Werewolf Made Board Games Popular Again. So Why Can't the Business Take Off in China?

Ten years in, the trade hasn't grown the way its operators expected — and not even a hit could change that.

Room 2475, fourth floor of the North Tower at Shangdu SOHO, by Dongdaqiao Station on Beijing's Subway Line 6. Emperor Penguin Board Game Bar ran here for eight years. Rent went up, and after August 13 this veteran bar moves to a new address.

It was once billed as one of Beijing's "Big Four" board game bars. In the roughly 40-square-meter room, the thing you notice first is the shelf facing the front counter, stacked floor to ceiling with board games. On this Saturday afternoon the noise comes from a table of Texas Hold'em and a round of Werewolf being put together in the last row of booths.

Scenes like this have not been rare over the past decade. In 2006, the arrival of San Guo Sha (《三国杀》) introduced many young Chinese to board games as a way to spend an evening, and board game bars began appearing — and disappearing — in cities across the country.

Those waves of closures were widely read as proof that board games in China were a passing fad. Baidu's search index shows interest has barely moved from 2011 to now; the few peaks came in 2011 and 2012. Board games have never been a big business in China.

Overseas, board games have been around for years, and after 2012 they entered five years of fast growth. ICv2 estimates that board game sales in North America grew 29% in 2015, to $1.19 billion (Kickstarter sales included). A Euromonitor report put global board game sales at $9.6 billion in 2016. Even so, that total is a sliver of what video games take in.

In 2016, as Werewolf spread quickly online and off, board games returned to the mainstream view. Zhao Yongquan, who runs a board game business, has met more than a dozen investors in a row. "Werewolf took off, and all they ask me about is Werewolf — how to turn something into Werewolf, whether it can be copied."

In 2012 this former commissioning editor at China Youth Press began promoting board game culture by publishing a board game magazine, and set up a company called DICE. In 2015, DICE organized the first Chinese board game convention, inviting makers to exhibit while players tried out and bought games on the floor.

Billed as "Asia's largest board game expo," DICE CON has gone from 15 exhibiting companies in 2015 to 55 now. To players, that already counts as thriving.

But next to Werewolf, which caught on by borrowing from livestreaming, talent-show streams and mobile games, people in the domestic trade like Zhao Yongquan would rather talk about what board games do in person — offline socializing — and about how much room the Chinese market has to grow. He told QDaily: "Three to five years to spread it is a realistic expectation."

Even so, he admits, to this day "there is almost no one in China designing board games full time."

He Min is one of the few full-timers. In 2014 he and some friends set up Guodong Fangkuai Studio; the three-person team put out a game called Deep Madness. Crowdfunding brought in $1.43 million and about 5 million yuan in profit. But for the market as a whole, one game every three years is nowhere near fast enough.

By one count China has 40 to 50 board game designers, and their careers are unsteady. Shuishui, who designed One Hundred Thousand Blind Dates and other games, also draws comics. In February 2011 he began serializing his own comics on Weibo, and started turning his comic The Crazy House into a board game. He told QDaily that once a game is finished, in-house testing usually takes more than 300 rounds of adjustment; then it goes up for presale on a crowdfunding site, and then he finds a factory to make and ship it. Part-timers like him are the mainstream of this industry.

Because the work offers so little security, most designers do it on the side, which drags down the quality of original titles. By the reckoning of one leading distributor, among the original designers it has dealt with, no more than three are anywhere near world class.

Letian, who has worked at Emperor Penguin for two years, says he has yet to see a domestic original board game he liked. "Maybe there is one and I just haven't played it. But a lot of so-called designers make board games to pad their résumé. Plenty of designers here may have played a few dozen games, or a hundred, then mash a few mechanics together and call it a game. I won't rule out that some people really have the talent for it. But the games are genuinely not fun."

That pattern badly limits the industry's ability to build steady production. Zhao Yongquan says the return on any single product is so low that original designers drift away. "They make a product, crowdfund it, see they aren't making money, and leave. If the market response is bad they vanish fast."

"Starting a board game project usually means prototype costs, art costs and printing and materials costs, and each of those runs to five figures — but not every project earns that back," Shuishui sighs.

Zhao Yongquan sees this as unavoidable at China's stage of development. "Most people start with a board game bar, or downstream sales, then slowly make connections, become distributors themselves, import and localize games. After enough of that they start doing original design. It's a bottom-up process."

Being a distributor isn't necessarily comfortable either. "I'd say our company isn't making money, but it isn't losing money either — we're basically breaking even right now," Yao Zongxiu, CEO of the publisher Mibao Dolphin, told QDaily. "At this stage we can't set out to make a profit. We're still waiting for the market to take off."

The knot of the problem is still how readily board games are accepted here.

As a game of wits, the board game's debut in China was tied closely to college students and white-collar workers. In 2006, Huang Kai, a sophomore at the Communication University of China, designed a game called San Guo Sha based on the American card game BANG! (known in Chinese as "killer cards"). The game could be played many ways and it caught on fast on campuses. Huang Kai sold it on Taobao for 79 yuan, and cards printed at the copy shop below his dorm went out across the country.

In 2007, Huang Kai and two friends founded Yoka Games studio to sell and promote San Guo Sha. Through online sales and offline distributors, the game spread widely among students and came to be seen as a new way for a younger generation to socialize in person.

By 2010, its peak year, the card set had sold 1 million copies. But the socializing it stood for, and the habit of gathering people to play, never spread far.

As Letian, a partner in Emperor Penguin, puts it: "Chinese people really have too little time off. How many can set aside a whole day to relax? You need the free time, you need to be willing to spend it on board games, and you need a group of friends with just as much free time. Look at us — how many of us can manage that?"

So in 2008, just as San Guo Sha was taking off, Yoka licensed Bianfeng to build an online version, San Guo Sha Online, which moved the players the card game had drawn toward a format that asked less of their time and location. The card game declined from there. A 2014 financial report from Hangzhou Bianfeng, the licensee, showed net profit from San Guo Sha falling from 40 million yuan in 2013 to 9 million.

At the same time, a board game bar takes almost nothing to equip — upfront investment rarely tops 200,000 yuan. A few dozen boxes of pirated games are enough to pull in ordinary customers if the owner doesn't push toward something more serious, which leaves the bars a long way from the middle-class customers any upgrade of the industry would depend on.

In 2009 the number of board game bars in Shanghai doubled in three months, reaching 1,000 the next year, with monthly takings reportedly averaging more than 10,000 yuan each. Ten years on, with rents in big cities climbing fast, what a single customer spends per visit has risen by no more than 20 yuan.

That makes a vicious circle: the harder it is to raise prices, the harder it is to attract customers who don't mind paying more. In the interview, Letian brought up the Werewolf bars and murder-game bars in Sanlitun. "Anything a murder-game bar can do, a board game bar can do too, but their average price is nearly double ours. Whatever new thing comes along is priced above board game bars... We set our prices too low from the start."

Bars are squeezed, and the share of core players who spend money falls short of what comparable markets abroad manage.

DICE once republished an article called "American Board Games and Millennials," which cited a Mintel survey of how millennials spend their leisure time and concluded that board games are popular with them because they are good value for money. At the end of the passage ran a line of small type: "This is based on average per capita income in the United States."

In China an imported board game costs 200 to 300 yuan on average, in line with world prices. But the average salary of Chinese "millennials," if such a group exists, is a sixth of their American counterparts'.

Hard to spread socially, heavily dependent on corporate culture, yet unable to reach middle-class wallets: with all of that tangled together, the first wave of interest in board games receded quickly.

By 2016 things had changed again. Thanks to online variety shows such as The Temptation of the Dinner Party and Lying Man, Werewolf — a board game published 15 years earlier — spread fast. When QDaily visited board game bars early this year, the owner of one near People's Square in Shanghai said that since the second half of last year, 70% of customers had come specifically for Werewolf, and weekend occupancy reached 80%.

But Werewolf still hasn't changed anything. Almost everyone interviewed said it doesn't strictly count as a board game product. Once it was turned into an app, a variety show, a social product, even livestreamed talent-show content, it drifted further and further from the board game it came from, The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow.

Both waves came on hard, and neither left behind a stable community of players. Still, the people who entered the trade because of San Guo Sha have had to find their own way to survive. The core players who went on to try other games are exactly the ground they stand on.

"Before board game bars closed in numbers in 2011, we had already been deliberately washing out the pure San Guo Sha players, because they tended to be noisy in the shop. So when that craze passed, it didn't hit us hard," says A.T., a partner in Yikeguan board game bar. "More to the point, by 2011 we were already sourcing games from overseas, and in 2012 we started global distribution, so San Guo Sha mattered to us even less. One thing fell away as another grew."

"One good thing about San Guo Sha is that after people play it, someone always asks what else there is to play, and they gradually come across other games. That's what turned the first batch of players into board game fans," Zhao Yongquan says. "So that group becomes the base population for board games. They matter a lot."

Is that group big enough? For now, at least, it can hold the industry up — even if only by keeping it running through crowdfunding.

Publishers put their titles on crowdfunding platforms to build buzz, and the products later go on sale through their own e-commerce channels. For a distributor that already has channels, A.T. says, crowdfunding is more a chance to interact with fans. "Crowdfunding platforms can also give players extra perks, and they give us more time to talk with designers."

Still, given the state of crowdfunding in China, not many companies rely on that money alone to pay for production. Open any project page and most of the user comments are about the usual crowdfunding troubles — missing pieces, late shipping.

In 2016, He Min and his team ran a successful Kickstarter. Over 28 days their Cthulhu-themed game Deep Madness raised $1.43 million, at a profit margin of about 30%. That made them, arguably, "the most successful crowdfunded board game maker in China" — though the game still hasn't gone on sale at home.

Abroad the picture isn't much brighter. Kickstarter's latest figures show the platform ran more than 1,500 board game projects in 2017, with the successful ones raising close to $70 million between them. Because that figure beat what video games raised on Kickstarter, people in board games cite it as evidence the industry is rising. But at under $50,000 per game on average, the money roughly covers the costs of design, manufacturing and launch.

At the end of 2016 the publisher CMON (Cool Mini Or Not) listed on Hong Kong's GEM board. By one count, CMON has run 23 crowdfunding campaigns since 2012, raising more than $26 million from 160,000 backers.

It still isn't a big company. Its 2016 report shows annual revenue just over $20 million and pre-tax net profit under $2 million — and that already makes CMON the largest player in board games.

Chinese operators pin their hopes on the size of the market at home. Both Zhao Yongquan and Yao Zongxiu say China's sheer population is the industry's best chance: even 100 million players would be a pot big enough to feed everyone in it. The condition is finding a way to get Chinese people to take up board games, which is plainly hard — it is, after all, the task that San Guo Sha, which nearly everyone played in its day, never finished.

So people in the trade have begun wrapping board games in one concept after another before pushing them out to market.

Family and parent-child games are one route. To ease the target customers' anxiety about their children's education, publishers are happy to package these as products that build a child's intelligence and emotional skills, repeating in their marketing that the games keep children away from screens, teach them things and improve how they get along with others.

Board game circles pass around a legend about markets abroad: that one origin of board games lies in cold European winters, a family amusing itself by the fire. Today, family sections still take up a large share of the floor at international conventions such as Spiel Essen in Germany and GEN CON in the United States.

In 2011, Ying Xiaotian, a San Guo Sha distributor in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, said in an interview that board games would only come of age in five to eight years — that is, once the players of that moment had children of their own, board games would turn into family games, as they had abroad.

But as of 2017, no standout family board game has appeared in China. Getting there runs into communication between generations, family education and social pressure, and board games can solve none of that. And once a board game becomes an early-education toy, it has already moved some distance from the vision of a game handed down through generations.

More people turn to pan-entertainment instead. In QDaily's interviews about board games, more than three-quarters of those we spoke to put IP at the center of their plans — distributors call themselves "pan-entertainment IP conglomerates"; original studios say their future direction is "IP-led"; and designers are turning more and more related cultural products into board games.

Before the film Da Hu Fa opened, Enlight Media's animation arm Coloroom Pictures approached Yikeguan about co-publishing a board game to go with the film's marketing. In July the Da Hu Fa board game announced a "concept phase" on the crowdfunding site Modian; it adapts the original creator's Animals Afraid of the Night, folds in some of the film's setting, and had 339 people behind it.

This kind of crossover is becoming normal in the board game business. Not long ago Mystery of the Antiques (《古董局中局》), adapted from Ma Boyong's novel of the same name, finished crowdfunding at nearly 520,000 yuan. Asked about this game, which mixes antique appraisal, trading and even AR, a player called 98 replied: "Didn't the Prince [Ma Boyong] also put out a game called Ming Dynasty Advisors? I was a bit disappointed after I played it. His design ideas are good, but some of the details were off — a lot of the rules weren't explained clearly, so you had to look things up online while playing."

Turning IP into board games is a fairly realistic approach. In 2003, George R. R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire was used as the basis for strategy board games including A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. In China, though, most board games don't carry that kind of weight; inside their IP systems they work more like merchandise.

"How well the two fit matters a lot. It's entirely possible for a game to be fun and a comic to look great, but for the two forms to go wrong together — it doesn't feel like one IP... When the fit is good and the experience holds up, different groups of users merge; when it isn't, each can become the other's sore point." Shuishui and his team are now trying to join original comics and original board games into a "linked" IP product; One Hundred Thousand Blind Dates, already adapted into a board game, will also be made into a web series.

Asked whether turning board games into spin-offs might damage the value of the games themselves, publishers and designers answered much the same way: this is the best route to a mass market.

At that point the conversation tends to swing back to Werewolf, the game that, after San Guo Sha, pushed board games to the front again. Every interviewee wanted a clear line between Werewolf and board games in the stricter sense, and every one of them had to admit that maybe a "pan-entertainment" product like Werewolf is the only way to manufacture a board game hit.

This is the third year Zhao Yongquan has organized the Chinese board game culture expo. Like most of the more optimistic people in the trade, he thinks the mainland will catch up with Taiwan within five years — Asia's second-largest market for licensed board games, where a single game sells 5 to 10 times what it does on the mainland, with dozens of original designers and more than a hundred original games published a year. His method is to keep pushing games as a way to socialize, so that more people find out what makes board games fun.

Other designers and small publishers think in simpler terms. During his interview, He Min said twice that he "isn't trying to revive Chinese board games single-handedly"; he and Letian both suspect that "pan-entertainment" and "internet thinking" will leave nothing behind for the real board game community. Yao Zongxiu's Mibao Dolphin plans to work step by step, releasing two small, two medium and two large games a year — "slowly waiting for the moment, until one day we can make the thing that sells a million a year."

Emperor Penguin, meanwhile, has found a new address near the North Fourth Ring Road. In the WeChat group set up for the move, one partner posted the wall he had just painted for the new shop: a giant, solid-black werewolf covering the whole wall. More than 500 kinds of board games are stacked at the door of the old shop, and there's no telling how many new customers they will still bring in.

Cover image: pexels