The Manufacturing Game

August 2022

Hello fellow spawn!

THEY ARE FINALLY HERE! After over a year designing, refining, stressing and a whole load of a hard work - we have finally received our first delivery of G.R.I.M. INC. at Terror Toad HQ!

What a different universe the manufacturing world is! From prototypes, to freighting and everything in between - what a learning journey we have been on! The initial mission was even to find a manufacturer and we went all over the world sending emails and getting quotes, we were also receiving so many messages of people finding our business and offering their services!

Finally, after a lot of searching and narrowing down, we found the wonderful Ethan from ‘HS Boardgame Manufacturing’  who has been an absolute pleasure to work with! From the outset he guided us through the whole process, sent us our first official prototypes, dealt with all our freighting and safely delivered 1500 copies of our first ever game to Katie’s mums garage ahem our very professional warehouse (the delivery man was just as confused).

We had no idea about this process when we first started out, and it was great to find a highly experienced manufacturer who knew the whole process from start to finish. I can still remember the excitement of our first prototype arriving and how we raced to the house to open that box! To actually hold something in your hands, that you designed, and there is nothing else like it I the world is a feeling I can’t even describe! Plus it was great to finally play the game with actual playing cards and not just ones we had cut out and wrote on.

From there we got back in touch with Ethan, refined our designed and before we knew it we were sending an email with our finalised artworks and putting our trust in him to print over 1000 copies of something we had worked so hard on! When it arrived, with trepidation, we opened the boxes and counted each card deck and we are pleased to report that Ethan absolutely smashed it - and G.R.I.M. Inc. is officially here!

But now it is time for the real work to begin, promoting and selling this game for this tadpole to grow some legs and wonder out of the swamp!

Look out in your mail, there maybe be something very Grim coming your way soon - and very soon Ethan might be making something a little more… Bananas…

Gettin' Help

April 2022

Making makeshift cards, scribbling rules, and thrusting very homemade versions of a card game on to people to try out is all well and good, but at some point, the very grown-up practicalities of making a product to sell have to be worked around. Yes, we worked out pretty quickly that hours of googling manufacturers and getting quotes would be a good start, but how would we market the game? What’s the best way to make a website? How on Earth do you get it into a shop? And what the hell does it even mean to be a business?

At the start of things getting serious with our game, last summer, we reached out to Business Gateway, and met (over Microsoft Teams) our very lovely advisor Lisa -who has been endlessly supportive and patient with our many questions and queries. The service at Business Gateway has allowed us access to knowledge from accountants, specialists in online presence, marketing and legal advice, along with being a general soundboard for our thoughts.

Through Business Gateway, we applied to the Glasgow Business Support Programme, and won time with specialists to help us on our journey to board game greatness. We split our time in half – the first half consisting of work with Matrix and a focus on marketing. This helped us re-frame our understanding of a marketing campaign, and we were delighted to work with Jamie from Matrix on this, who impressed on us the importance of our customer promise, the tangible, and the financial.

Most recently, and using the second half of our allocated time, we have been working with the company Intend, who we reached out to in search of advice on how to get our product in to shops and in touch with distributors. This has always been something of a mystery process to us, and we are so pleased that Stuart from Intend has been helping us so much already – even after one meeting!

Where all this goes next is for us to find out. However, we do have exciting plans and grand intentions. A huge thank you to all the experts who we have worked with so far. Watch this space!

The Ugly Little Tadpole

March 2022

Well, I guess it is more a tale of three ugly little tadpoles... 

Long ago in the year 2020, in a swamp under the old rotting oak tree, a toad was born. Well more like three little toads actually... 

The toads - Chris, Katie, and Mark - are long-time friends comes business partners to create what they hope will be the most croakingly good-time games company you ever did play, but how did we get here? 

Katie and Mark met all the way back when they were but bairns (Scottish word for children) in a small town in South-West Scotland, and Christ has it been some journey since then. The both met Chris in 2014 when he auditioned to be in the haunted attraction they were creating at the time (we did say it was some [weird] journey!).  

Fast-forward to 2020: Lockdown, boredom, zoom calls, alcohol. We are big fans of anything fun and challenging like Escape Rooms, Haunted Houses, and of course - BOARD GAMES! Because of this we had always talked about how cool it would be to make make games and the kind of ideas we would do - and lockdown finally gave us time to realise that this was something we COULD do! There was many a night we spent from here throwing around ideas, drinking wine over zoom (one time Mark fell down the stairs without spilling a drop!), and just having a great laugh while trying to create an amazing game - and thus G.R.I.M. INC. was spawned! 

Through a lot of work from here, and a lot of learning we finally had our playable copy, ran a successful Kickstarter campaign (something I’m sure there will be a future blog post on) we are where we are today. Standing on the precipice of an amazing opportunity about to order our first game, and with BIG plans for the future, it's going to be bananas! 

Again, we just want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has supported us so far, we wouldn’t be here without you and we are determined to be the most incroakable games company in the world! 

… and that is the story of how three little tadpoles grew into one big Terror Toad.