Thornhenge

WinGo is a printer specializing in board games in Huizhou, China. Starting as a general printing company in 1992, they transitioned to a board game focus in 2003.

The company is headed by Leon. He works alongside a half dozen graphic designers and businessfolk in the corporate offices, tidying up game graphics for printing and making sure the numbers work. The location of this building gives WinGo one of its advantages that Leon is happy to sell to customers: Lodged in an office building otherwise full of import-export firms, WinGo has an easier time than most slipping a dozen games onto a pallet to here or there without paying an arm and a leg for the privilege. If you want to ship just a few games to Europe, just a few to Australia, and so on when your print run is done, WinGo has stronger connections than most to make the economics of small-batch shipping less painful than it would otherwise be.

Across town, the magic happens in a two story factory building. On the first floor big-box printing happens: Packaging for large screen TVs and the like. Most of this part isn’t game printing, but the die cutters live here, as do some of the card finishing machines.

Heading up to the second floor, we saw the serious business of game making: The offset printer, boxworks, lamination machines, and the wing of hand-work tables.

The games WinGo was working on while I was there were card-heavy, so I took the chance to document the card creation process while it was all laid out between a couple different games.

Cards start their life as poster-sized sheets of cardstock, (i.e. extra-heavy paper) that goes through an offset printer the same as labels and rulebooks. It gets printed on both sides. With a typical sized sheet and typical sized cards, you can fit two poker decks worth of cards to a sheet: 10 columns by 11 rows. A couple slots may be set aside for printer’s guides, for something like 108 cards to the sheet at the end of the day.

If the cards are going to receive a special finish, like a linen finish or poker-oil coating, this happens while they’re still in uncut sheets.

If cards are being made by double cutting, which is what most non-card-specialists have the tools to do in-house, the sheet of cardstock then gets sliced into strips and rows.

The piled up stacks of cards, still square-cornered and larger than the final size, are loaded onto a double-cutter. Here they get pushed through a hefty bladed window that lets only of the center of the card through. The outer border of the card is left behind on the other side of the double cutter, where a second blade cuts it in half so it can fall away or be scooped out by the worker running the press.

Another step of the process WinGo showed me in more detail than I’d seen previously was the die-(cut)-tooling. Off to one side of the factory, WinGo had a die-cutting workshop, were a single engineer stood in meditation over a print plan, figuring out how he was going to tackle this one. He didn’t seem to mind as I swept around the room, grabbing photos of each step of the die-tooling process.

In Summary, Strengths I Saw in WinGo:

• WinGo’s offering to take over more of the work of game distribution, getting small batches of your game to remote corners of the world bears exploration. Kickstarter has opened the need to get small batches out of a printing to remote locations in the world, and WinGo wants you to know they can help with that.
• Back at the corporate offices I saw WinGo graphic designers doing parts layout pre-press for customers. If you’d rather be hands-off in how your punchboards and parts fit together, WinGo has demonstrated a willingness to take this part of the work off your hands.

Things to pay extra attention to when dealing with with WinGo:

• One thing that publishers stressed when I was going into these tours was that they wanted to hear about game drying and curing. Did this factory or that factory have a drying room? There are persistent horror stories running around among publishers whose products warp after printing. More grisly are the tales of whole batches of moldy games after the floods a few years back. So I had to grill Leon a bit when he said that he didn’t have a drying room. At all. Didn’t need one. Leon insists that game warping isn’t about drying and curing, it’s about the quality of your greyboard stock and your glue selection when laminating the labels onto the boards.

Notes from WinGo:

I offered every printer the chance to comment on or correct their review before it was released. Leon had this to say:

• Regarding our corporate offices. It’s for not easily in touch with shipping company only. Firstly, this head office ( including marketing, showroom, Quality inspection, product development, art design) can work independently. It’s a help for management including quality control. independent of office can driving our team focusing on board game development & production etc all around the board game.

  And it’s providing by local government free of charge. They are encourage company like WinGo to doing well business on their scope then can pay more tax. Sorry for misunderstand on this point!

• Regarding game component drying. Sorry for confused here. That material quality & glue are very important to keep the playing board or other component won’t warping / moldy. But I have mentioned all gray board material from raw-material supplier was dry up before delivery to WinGo. The raw-material supplier’s drying room & equipment are more professional than a simple drying room with some heaters inside.

  And then WinGo just cut it and laminating the surface printed paper on outside of the gray board. This technology are more reliable than final component put into drying room then keep 7-12days. It will have other chemical reaction appear. We used same method before but this is not scientific method. I guess we had delivered more than two million games to global market. So far, this problem are under control!

• Leon also noted that he hadn’t shown the Computer to Plate printing during the tour, and provided the photos below, of that part of the factory.

P.S. Looking for a job?

Like most Chinese printers I toured, WinGo had ambition to overtake Panda. Leon had identified North American & native English representation as one of the keys to Panda’s success, and he’s looking for a U.S.-based representative for his company now.

Panda Game Manufacturing of Shenzhen, China has earned a place as the go-to printer of the Kickstarter publishing community. With a winning combination of a eurogame-level focus on quality going into pre-press, and native English speakers in their Vancouver corporate office acting as the go-betweens to the factory in Shenzhen, they’ve carved out a place for themselves that’s made them the up and coming big printer alongside eurogame old-guard Ludofact of Germany.

Starting in Panda’s showroom, I was first impressed by how many of the games I’d played and loved had been printed there. It’s an impression that would be repeated as I was lead about their printing floors, seeing time and again games that I had enjoyed in reprint, and new games from Kickstarter campaigns that I’d gotten excited by and backed. And then there was my first game, “Lyssan” on the showroom shelves, which they’d printed just the year before.

Panda, founded in 2007, grew out of the Shenzhen Bofung Printing Group. Bofung dates back to the early 1980’s. In just 6 years, Panda has already expanded to supply a majority of their parent company’s work. The key to Panda’s success may come down to two things: Native English speakers at the corporate offices in Vancouver who make dealing with Panda easy for publishers. That, and a focus on quality. Panda starts with the assumption that you want to print your game at a quality level to equal or surpassing the expectations of the eurogame market.

Like other large boardgame printers I toured, Panda works with greyboard and does offset printing directly. They’ll make your boxes, punchboards, and rulebooks in-house. (I’m told they also do card decks in house, but missed it when we toured.¹) For wooden components, and plastics, they’ll be your liaisons. Panda sources from factories that they’ve built up relationships with over the many games they’ve made previously, getting you meeples, dice, and other components to meet your expectations.

One extra step of the game-making process Panda did in-house that I hadn’t yet seen elsewhere is making their own dies, for die-cutting the boxes and punchboards. I had to spend a few minutes nerding out over their laser, which cut the grooves for the blades of the die to be slotted into. A laser table is a great tech for this purpose: A CNC laser cutter will take in a computer file and produce cuts down to a precision of a thousandth of an inch, just how they were in the file, in the board that holds the die blades. These then act as a guide & structure for the blades that stamp out a game’s punchboards of tokens, or the box tops and bottoms themselves, before they’re folded up. Making a die is a one-off job for each pattern of punchboards in a game, and lasers excel at high-precision one-off jobs.

Another place Panda shines is their attention to details that matter to game publishers. Where other large factories I toured might have only a single room set aside to drying print jobs, and that room might even be empty in the summer heat, Panda had multiple rooms set aside to drying and those rooms were in use. Panda’s been around this rodeo many times now, and they know that the final detail of drying the game parts can be there difference between a game whose boards warp a few days after opening and one that stays beautiful.

 

Panda’s Strengths, in summary:

• Games focus: Panda does games, and they’ve been doing it with an intense focus for the last six years.
• Native English speakers: Panda’s corporate offices are in Vancouver, their factories are in Shenzhen. Michael and the rest of the Vancouver team will be your liaisons in the printing process, and will spare you much of the confusion of dealing with non-native English speakers.
• A focus on quality: Panda starts with the assumption you want to make a game to the quality level of the eurogame market, not the big-box store mass-market or cheaper. Dealing with Panda, you’ll spend less time than with other printers going over your quality expectations and component selection. If you’re a new publisher and are asking for advice on component selection, they’ll be advising you based on the assumption that you’re looking to make a beautiful product, and not cutting corners.

Things to take extra care with when printing with Panda:

• When deadlines loom and tense eMails are exchanged between printer and publisher, the folks at Panda will often fall back on reminding you of their reputation for quality, and assure you that if they let mistakes through, they wouldn’t have kept that reputation. And much of the time, they’re right and you’re worried over nothing. But you still have to hold up your end of the bargain. Inspect each thing that comes back from them to make sure it meets your specifications, and don’t be shy about sending back the polite “this doesn’t look like what I sent you” letters when you have to. I’ve compared notes with many other Kickstarter-based publishers, and everyone I asked agreed on this point: We love Panda, but sometimes you’ve got to keep hounding them to make sure they deliver the product as specified, even when they want to fall back on their reputation. At the end of the day, Panda will make a beautiful game for you. But as proud as they are of their quality controls, you still have to do your due diligence.
• If you’re paying attention, you may notice hints of growing pains when printing with Panda. These guys are slammed with work, especially around the middle of the year: the months before the convention season before the holiday season. This, combined with their careful pre-press process means they need a few weeks longer lead-times for pre-press art approval than other printers. They can also command a higher price than most of their Chinese competitors, and have slightly larger minimum batch sizes: 1,500 rather than the 1,000 other large printers require.

Closing notes from Panda

Each printer got a chance to offer corrections and responses before these reviews are published. Michael@Panda made these notes on the review:

• “We have expanded our team to include two full-time account managers located in Indianapolis, USA. This will greatly increase our service levels, response time, and should allow designers and publishers more opportunities to meet us face to face (Vancouver was a little too far from the action). This location was ideal to us as it is in the EST time zone and within close proximity to large gaming events such as Origins and Gencon.
  We also added a pre-press lead as well as another project manager to our team so our pre-production process is becoming faster and more streamlined. The kickstarter explosion of the past 18 months took us a little by surprise and we have been working hard to expand our team so that we can continue to provide the level of service that our clients expect of us.”
• The original text said that Panda contracted out deck making, rather than doing it in house. Michael informs me that Panda is now doing decks in their own factory. The text of the article has been amended to this. I’ll have to bug Cherry and John to show me the deck cutting machinery next time I’m there.

Ningbo Lijia does the printing for a few games you might have heard of: Monopoly. Twister. Recently, they’ve been making overtures to publishers of Kickstarted games and Eurogames.

A quick aside, about the name:

Ningbo Lijia is “Lijia” for short. Ningbo’s the name of the city they’re located in. “Lijia” is their proper name. This is how placenames go in Chinese: You zoom in, from the broadest to the most specific. So saying “Ningbo Lijia” in Mandarin makes sense the same way saying “Honda of Brooklyn” would in English.

If you’ve published before, you might have Lijia parts in your game without knowing it. Several other publishers turn to Lijia to do their plastics, meeples, custom dice, and more exotic components.

From what I’ve seen – and short hours forced us to cut our tour short, so I can’t speak to all of Lijia’s qualities – this is Lijia’s big strength. They’ve been asked to make any number of exotic game parts before. Large plastic boards, metal tins, rubberized play mats, and stranger things.

Like I said, the tour was on the brief side. My hostel was hard to find, but the driver they sent to pick me up persisted and eventually found me. We met at their new corporate HQ – Lijia just moved their office workers out of the factory recently. There was a tea ceremony where the first cup was poured over a frog idol to bless our fortunes together.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I got to see their showroom of games they’ve made. It’s an extensive display.

From there, we toured the first of three workshops: The paper workshop. Here, Lijia keeps their own 5-color offset printer, the heart of their printing operations. There’s a variety of die cutting machines, one laminator, and numerous hand-work tables that follow from the work the main offset printer starts.

 

 

There are two whole workshops I didn’t get to see on account of short hours with Lijia: The woodworks and the plastics workshop. Boo. Most game factories don’t even have those sections, outsourcing their production needs to others. Lijia is usual for having them in-house. Unfortunately, no report on those, ’cause I never got to see them.

An Overview of Lijia’s Strengths:

• Capacity: Lijia routinely turns out hundreds of thousands of copies of mass-market games.
• Component manufacture in house: Pretty much all game companies do final assembly in house. Many do printing in-house, too. But doing plastics and wood in-house is unusual. This, and the long list of stranger things Lijia has sourced for game publishers might be their biggest strength.

In Working With Lijia, I would Take Extra Time On:

• Talking with them about quality expectations, component by component. I’m a big fan of the Eurogames look. Lijia does the bulk of their business in mass market games, like Monopoly, Twister, and others. These games are more optimized for low cost. I’d take time to talk with Lijia component by component, making sure we were on the same page making a games at a quality level that’s going to look right at Essen Spieltage, rather than a game that can be priced for big box stores.

Longpack is a big printing company, with roots in the packaging and book printing business. Now they want to move into games. They point to the expertise, hardware and the contacts they’ve built doing print contracts for the biggest companies in the world as proof that they can handle your next game.

My tour guides at Longpack were Ning Pan and Charles Kong. Ning is a company higher-up, enthusiastic to get Long into board game printing. Charles was a recent transfer to the company from Shanghai General Motors. He was enthusiastic for the chance to bring his industrial design experience to bear on making injection-molded plastic parts for games.

Longpack has been in business since 1999, with a focus on packaging and book printing. They say they’ve been watching the success of Panda for the last 4 or 5 years, and want a piece of that action. They’re coming from a similar background (growing out of an established printing company), giving them many of the same strengths, starting up.

The tour starts in their Computer-To-Plate printing room, where the metal master plates for their offset printers are made. Mostly, this room looks like every other CTP rig I’ve seen so far. One change hints at the added efficiency needed for Longpack’s CTP to keep up with the rest of their sprawling factory complex: They’ve rigged a feed between the plate printer and the rinsing machine. The graphic designer doesn’t have to leave her desk to move the plate from one machine to the other.

From there, we step out into a half-football-field sized room of offset-printing stacks. Walking through here, you see boxes being made for products you’ve actually used. I saw brands of toothpaste I’d brushed with, breakfast cereals I’d eaten, and more. Longpack regularly turns out hundreds of thousands of cardboard boxes for the largest companies in the world.

Also, their printers include longer rigs than the industry-standard 4-color printers. Their biggest rig is a 6+1 tower printer. So it could do 6-color printing for especially vibrant tones. Then the +1 station could add spot gloss. Or you could use it to add a pantone shade, if you had a color that had to match your brand perfectly.

Come out the other side of the print floor, and you arrive in a room of assorted machines to do specialized tasks at a rate of thousands of boxes per hour. They had a couple different truck-sized die-cut machines that could keep up with the rate their offset printers turned out boxes. Another machine for folding together and glueing boxes at a similar pace. A little manual foil-embossing machine nestled between those two.

Actually, most of these machines other than the printers WOULDN’T be used in board game production: They’re specced to work (very quickly) on thinner grades of cardstock than the 2mm chipboard most boardgame boxes, boards and punchboards are made from. To see the machines that are going to turn out your laminated chipboard components, you take a drive to Longpack’s boxmaking workshop.

But it’s good knowing that the machines are there. If you wanted to do something exotic with your box inserts, anything from having a printed insert to a cellophane window, they’ve likely got the tool for the job. Longpack’s wide variety of specialized packaging machines should make it possible to really stretch the bounds of game inserts and packaging, if you’ve got the budget and the will to go that extra mile.

The boxmaking workshop might be of the highest interest to game manufacturers. This is where Longpack die-cuts, laminates, and folds chipboard. In other words, this is where your game boxes and your punch-boards of tokens are made. The machines here are heavier duty. They don’t run nearly as fast as the 6,000 die-cut-an-hour monsters back in the packaging workshop, but they’ve got the force needed to do their job on the 2mm chipboard that’s industry standard for game boxes and tokens.

Side note: What we call “chipboard” in the industry, Chinese printers call “greyboard”. I find their name more descriptive, actually. Anybody else want to swap to the Chinese term for this one?

The bindery is the third of Longpack’s workshops, allowing them to turn out staple-folded booklets (like most boardgame rulebooks) up to hardback books. When I point out that they can do hardback books, as a board game publisher, that means to you that they have the tools and expertise in house for the folding game board itself. The techniques and tools for a hardback book cover and a folding game board are essentially the same.

Upstairs from the main bindery floor and its monster machines is a floor set aside for manual labor, with multiple assembly lines. Ning points out that this is where they’d do the final assembly of a board game. Like other printers’ assembly lines I’ve seen, it’s basically a table with a rolling belt on it that carries the work past. For game assembly, that would mean a worker at each station with shelves full of each component to put in the box. One person might toss in the bag of dice as the game rolls past, another the punchboards, and so on. A scale at the end of the table serves as a quick sanity check to make sure nothing was left out.

There have been smaller manual-work tables near the big machines in every other workshop. Sooner or later, a customer will ask for something that Longpack doesn’t have a schoolbus-sized machine to do at 10-copies-a-second. For that eventuality, there are tables scattered here and there, one for every few big machines, each with a few workers around them.

So that’s the impressive range of what Longpack can do in-house: Boxes, inserts, staple-bound rulebooks, game boards, punchboards of tokens, final assembly and shrink-wrap. Looking at just what this factory complex can and can’t do without shopping parts of the job out is a reminder of the demands that game publishers put on our printers. Even with three giant “workshops” of highly specialized machines, Longpack still will need to shop out many parts of a game printing job: Injection molded plastic parts, vacuum-formed plastic liner trays, dice, wooden bits and meeples. Even something as close to their business as cutting decks of cards they’d send to an outside shop. When we send in the specs for a game with more than a few parts, we’re nearly always actually getting the work of a few different factories.

Overview: Strengths I saw in Longpack:

• Longpack is coming from an extensive background in printing, with the ability to do a wide variety of parts in-house.
• They’re big, with presses that will turn out thousands of prints in an hour, yet they’re hungry enough to get into this business to accept order sizes as low as 1,000 copies.

Things I’d give extra attention to in dealing with them:

• Drying: Longpack showed me a single drying room, slightly higher tech than ones I’d seen at smaller game presses, for their entire campus. And that’s a big campus. I asked them if they had more, and if one room could service all their drying needs during the rainy season (June/July). They shrugged off the question a bit, saying that most jobs only needed a few hours in the drying room, and that if they needed to they could turn other rooms into drying rooms or even get additional space for drying by working out a deal with other printers in town. If your game is going to print near the rainy season, I’d make sure to include guarantees on drying time in the contract, to make sure that it gets the attention it deserves.
  

  Longpack’s drying room, with a standing dehydrator and heat lamps.

• They’re well positioned to get into this business, but they’re really new, and China doesn’t really have a boardgame playing culture, outside the HKSAR. Concepts and terms that you assume any boardgame player (and certainly a boardgame factory) would know, they’re just now learning. I had the pleasure of introducing them to the idea of a ‘meeple’. The idea of mass manufacturing painted 2D wooden game pieces as a standard component was new to them. While these guys have their process and quality control for printing to cardboard down, if you’re reading this soon after I write it, (July 2013) you may find gaps in their knowledge of some components common to the boardgames industry.

 

Edited: 28MAY15: Updated link to Longpack’s new website.