Inventory

Inventory is where a board game business ties up most of its cash. Every copy in a warehouse is money you already spent that only comes back when the copy sells, and meanwhile it costs storage fees every month. The core discipline of running a game business is deciding how many copies to print, where to keep them, and how fast they need to move, because both failure modes are expensive: selling out too fast leaves money on the table, and overprinting buries your cash in cardboard.

Print run sizing starts from evidence, not optimism. A crowdfunding campaign gives you a hard floor of copies you must deliver, and most publishers print somewhere between 20 and 50 percent beyond backer count to have stock for direct sales, reviewers, conventions, and early retail interest. Printing more drops the unit cost, which is seductive, but unit cost is irrelevant if copies never sell. A common first-campaign mistake is doubling the print run to chase a better per-unit price and then paying storage on the second half for years.

Storage itself is a real line item. Third-party fulfillment warehouses typically charge by the pallet or cubic foot per month, plus a fee per order shipped. A few pallets is cheap, dozens is not, and long-storage fees at some warehouses climb steeply after six or twelve months. Keeping some stock at home works at small scale and is how many publishers start, but it does not scale past a few hundred copies, and your garage does not integrate with your web store.

Track your sell-through rate, the pace at which copies actually leave, from day one. It tells you when to start planning a reprint (lead times mean you order the reprint while you still have stock) and when to accept that a title has slowed and discount it rather than pay another year of storage. Inventory that will never sell at full price is not an asset, it is a monthly bill wearing a disguise.