Thanksgiving

What prompted this blog post?  Mostly it was Thanksgiving.  Tomorrow is Thanksgiving 2025 and I have a stack of games, mostly from Spiel 2025 in Germany, that I need to get to the table and evaluate for possible licensing to the USA.  But this is also the first Thanksgiving with my twin daughters, Kennedy and Kiera who are just 10 months old. 

Me with the kids from a couple of days ago.  

This has me feeling quite emotional, maybe because of our beautiful twins, or missing my three older kids this holiday season, or maybe it is because I am spending this Thansgiving in Guangzhou China and I haven't had the time to acquire and cook a turkey like I love to do.  Living here in western Guangzhou further from some western friends has been pretty lonely if I'm being honest.  There aren't nearly as many foreigners here in China as pre-covid.

But I am so thankful for all of the wonderful family, friends, colleagues and most particularly you the larger gaming community that have been faithfully and quietly buying from us since we started in 2008 and since I went full-time in 2011.  If you're interested in reflecting on where we have come from and where we are going, please read on.  This will be a longer post covering a LOT of ground but I feel it is important this holiday season to keeep things in perspective and not let some of the larger bumps in the road get us down.  I hope you will take that perspective personally this year too and remember that in the end the games we play (and the business we are in) aren't about winning and losing, it is about the people who touch our lives.  What a wonderful thing that this hobby/industry can bring us all closer together, even if we are a bit like a disfunctional family at times.  

Humble Beginnings

For those who don't know much about our history, I was a CPA and have my MBA and worked as an acountant for about 6 years before quitting the rat race to pursue my dreams of being an entepreneur.  In 2001 I quit my "day job" and started selling mostly on Ebay.  I sold a variety of stuff from Time Life CDs and DVDs to Rubies costumes to Master Replicas Star Wars nerd stuff to Anime and yes Board Games.  All of this was online and I did that for more than 7 years until July of 2008 when Ebay changed its fee structure from 2-3% commission to around 10% commission.  My margins as one of a million other Ebay resellers was around 10% so my "business" all but disappeared overnight. 

I didn't want to return to the exciting world of accounting so I turned to the single product I had developed myself, the "Yucatan Adventure Board" that was basically a double thick 6-fold board that you could place your Settlers of Catan tiles in and have them stay in place.  Catan didn't have a border around the edge at the time and the game was always sliding around on my game group.  I had 2,000 of these boards made in China and started trying to sell/distribute them. 

 

The Yucatan Adventure Board was our very first product.

Not long after Agricola got really popular and Zman only offered "animeeples" to the first 1000 preorders in that time before crowdfunding.  But the game was a huge hit and this new company "Mayday Games" decided to produce a small animal token set, quickly followed by sets for other popular games like Stone Age.  

This 50-pack of pig, cow and sheep tokens retailed for $15 and was our 2nd product.

I say "we" but really it was just me and a credit card and a bit of a dream to turn this into a real company.  Not long after the "meeples" accessories I got an email out of the blue from a guy named Craig Borden.  I still remember it clearly to this day because Dominion had just been released and it was hugely popular but it was basically 500 cards in a strange size.  Dominon requires constant shuffling and the cards would quickly wear out with all that play.  Craig asked us if we would consider making some card sleeves in this 59 x 92 mm card size because NO ONE else was making them.  I thought "sure" let's try it.  We came up with the name "euro size" for that strange dimension and started producing card sleeves.  

A look at our 10x10 booth at GenCon 2010, our first convention.  We have a few token sets, the Yucatan board and the "euro card sleeves" and that was about it!

At that very first GenCon an executive from Ultrapro strolled over from their huge booth to look at our products and noticed the sleeves.  He asked me if we were planning on getting into "their sizes" like for Magic The Gathering.  I told him we were just a small start up and had no interest in taking on their market.  He offered to "stay out of our niche size markets" if we would stay out of their markets and we shook on it.  Less than a year later Ultrapro was making Dominon sized sleeves and several other sizes followed, so we eventually entered into the larger market with more standard sizes too.

Our tiny booth at Essen Spiel 2016

Ever wonder where "Mayday Games" came from?  It was born of two main ideas:  

1-Serve the community

The first one was that we were the company you could "put out a Mayday to" if there was a product or accessory in the board game world that wasn't being produced that you felt needed to be.  We have recieved hundreds of emails from board gamers over the years asking us to make a new product or expand on an existing one.  We recieved a cease and desist letter from Mayfair games for our Yucatan Adventure board trying to scare us off.  But in the end we didn't use any of their art or copy anything in their game so we were able to come to an agreement.  Mayfair agreed to "allow us to produce the board" in exchange for us acknowledging and stating on the packaging that we were granted a license to produce it but Mayfair reserved the rights to Settlers of Catan.  

From our very first products we were pushing up against the biggest players in the industry, unabashedly so.  The sales of the Yucatan Adventure board never took off, but Mayfair came out with an updated version of Catan that had a frame around the tiles for the first time ever shortly after getting their hands on one of our boards.  We like to think we played a part in that and that consumers ever after have benefited from our innovation.  

2-Get Noticed in the Industry Catalog

Back before EVERYTHING was online there was still printed catalogs/books of all the games and accessories that distributors carried.  It was arranged alphabetically by the 3-letter code assigned to each publisher.  Mayfair Games was MFG and we NEEDED to be right next to them in the catalogs to have any hope of being noticed with our Yucatan Adventure Board.  Mayday Games was assigned the 3-letter code of MDG, directly before Mayfair in those catalogs.  Forever after any store looking for Catan knew to go to MFG in the catalog and would stumble on our Yucatan Adventure Board under MFG on the same page.  Brilliant or brazen?  I guess it depends on your perspective.   We like to think of it as gorilla marketing and thinking outside the box because we didn't have the capital to advertise or compete with the big boys. 

The Outsider

Mayday never really kissed the ring of the board game elite.  Back then the Mayfair execs and some other larger companies were seen as the gatekeepers of the industry.  Not only was I an upstart little squirt, but I was also very religious at the time so I actively avoided the alchohol heavy parties and the bar scene that many other publisher higher-ups used to network at conventions.  I began taking my wife and 3 kids with me to help work the booth and never felt a strong desire to really join in the mixers or rub shoulders with the movers and shakers.  I was all about the sales, the next product launch, and mainly about staying afloat.  I have a family to provide for and to be brutally honest these years before Kickstarter and with no access to capital... well it was a very rough time for me financially.  I can remember going to one Origins in my old Corolla with my then 11-year old son in the car with me.  I still had my full-time job and couldn't afford to take time off let alone pay for an extra night in a hotel.  We drove the 24 hours from Utah to Columbus without stopping and I drove 24 hours straight and then Chase and I set up the booth as soon as we arrived.  Yes, times were tough.

Growing Years

2011 was a watershed year for us, our first two games (Space Junkyard and Hagoth: Builder of Ships) were both pretty bad to be honest, but we got the license to Get Bit and launched that and Eaten By Zombies (a deck builder) in 2011.  It was our first effort at Kickstarter and we were blown away to recieve over $13,000 from Get Bit and over $47,000 in funding from Eaten By Zombies.  We were over the moon and used a lot of the profits from EBZ to bring the designer Max to Essen with us that year in appreciation!  At the time Eaten by Zombies was in the top 10 MOST raised for a board game and it felt like we had really arrived!  Sales were steadily increasing.  

Crokinole

In 2010 my younger brother asked me if I could get a Crokinole board for his in-laws as an anniversary gift.  His wife is from a small town just outside Calgary in Canada, but I'd never even heard of the game.  I told him I could find a good board at a good price, after all I was plugged into the board game community and it was a highly rated game on BGG.  You can image my shock to find that not only was there no crokinole boards being made in the USA or in distribution, but there were only a handful of small, boutique producers of the game like Willard Martin and the Hilinski brothers, both in Canada.  

My son (upper left) playing Crokinole on one of our first boards at a school board game club in 4th grade in 2010.  

As a side note, I recently watched a youtube video where the host was decrying Mayday crokinole boards as being a rip off of other "more established" companies.  He was referencing Browncastle and Tracey boards in his podcast and I think this is pretty common to assume they are the "more established" companies.  But Browncastle and Tracey only started up in 2020 and 2018, respectively, many years after us.

Anyway, back to the story.  In 2010 I purchased 3 crokinole boards from some of the best respected names in the business and sent them to a factory in China to ask them if they could make something just as good and at what price.  We were able to get a board that was what we advertised as 85% as good as a custom board, but at less than half the price.  We started selling them and my brother's in-laws got a much more budget board for their anniversary, but it was our board.  

We went on to produce print runs of boards in 2010, 2011 and 2012 before finally launching our first Kickstarter for a board in 2013. Now we are in the middle of our 9th Kickstarter project for Crokinole boards and we believe this will be our best version ever.  

Kickstarter and Continued Growth

Kickstarter changed everything for us.  It allowed us to start producing games with less risk and to have a greater certainty of how many copies to produce.  We believe in transparency and accountability so we keep a running scoreboard of all of our projects for all backers, customers and potential customers to review HERE.  We have run 52 successful projects since 2011 to nearly 57,000 backers raising nearly $3.5 million USD in funds.  with that many small projects averaging just over 1000 backers per project you can imagine how much work goes into the fulfillment and customer service aspects of things.  We for sure have had some people fall through the cracks but we stand behind every product we sell and invite anyone with any issues to reachout to support@maydaygames.com and let us serve you.

We have made some pretty bad mistakes over the years, and my next blog post will more directly address those, but we pride ourselves in trying to never make the same mistake twice.  We will surely mess up again in the future and to read about us online you might think the sky is falling.  But many publishinng companies have fallen to COVID or withered away and disappeared by being acquired by Asmodee or even more recently several companies have struggled/closed blaming it on the crazy tariff situation this year. 

But we are not only still here, we are thriving.  Over the years we have come to realize that BGG elitists and Reddit trolls are NOT our customers.   The more we read online about how much we suck the more we have to remember that without some push back to that narrative, future customers might one day actually believe that.  So let me just pull the curtain back a little bit on our company and yes actually brag a bit about all that we have accomplished.  

Where We Are

We have had positive growth every year but one year since 2011 when I began full time and our sales are up almost 300% since pre-Covid.   We are also MUCH more profitable than we were pre-Covid and that trend is continuing.  Why?  Let's talk a bit about that.

The Covid Shift

When Covid hit most of the retail stores in the USA closed down for 3-6 months and stopped paying their distriubutors.  Those same distributors stopped paying many of the publishers, us included.  Prior to Covid about 70% of our sales were to distributors while about 30% were direct to customers.  With stores and distributors being shut down and not paying we noticed something amazing, our customers STILL wanted our products but couldn't get them locally.  They started coming to our website and other places we sell to get our product.  During the first year of the worst of COVID our sales switched to 70% direct to customers and 30% to distributors/stores.  

Let's just pretend you sell 100,000 widgits at a $50 retail price and a $20 wholesale price and that 70% of them go to wholesale.  Your revenue would be (70,000 @ $20) + (30,000 @ $50) = $2.9 million dollars.  Now imagine that flipped and you were selling (70,000 @ $50) + (30,000 @ $20) = $4.1 million. 

Those aren't our numbers, but a jump in revenue of 41% is about where we ended up during COVID, doing the same volume.  As you can imagine we had a little more labor cost to ship things out, but most everything else stayed the same.  

The Low Cost Advantage

While many publishers have their product at a third-party warehouse, we have always operated our own warehouse in Utah with our own employees.  This makes total sense to me an appeals to my cheap, accountant personality.  Why should we pay someone else to do what we can do ourselves and then give them a markup for their profit?  I'm sorry but that sounds expensive and honestly a bit lazy.  We would never be another warehouse's most important client like we are to our warehouse staff and we control our own destiny because we have historically rented our own warehouse and paid our own employees to staff it.  

In fact until 2024 we rented what I would call a "barn" more than a warehouse.  It was very ghetto and frankly a depressing place to work.  But you know what? It was cheap and it helped us to stay profitable.  We also fulfill our own Kickstarters and own our own 26' box truck that we have an hourly employee drive out to GenCon rather than pay $400+ per pallet to ship out and back.   

This is the "warehouse" that is more like a barn where we used to be!

We save money wherever we can.  We put all of our shipping on our points cards and fly and stay in hotels on points at conventions whenever possible.  At Spiel in 2025 we paid exactly $0 for 3 rooms for 6 nights each as we just stayed on points.  It is a beautiful thing to be in a low-cost position.

Our booth at Spiel 2025 in Essen Germany

Conservative Finances and Long-term Planning

With the advent of the tariffs we saw many companies that were a few crowdfunding projects back on fulfillment really exposed.  I know of half a dozen companies with multiple campaigns that weren't fulfilled and when Trump's tariffs hit they were really in a tough spot.  We run our crowdfunding with discipine and use the funds from each project to immediately pay for the full print run at the factory as the very first item on the day they send us the invoice or the day we get the crowdfunding funds in our bank, whichever comes first.  

As a result we were able to run our Lifeboats Kickstarter in 2025 at a profit even in the face of crazy tariffs and we didn't have to delay that project due to having other unfilfilled projects hanging out there.  We absolutely hate paying any interest and we have had many years recently when our interest expense for the year was ZERO.  This has helped us stay profitable EVERY year since 2011.  

In late 2022 we decided we were tired of paying rent.  We bought a 1-acre commercial lot and paid CASH in 2023 for the lot.  We had a reputable contractor build an 18,000 square foot warehouse on that land and designed it so we would take 1/3 of it and rent out the other 2/3.  This means that the rent we are collecting will be paying for the full mortage payment of the warehouse starting in early 2026.  Not only will we not be paying rent but we will be operating for free there.  The building is only going to appreciate and the rent is only going to go up on our tenants over time.  This is a calculated move to further reduce our costs verses our competition and ensure we remain profitable even if there are other challenges on the road ahead.   Have a 2-minute tour of our new warehouse! 

Continued Success

One thing we have NEVER talked about before is our success.  We don't need to put out an annual state of the company and talk about sales and profitability as some other publishers do.  We are happy to be profitable and solvent and growing.  Without going into exact numbers let's just talk about that for a minute.

We migrated fron OS Commerce to shopify for our main website on January 20, 2016.  We were shocked to get a notice in early 2025 from Shopify that MaydayGames.com had hit 100,000 total orders through Shopify.  We didn't get the award until September but we hit the milestone in Q1 of 2025.  The accountant in me had to do the math.  That is 12,500 orders per year or 34 orders per day for 8 years.  

 
That doesn't include SleeveKings.com (with over 75,000 orders already since late 2018) or any of our other websites or Amazon or wholesale sales.  That is just direct-to-customer orders.  Shopify sent us a nice metal thing in the shape of a bag to commemorate the occasion which we proudly display at our office/warehouse.  If you are ever in Spanish Fork come by and check it out!  

Looking up Shopify statistics it shows that less than 1% of shopify stores ever achieve this 100,000 order milestone.  We also have 4.9/5 stars on our Amazon account with over 4,000 ratings.  Sometimes it seems like all we read online is negative about our company, so it is really good to stop and have some perspective and remember that 99% or more of our customers are happy, repeat customers.  

Our sales and profitability continue to grow thanks to our amazing team and the work they put in.  We have slowly grown to a decent little company and we are so grateful for your support so we can keep doing what we love.

This is our current team!
  

Building a business from the ground up is an amazing experience and has come with so many highs and lows.  I'm so grateful for all of the help I've had over the years on this labor of love.  I of course want to make money, but I have a real passion for this industry and love our products.  I'm constantly thinking critically about how I can improve our company and working to ensure things continue moving forward.  So grateful for Shopify for their recognition, this is really cool and feels a bit like a "youtube channel" award in many ways.  What an amazing 15+years of being in the board game industry.  When I started I didn't know a word of Chinese and had never been to Asia, now here I am living in Guangzhou with my amazing wife and two 10-month old twins.  Life is really sweet sometimes.

I hope you all will embrace thankfulness this holiday season too with me.  

Seth
Head Jester/Mayday Games