s their baby. They want to see it to through into adulthood. They want to be there to watch it graduate, right?

That’s why people get into publishing. It’s just unfortunately, publishing comes with all the other bits, like ecommerce, logistics, fulfilment, and VAT compliance. You can’t take all those nice bits and then not have to deal with the other stuff. We’re trying to handle all those boring, not very sexy elements of publishing for you, so you can do the fun bit.

Board Wreckers also wants to be a marketplace for people to sell their games – why? Why should people list their games with you, and not sell via Etsy, Ebay, or their own webstore?

Yeah, so setting up your own e commerce site is doable these days. It’s totally doable, and Shopify makes that easier than ever. But it doesn’t get around a lot of the regulatory stuff that I just explained, you still have to think and plan and understand how to sell your store, to manage those things and get that working with some kind of fulfilment and logistics solution so somebody buys your game.

You need that order to go through to somebody who’s going to then ship your game. And: how do you get all that working together nicely, knowing that if the customer is in the EU then you have to manage the VAT and whatever else on that?

You could also take your games to somewhere like Amazon or Etsy or any of the others, but you are just a very, very, very small fish in a massive pond full of other fish, and you’re not going to stand out, to be honest. I mean, when was the last time you went to Amazon and were just browsing? It doesn’t happen. You go to Amazon because, you know, you want X, Y, Z. You don’t go: ‘oh, I’ll just have a look in the games and puzzles section today just to see what’s new’. It’s quite rare, isn’t it, so unless people already know about you, they’re not coming to look for you.

As a small publisher, you don’t necessarily have a big marketing budget. You can’t really push your name out there that easily, so being on Amazon doesn’t help you get sales, it just maybe facilitates where you can sell the game from. Also, it’s an absolute nightmare trying to get your stuff listed on Amazon. That is one of the big pitfalls I had. It is a real pain in the ass. And after all that hard work, you just don’t see any sales. It’s very demoralizing.

Bored Wreckers Marketplace basically makes this whole process a lot easier and simpler. It’s easy to get yourself signed up. It’s free to list your first three games on there. I just take a small commission whenever an order comes through. So it doesn’t cost you anything until you make a sale, which is great, and we can provide all the fulfilment and logistics and that side of it if people want to, or you can manage all that yourself at home if you want to keep your games in your garage and just ship them out whenever an order comes through.

Essentially, we’ve built the platform to be as super easy and streamlined as possible, and sort of cover all the different ways that people might want to sell or fulfil their games, but also we provide a centralized hub for people who want to support indie board game makers to come and look for indie board games.

So you’re banking on there being an audience of folks who actively go shopping for new, small, indie board games. How have you found that audience – and how’re you going to connect your indie publishers to those buyers?

The marketplace has only been up and running for six months now. So it’s a really new enterprise, and we launched it for the first time at UK Games Expo. There we were able to talk to people and say: ‘This is what we’re doing, we’re trying to help these kind of publishers.’ And we got loads of interest from the from members of the public and customers.

So the way we reach them is just by trying to get our name out there and say: ‘look, this is what we’re doing.’ And we know people love supporting local, small creators – otherwise Etsy wouldn’t exist, for instance, right? You know, people like the idea of buying something from a real human.

My next year or so is going to be going out and looking for people who want to buy from real humans instead of faceless corporations. Because, you know, all of our publishers are real people who make amazing games and part of the platform is providing each publisher with a profile where it’s got a picture of their face and it tells you a bit about them, and you can get to know what their interests are, or find out more about why they got into making games.

We’re trying to push that personal element. If you look on Kickstarter, people back Kickstarters out of emotions and feeling connected with something, right? You’re not really just buying something, you’re investing in an idea that you want to create. So we’re just coming in at the end of that process as well, and saying that there’s still people with these awesome ideas. You can help them achieve their goals, become publishers, make more amazing games, and you can be a part of that journey.

We know the the tabletop games industry is full of people who do that, because Kickstarter’s biggest revenue stream is board games, for exactly that reason. So they’re out there – I just need to go out and start marketing to them more for sure.

And your customers won’t be crowdfunding a project, they’ll be buying a finished product?

Absolutely, yeah, you’re buying things that have already been been made, probably because they were crowdfunded. But in the future, like we’d like to start providing listings for crowdfunding projects – not necessarily running the crowdfunding ourselves, but promoting crowdfunded projects that are out there again, just to help continue promoting indies, and building a pipeline of people who want to list their ideas on our platform and just link through to the crowdfunding website.

But you know, by then they they’re hopefully invested in using the platform, and saying: ‘well, now the game’s made, I should start listing on here, because it’s a super easy transition.’ So that’s a feature that should be coming at some point soon, hopefully.

With the crowdfunding link you’re hoping to add, is there a risk that the sheer scale some crowdfunders are now reaching could drown out your small indie creators?

The crowdfunding element would still be working with indies. I wouldn’t be looking to work with bigger publishers on that. I’m not trying to promote everybody’s Kickstarter, so hopefully, just in isolation, that shouldn’t be such an issue. I don’t think it will take over the core offering of the marketplace, which is a sales platform, essentially. It’s just an additional tool, in some ways, to help our indies promote their their upcoming projects, or help new indies promote their projects, and then hopefully use our platform in the future.

Crowdfunding is the number one way for indie publishers to make their games right now – why shouldn’t they just do that?

Obviously, it’s awesome that crowdfunding has unleashed a tour de force of new games to the world. The industry wouldn’t exist without Kickstarter and crowdfunding, to be honest, not in the size and scope that it currently does.

The issue right now, at least as far as I see, is that you basically have big publishers who don’t want to take any risk, who develop an idea for a game, and they use Kickstarter as a testing platform, really, to soundboard whether people are that interested. They don’t take the risk, manufacture a game and then try and market it, like they would have done traditionally. They build an idea, they pay for the artwork and things like that, and then they they put it out there, and if it flops, they haven’t lost too much because they haven’t had to invest in getting the product manufactured.

But what it means is these publishers, because they have so much capital behind them – more than indies, I should say – they can make flashy, shiny, exciting, sexy campaigns that mean that the bar you have to raise your own campaign to is so high and so difficult to attain. For people who just started out, they’ve got an idea, but now they suddenly have to find somebody to do a super awesome one minute promo video – and that can be really expensive and difficult to do.

I think it’s no longer a tool for supporting the community. It’s a pre order form for large publishers that don’t want to invest in having their products manufactured. It drowns out the smaller publishers because, you know, they can’t compete. They struggle to compete anyway, right? And then you’re on a site with this mega campaign that’s going to be $30 million or whatever, and it’s cost them, like, four and a half million dollars just to produce the Kickstarter page and video, right? How are you supposed to compete with that?

So your mission is based on platforming tiny publishers – what happens when one of your publishers gets big and starts crowding out the little guys?

Yeah, I have thought about this. One of my friends, also a publisher, asked it me early on. It’s like, when does a publisher get too big? And honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question, not yet anyway, but it feels like it will be a good problem to have in the future, because it just means that what we’ve done is successfully created some success stories out of our platform. But, yeah, it is a question I have to think about. It’s hard to know what I would implement until we see what the picture looks like in the future.

It could be that we potentially allow medium or larger companies onto the store eventually, but what we’re doing is foregrounding new and indie and that is always, that will always be the core mission. That will never change. It’ll always promote independents.

If some of the independents have a really awesome success story on our platform, maybe they’ll want to leave and start their own ecommerce anyway, and we won’t be there trying to foreground people who are really succeeding. We’ll be there trying to foreground people who who are new and haven’t had a chance to be shown, showing them off to the world. I don’t know what that will look like in the future, but that will always be the priority.

Thanks, David! Best of luck with the next stages!

Ever considered designing and publishing your own board game? Or are you the kind of indie-first tabletop gamer who’d love to shop for folks’ debut creations somewhere like Bored Wreckers Marketplace? Come join the Wargamer Discord community and tell us about it! We’re a friendly old bunch, and we’d love to have you in our club.