Last year 7th Dimension Games sold 409 unique titles of board games (I’m counting an expansion as its own game for simplicity). 234 of those titles, over half of them, sold 1 copy. In fact, over 55% of profits from board games came from titles that sold 3 or fewer copies.

Monday, I was at ToyFair. It didn’t take me long to see a pattern. Companies like Rio Grande, Mayfair or other companies that make gamer’s games tend to use a distributor. The distributor works with hundreds of companies and has a warehouse where they open big crates to break them into individual units. That way I can buy a single copy of a different game every week.

Companies that sell squirt guns, yo-yos, etc either sell direct (or use an agent) and expect you to buy a case of product x. So when they try to sell me a party game they ask how many dozens they can sell me. When I said one single game they looked incredibly confused.

So, ToyFair wasn’t a waste of time, but most of the companies there weren’t selling to me.