What happens during fulfilment? – From the factory to your doorstep

Of course, nothing can beat the experience of playing a great board game and sharing the experience with friends and family. The thrill of a good combo, a well-executed strategy or just luck falling into your hands is unbeatable. However, for some people, the thrill of backing an exciting campaign or buying a title they were eyeing for a long, long time can be just as exciting. The news of a long-awaited campaign being finally fulfilled is a thrill on its own. You are reading the updates, following freight ships and opening your email inbox every day, waiting for a tracking notification. But how do we get there? From the games being made to them arriving at your door? 

After so many crowdfunding projects and experience with multiple partners all around the world, we want to give an insight into how fulfilments actually happen. Who’s moving what and where? How are fulfilment centres handling such a big workload in a short amount of time? Why are fulfilments and timelines so often unpredictable?

Where it all begins: the factory 

You might think that fulfilment starts at the shipping company, or at least in some port city. But the real preparations far precede the movement of pallets and stock. We are preparing the fulfilment well ahead of the board games even being printed. We start by preparing a shipping plan that includes the exact quantities that each of our fulfilment partners should receive of each printed product. This shipping plan is then shared and discussed with the manufacturer, as they are the ones preparing the pallets.

In our exact process, we are working with Panda exclusively, so they are the ones who prepare the pallets and shipments that are then transported to the Yantian port to be picked up by freight ships.

The long wait

There is technically no way of fulfilling all at the same time in all regions. By the rules of simple geography, some regions are just luckier than others. If a fulfilment centre has everything needed to start, it makes no sense to technically store stock and let it collect dust while shipments arrive at other places around the globe. This is why shipments can leave pretty soon after manufacturing finishes in Asia and Australia. Starting early in Asia can also be deceiving, as the continent is huge and transport between all the islands in the region can be tricky. Most orders are sent in bulk to local hubs that then distribute them within the country of destination. 

Freight shipment between China and North America can be quick as well. The most significant delays we encountered in this region were due to dock worker strikes or congestion at ports. Shipments usually arrive along the western coast, both in the US and Canada, as we recently started fulfilling these countries separately. 

While the above shipments are pretty straightforward, this can’t be said for the vessel bringing your games to Europe. Ship routes between Chinese and European ports are difficult to predict. Due to conflicts in West Asia, routes like the Suez Canal became high-risk or unusable. For our recent European shipments, the ships had to take the longer route and go around Africa. This naturally adds not days but weeks to the time it takes for the board games to arrive in this region. Cargo ships also stop at multiple ports during their route. It is also difficult to track, monitor and control shipments. It also happened multiple times that our pallets were moved to a different vessel in the middle of the freight shipment. This is something that we are unable to control or predict, and it also sometimes adds weeks to the arrival of our precious cargo. This is, of course, very frustrating not only to us, but mostly to our backers who have spent a long time waiting for their games, only to hear further and further delays so close to the finish line. This is still the safest and most reliable option we have found so far for getting our games to Europe. 

Importing, exporting, porting everything!

It might sound like a done deal – the stuff is here, just get them shipped already! Our games arriving at a port is just half of a success story. They still need to go through customs and sometimes testing to make sure the products we are importing to the country align with local regulations. Our games need to comply with regulations in each region where we distribute them. The most rigorous of all is the European Union and the UK, which means that after waiting long weeks for the games to arrive in Europe, it can also take a week or so for them to clear customs. Once it is all done, everything is approved, and duties are paid, the board games can finally get on either trucks and/or trains to get from the ports to our trusted fulfilment partners. 

Work at the fulfilment centre

At this point, we are also counting the days and biting our fingernails for the actual fulfilment to begin. Our local fulfilment partners are receiving the stock. They are sometimes juggling multiple trucks from multiple companies at the same time, so unloading our pallets can also take some time. For the next step to be sending packages out the other door would be amazing, but it is still not that simple. After unloading everything, our partners need to diligently count every piece of stock they received to make sure everything we sent actually arrived. After it is confirmed that they have everything to start, they can begin putting packages together.

Fulfilment centres, at least during a crowdfunding campaign’s fulfilment, usually begin with the simplest orders. You only pledged for the title we have the most copies of? Nothing else? It’s just putting a box into another box, easy-peasy. Orders like these usually take up the majority of packages. It is easy to package, easy to move, and speed is of the essence when a warehouse is full, and courier trucks are already notified of hundreds of orders going out the next day. 

We are also working closely with our partners to perfect packaging methods to minimise damage both during the packaging and shipping process. For more info on this, you can read our dedicated blog post here. 

There are many obstacles our fulfilment partners can run into. The shipping companies we work with regularly do fulfilments for other board game publishers. For example, partly because of the unpredictability of freight shipments, fulfilments of multiple projects can overlap. If a shipment arrives later than planned, there is sometimes an additional delay as they have to complete another project that arrived earlier than expected. Of course, they are prepared and capable of handling multiple fulfilments at the same time, but these obstacles make the planning of personnel and workload challenging. 

Okay, but what about the time in between? 

Most of the fulfilment centres we work with also support our webshops from where we fulfil orders continuously. They also handle the storage of our stock. Some of them also fulfil replacement orders, which are handled completely separately from webshop and campaign order fulfilments, as they require a different approach. To be precise, they need to dig up a box and find the exact piece someone needs. 

Direct-to-customer orders are only a part of the work our shipping partners do for us. They also handle larger, B2B orders shipped to distributors and retailers. They assemble the pallets that are then picked up by the distributors or shipped directly to them. These are the games you find in your local board game store or webshop. 

We regularly attend conventions both in Europe and the United States. Our reusable furniture is also stored in our partner’s warehouse. We arrange the shipment to the convention centre for both booth furniture and stock. 

All in all, the whole operation wouldn’t be possible without them. While we are a tiny company in comparison to other actors in the board game industry, we have a wide web of operations internationally to be able to distribute our products after crowdfunding campaigns. It is hard to find reliable partners, and we had to make difficult decisions many times to make sure we continue to improve our services. It might be frustrating when a mistake is made, something is missing from an order, or a package is damaged. We kindly ask you to keep in mind that people are working hard to send out thousands of games in a very short amount of time. And, of course, if you still encounter an issue, you can always contact us, and we’ll get to the bottom of it!