We are considering opening a webstore to sell BG accessories. Gauging interest/asking questions.

By Lance845, in Twilight Imperium

Hello everyone.

Me and a friend who has a web store for all kinds of other things are considering expanding or opening a new store front for board game related materials. We have access to a decent sized industrial laser cutter (currently used to etch designs into materials like coasters, flasks, journals, etc etc...) a good supplier for quality colored acrylic sheets and a love of board games.

Primarily we want to make things we would want ourselves. We want them to look nice, be useful, enhance the gaming experience in some way, and be priced fairly.

To that end one of the first things we are looking to make is sets of Command and Control Tokens for Twilight Imperium 4th ed. As you guys probably know the game itself comes with sets of the tokens in cardboard that have graphics on them for each of the playable factions/species. With the upcoming expansion that is 24 sets of over 30 tokens each. It occupies A LOT of space in storage (and sorting through them for set up) and isn't the most clear on the board since the factions colors do not necessarily match up with the players color of ships.

So we are considering cutting sets of the tokens in transparent acrylic in the colors of the ships (6 colors base, 8 with the expansion). We have the files made for the size sheets we want to cut and we are thinking we could sell the original 6 color sets for 30-40 USD. The expansion colors for 15. And 40-50 for all 8. (No guarantees on that pricing it's tentative right now based on our estimates).

We found another store (Litko) that sells a similar product for 16.99 per color. A much higher price that we find unfair and untenable for the buyer. You almost have to pay for the game again to get the original 6 colors.



So questions for you guys.

1) Is there any interest in the Twilight Imperium tokens product?
2) How do you feel about that proposed pricing?
3) What other games would you like to see similar products for?
4) We are also considering a resin 3d printer for further accessories. How likely are you to buy resin game accessories?

Thanks for reading and any feedback you can provide. Good, bad, ideas, anything. We are happy to hear from the community. Just looking to gauge general interest right now.

You might have more response over at the reddit community (r/twilightimperium) which is a lot more active than here -- I expect that there would be a fair amount of feedback on that sort of thing over there, as a lot of people there tend to buy accessories for their game. The BGG forums are also quite active, but I think this sort of thing (looking for feedback on a product/potential product for sale) falls just outside what's typically permitted there.

For myself, I don't typically have a lot of extra cash available to buy upgrade components of this sort, so cheaper is better -- the price range you talk about here seems quite reasonable to me. (On the other hand, I'm also not real keen on the color-coded command counters, though a lot of people are; I rather like the faction-specific cardboard ones -- so my opinion on the viability of those specifically isn't exactly a useful metric.)

One of the biggest products in demand is a viable storage solution. There's several on the market, and all seem to be well-liked by different groups of people. It seems to be a product that there's always room for another option.

Resin accessories -- there are a few homebrew rule sets that could use some nice-looking dedicated 3d pieces. The Monuments variant over on r/twilightimperium is a popular one, and there's a few others both there and BGG which have people looking for some good miniatures for Twilight Imperium.

But I'd really recommend asking over on the reddit community if you haven't already. That's where you're likely to get the best and most useful responses.

Thanks for the reply!

I will check out the reddit. Good suggestion. Today we did our first test cut of one color, images attached to show you what we are looking at making. You can see size comparisons, general style, and how they look at the system tiles.

Storage solutions isn't something we are against getting into. But we would need to come up with a design that improves upon whats already available in order for us to consider putting something to market.

IMG-20201123-161721090-HDR.jpg IMG-20201123-161746266-HDR.jpg IMG-20201123-161944422-HDR.jpg