Getting plastic toys for games made: Moulds

>>The reason that I ask is that I'm curious about the process of getting to use premade pieces for a published and promoted game. Did you have to jump through any hoops to be able to use those figures in your product? Was it necessary to work out any sort of deal with the owner of the original molds?<<

We produced a WW! variant of Risk where we used 150 count bags of small army men (appox 15-20mm or so), two in each game. In theory, yes, we should have negotiated the rights to use them in our game. Weather that would have been a difficult or expensive process would depend entirely on the company, but remember any company to be mass producing that sort of thing is going to be a larger company and will tend to think in larger dollar amounts.

We didn't actually negotiate the rights. These were little dollar store items that were manufactured in China. However, when I first saw them i noticed they were knock offs of little army men sets that I had owned as a kid that generally had not been produced for a long, long time. Upong doing some research we found the original owners had gone belly up long ago and could find no record of sale. No...it could be the company in China is now the legitimate owners...they were producing what is likely millions of these play sets since each christmas season they would ship hundreds of sets to each dollar store in a 7000+ store chain. But investigation of the company showed they were not an actual intellectual property type toy manufacturer such as a Hasbro or a Mattel, who have games produced and work hard at branding their properties. They were a plastics manufacturer who had several divisions, one of which focussed on castings for toys and such. They proved utterly impossible to contact. The impression we got was they shopped the idea to the dollar store, which they probably already did huge shipments to their distribution centers on behalf of their clients. They made knock off molds and just started production and they themselves did not even have the rights. They probably stayed with the original company that went belly up 1+ years ago.

We had trouble getting them because they were only produced seasonally for the christmas shopping season and only sold through one chain of dollar stores. When their stocks for the season would come in and we found out we would go in a buy out several stores worth of inventory. We're finally dropping the product from our in print status in a month or two as the last of our remaining inventory sells out.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com