We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Curt Covert. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Curt below.
Alright, Curt thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard
There are a growing number of great board games and amazing board game companies out there these days. Modern board games aren’t just for kids, like when I grew up, and deliver thoroughly engaging experiences for all ages. But for the past 22 years, Smirk & Dagger Games has been dedicated to developing games with an emotional center. Deeply thematic games, where the pieces fade away and players are invested in the world of the game. We liken them to cinematic experiences. We want you to feel something at the table. Adventure, tension, warm fuzzies, fear, joy – just as if you were watching a movie, but YOU are the characters and the choices you make shape the outcome.
The Night Cage is one such example, where players wake up in a world of complete darkness, with only a candle to hold the oppressive void back. As you move tile by tile, you light new pathways – and old one fade away. You are lost in a labyrinth. You must all work together to win or lose the game together by finding keys and then a way out – but you are not alone. Monsters who despise the light try to extinguish your flickering flame. It does what few board games can do… deliver a sense of dread and tension like a horror movie might.
Or on the other side of the scale, A Place for All My Books is a cozy, warm game about slightly introverted book lovers, who delight in organizing their collection. By completing the organizational puzzles, gathering and sorting books, they will admire their accomplishments and boost their social battery. When it climbs high enough, they can venture out of the house, into the village – to get more books! It is a game that speaks to players and makes them feel seen – and celebrates them. All with delightfully zen-like game play. It is truly joyful.
The result of understanding the emotional underpinnings of these experiences is that one can create much more interesting games and memorable moments. Players often recount the events of the game and the story that unfolded as they journeyed through the game together. My games are wildly diverse in look and feel, but all of them are built on this desire to entertain in an emotionally driven narrative. And that has allowed our games to stand out.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My skill set is borne of a diverse background as a filmmaker, cartoonist, copywriter and graphic artist. Concurrent with opening my board game company, I worked as a Creative Director and Concept Director for several marketing agencies with clients like Dannon Yogurt, Jameson Irish Whiskey and Unilever, to name a few. All of which I was able to leverage in opening and building my board game company. For 14 years, it was a slowly growing side career, alongside my marketing career, and allowed me a creative outlet that was truly my own. Essentially, I had two jobs. An extremely demanding day job – and my own company which I fed and watered from 9pm to midnight every night. I suppose some would have found it extremely taxing, but I looked forward to the opportunity to build the games, make them look sensational – and put them into the hands of the public. It was wildly energizing. Admittedly, it was a hobby business and at the time, I didn’t need it to be anything more. I slowly grew my line of games and my reputation in the industry and that was enough. It more than paid for itself and it was fulfilling on so many levels.
Then, 8 years ago, I made the decision to leap in with both feet, becoming a board game publisher full time – and see if the additional focus could catapult the brand forward. I redefined my product line to broaden the potential audience and shifted from making games that I loved ‘for passion’s sake’ to games that I felt could truly break through the 7500 new games releasing a year and get talked about. Any game prototype had to prove that it was driving a “desire to own” when we play tested with fans. If we were not spontaneously asked, “Dude – when is this coming out?”, we would abandon the game as “not good enough.” I optimized the game covers for shelf appeal, looked for innovative ways to increase table appeal of the game when set up to play, redoubled efforts on compelling theme and narratives. All the while, sticking to my core belief that games are more engaging when they connect with players on an emotional level. If anything, I found new ways to connect with people. And started to find my “hit” ratio climb. Steeply. Shobu, The Night Cage, Boop, A Place for All My Books…. all combined to drive the company’s reputation in the industry and unit volume through the roof.
Not to be overlooked is the time and care I took to build a community around my games. At conventions, where we go to show off the new games, demoing and selling the latest to the fans, I focused my team with the following key thought. We are not here to sell games. You are not salespeople. We are entertainers. We are welcoming friends and family into our booth to show off what we are excited about. To showcase the fun that can be had. And if a sale arises from that, we have them available. We built brand loyalists, who would stop by the booth every year – to say hello to their friends and try out the new stuff. It was a destination. It was part of the fun of being at the show. And they would support us by taking copies of the games home, to recreate those wonderful moments they had in our booth with loved ones at home. In the end, it is not the products but the experiences around those products that are the true brand. It has been wonderfully gratifying to see our brand grow from the seeds I planted into the forest it has become.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
At the outset, I was simply looking to publish my first game and get it into the hands of gamers who would appreciate it. I was opening a business – almost as an afterthought. I endeavored to get as smart as I could beforehand, seeking to avoid pitfalls that could get in my way or kill me before I could even get underway and spoke to many other small game companies, most of whom were open and generous with their time and advice. But funding my first game was going to be a significant risk and all up-front investment. The only way I could pay for it was to take out a line of credit on my house. This is not a path I would recommend to anyone. As my only way forward, I took extreme care to assure that there was a market for the game and a big enough audience ready to buy it. I had hand crafted 100 sets of the game in my kitchen with xeroxed cards onto parchment cards. I took it to the biggest game convention in the US, where I set up a small card table in someone else’s booth – amid a gigantic sales floor. The only thing announcing my presence was a 8×11″ sign at the table. I sold 80 of them and took it as a sign that a professionally printed edition would move. It was indeed a huge risk – but one that paid off for me and propelled my company forward to a second and third product.
These days, new companies often get their initial funding through crowd-funding on platforms like Kickstarter and GameFound. Here, publishers with the dream of creating their first game can showcase it on-line and have people pledge to fund it before it exists, supporting them by helping to pay for the print run. It has lowered the threshold drastically for new companies entering the market – but is not without risk. So, I often advise new companies to treat their crowd-funded game as though they HAD put their house on second mortgage. Make sure it is a finished marketable game – that demonstrates the audience is hungry to own it – before launching. Sitting on inventory you can’t move can kill a company quickly. Nor is Kickstarter ‘free money’. It is only a bankroll to launch a dream. It comes with a huge commitment to see it through and is no less of an investment of time, money and sweat to build your business beyond that.
Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?
I’ve had two “near death” moments for the company. The first happened almost immediately and was due to my inexperience and poor planning. My first game delivered on Halloween day in 2003. To keep the unit price down, I printed 5000 units, which was WAY too much for an unknown company. Additionally, the trade show where I could pitch my game to distributors and retailers — was 6 months away. Not only was I paying interest on that investment of product, I was also paying to warehouse it – with no means of distribution. It was a humbling realization. But sometimes naiveté can work in your favor. Panicked, I started cold calling retailers. Mom and Pop shops, and even bigger specialty chains. I didn’t know trying to call a buyer at a chain store was impossible. So I did. There is no reason in the world why my call to Spencer’s Gifts should have been put through to the buyer. There is no chance that the buyer would pick up and give me the opportunity to pitch the product. But I got lucky – and they ended up buying half of the print run, which paid for the entire inventory. In the same month, a consolidator called me out of the blue as a new exhibitor at the upcoming trade show. He told me I could spend my whole show trying to convince at least one distributor to pick me up – or he could add me to his roster and I would be a line item that would be instantly available to all distributors overnight. My trade show discussion with retailers was that my game was fully distributed and they could order through anyone. And my company went from “at risk of failure” to “on its way forward”.
The other close call was in 2019. Distributors across the nation had risk management professionals analyze their businesses and determined that the industry growth, with over 5000 new games coming out every year, necessitated a change in how they stocked games. They could not stock them all and could not buy as deep on each title as they had traditionally done. They advised them that they should look at retail pre-orders and order 10% or so above that total as an initial buy and restock strong sellers only. The problem was two fold. Supply chain issues often made pre-orders risky for retailers, who might not get the games when requested – only to have them arrive after demand plummeted. So they would usually only pre-order games they thought might sell out quickly to secure some portion of their order. Secondly, no one told retailers their pre-orders now determined what was stocked at all, nor did they want that responsibility. For small to mid-size publishers like myself, who typically didn’t get pre-orders because our games were unlikely to sell out immediately, it meant that we essentially went out of distribution. I had two new titles launch at way below average numbers. Retailers called asking how they could get copies. No distributor carried the games – and they were sitting in my warehouse just waiting! I called frantically trying to understand what was going on and discovered the situation above, but no one was talking about it or trying to fix it. It was just the new way of the industry. And I couldn’t move my new games. One distributor ordered just 12 units at launch – and when they sold out, didn’t re-order because they only moved 12 units!! Losing access to distribution would have killed the company in months, but I pivoted and came up with a strategy to keep my games flowing through the channel. I spoke with the largest distributor I had and asked them to take my line on consignment. It was the same risk to me and I needed retailers to be able to find them. In less than a month, product was flowing again – and this ended up pushing demand at other distributorships as games got out to the marketplace and proved themselves through sales. But for a time, I was looking at certain doom.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.smirkanddagger.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smirkanddagger/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smirkanddagger
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SmirkandDagger
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMhMZv2Hi9FjPf5ThcFm6oA
