From Tables to Publishing 20 Games a Year, The Allplay Story w/ Chad DeShon | BGSS ep_028

Chad DeShon ran a million-dollar Kickstarter, added another half million in add-ons, and made basically nothing — then turned that wreckage into one of the busiest publishers in board games. He's the founder of 🎲 ALLPLAY, formerly 🪑 BOARDGAMETABLES.COM, and he runs the whole thing out of a limestone mine. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE: 🕳️ The Allplay warehouse is inside a decommissioned limestone mine — down the road from 750,000 square feet of federal documents 🪑 2014: he emails a stranger about a furniture order and ends up selling board game tables with zero woodworking experience 📦 THE DUCHESS lands at $499 against a $4,000 market and funds in minutes — then 25 containers arrive damaged 💸 "Everybody had to get their table, or the whole business just went away" 🎲 He played QE, emailed the designer to ask if he could publish it, and accidentally became a publisher 🏷️ Every review started "this is QE by BoardGameTables.com" — the naming problem that forced the ALLPLAY rebrand 🧲 His pitch advice for designers: whatever is unique about your game has to be in the first two sentences ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔗 LINKS 🎲 Allplay ▶ https://www.allplay.com/ ❤️ Support My Work — Join Cardboard ▶ https://crdbrd.app/ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎧 TOO LONG TO WATCH? THIS IS NOW A PODCAST! 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... 🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033GRnT... 🔵 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/014... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 - Cold open 00:57 - Who is Chad DeShon? 01:04 - His office is inside a limestone mine 03:42 - The founder story starts with a furniture order 07:40 - The first table sells the day after the website goes live 09:59 - The Duchess: gamers touch the table and walk away 12:18 - Cold-emailing furniture factories in China 13:18 - $499 against a $4,000 market — funded in minutes 18:00 - 25 containers of tables arrive damaged 20:20 - A $1M campaign that made basically no money 24:37 - Redesigning the table around the UPS weight limit 27:24 - Dropping table parts in his basement to test the boxes 32:11 - What he learned watching Geek Chic go under 36:19 - Moving production out of China 42:37 - Why BoardGameTables.com became Allplay 46:38 - On Tour, then QE — how he became a publisher 50:27 - Rescuing Container and Through the Desert 56:01 - The nine-game Kickstarter, and what went wrong 1:00:14 - About 20 games a year, and why that number stops here 1:05:21 - Things in Rings, and still waiting on their Wingspan 1:12:27 - COVID, containers, and forecasting the impossible 1:18:59 - Why QE was never re-themed with animals 1:23:51 - Enchanted Ivy, their first solo game 1:30:58 - The convention booth as a marketing machine 1:34:59 - Jibber Jabble at Gen Con 1:42:04 - Mountain Goats Legacy and Sail Legacy 1:48:20 - Rapid fire: one table, one game forever #cardboard #bgss #allplay #cardboard #bgss #dicethrone #wroth