January 2024

A New Website and a New Store

My main distribution strategy for SDG Games has been to sell through The Game Crafter’s online store. This is an easy solution, but the print-on-demand model results in high prices (with low margins) and long delivery times. This approach also doesn’t work for Journeys with Paul (announced earlier today), which isn’t made by TGC (although they do provide one of the key components). At the very least I needed a way to sell this one game, and whatever solution I came up with should also provide significant benefits for folks buying our other games.

When I launched SDG Games, I created a WordPress-based website on a hosted platform. I’ve decided to break my web presence into three parts. I didn’t want to lose the content I’d created in WordPress, so I broke that out with the new address blog.sdggames.fun. I’ve created a new business website. Finally, I created a new store called SDG Biblical Wisdom using Shopify. All these sites are linked together so you may not even notice when you go from one to the other. If you’re reading news about SDG Games (like this update), you’ll probably be on the blog site. When you are learning more about our games, reading the game rules, or using the online scorepads, you’ll be on the main SDGgames.fun website. Whenever you’re ready to buy, you’ll do it through the SDG Biblical Wisdom Shopify store.

I will also continue to offer most of my games through TGC’s store, for those times when I’m out of stock, but most of the time customers will get the same products at the same price and much faster delivery times if they buy directly from me through my websites.

Introducing Journeys for Paul

When I created SDG Games, the original vision was to launch a line of “Journeys” games covering different aspects of Biblical history and geography. However, the high cost of Journeys with Jesus convinced me to focus on games we could produce at a much lower price point.

For the past several months I’ve been prototyping and play testing a game based on the churches the Apostle Paul planted in Greece and Turkey. Producing this game at an affordable price with the components available through The Game Crafter was proving to be a challenge. So instead I’ve decided to source the parts from various suppliers (5 at current count) and assemble the games myself.

Today I am announcing the availability of Journeys for Paul through the new SDG Games website (more on that soon).

Here’s the brief description of the game: The Apostle Paul is unfortunately detained, but wants to hear how the churches he planted are doing. He asks his co-laborers Luke, Titus, and Silas to visit the churches in the regions of Macedonia & Achia (in present day Greece), Asia Minor, Galatia (both in present day Turkey), and the Islands of the Mediterranean.

Relaunching Journeys with Jesus

I originally launched SDG Games in February 2021 with the release of Journeys with Jesus. One of the most important lessons I learned from that first game is that print-on-demand games are expensive. Since then cost and the resulting price have been the key consideration in my game design. About half the cost of that first game was in the large game board and the large box to hold it.

For the past couple of years I’ve tried to come up with a more affordable approach to Journeys with Jesus. The Game Crafter (TGC) is always enhancing their component portfolio and recently I’ve discovered a more affordable board design that also fits in a smaller box which together reduce the cost by over $3. Reducing the number of cards in the game and eliminating the tuck box to hold them (a more reasonable approach with fewer cards in a smaller game box) provide additional cost savings, getting the production cost to just below $35.

The cards I removed were for journeys recorded in the Gospel of John, leaving those journeys described in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), so I also created an expansion pack with the removed cards (priced at ~$13). I rebranded the original Journeys with Jesus as the Legacy version and made the new lower-cost version of Journeys with Jesus and the Expansion Pack available in the TGC store.

I’m also really excited about the artwork for the new box. I’d love to hear what you think of this new approach.