About me
My name is Gil Hova. I’ve been designing board games for over 25 years, although I’ve only been good at it for like 15 years of them.
For 6 of those years, I self-published my games through my own company, Formal Ferret Games. My best-known games during that time were The Networks, Wordsy, and High Rise.
I don’t wish to bury the lede, so: Informal Ferret Games will be a line of games I am releasing through Print On Demand (POD).
So Informal Ferret Games is your next company?
Sort of but not really, because Informal Ferret Games is not a real company. It’s just a name I’m giving to games I’m making now. I’m not making any significant money on this, and Informal Ferret Games will not be a legal entity the way Formal Ferret Games was.
Wait, why?
From 2020 to 2023, I encountered mental health issues that meant I had to close down Formal Ferret Games. I was unable to fulfill my final Kickstarter for my game High Rise. It wasn’t a happy time.
Thankfully, AllPlay has stepped in to help me. They now own the rights to The Networks, Wordsy, and High Rise, and they will be releasing those games for the time being.
Are you okay?
I’m better now, thanks for asking! But the experience showed me that I can’t run my own business anymore. No more traditional crowdfunding for me.
So knowing all this, why Informal Ferret, and why POD?
I want to continue designing games, but I want to keep it a hobby instead of a job. Formal Ferret was extremely stressful for me, and I couldn’t handle that stress. So I have a few goals with Informal Ferret:
First: Less stress.
I do not want to lose any sleep over this stuff. I don’t want it to take over my life the way Formal Ferret did. And I don’t want it to blow my life up like it did.
Running a board game company these days means dealing with wildly inconsistent expenses, shipping snafus, tariff and duty hikes, and closing borders that change every week, in addition to the regular stress of paperwork, inventory, crowdfunding, and trying to stay in the black. I can’t handle that anymore.
Second: Do no damage.
I’m glad AllPlay is coming through to help all the kind people who believed in me to back my games on Kickstarter. Obviously, I can’t run a traditional crowdfunding campaign anymore—and, considering the point above, I don’t want to.
Informal Ferret will be much smaller, with the idea that if my brain falls down again, I won’t be inadvertently messing anyone up.
Third: Keep creative control.
I started Formal Ferret because I didn’t have an option at the time to make sure my games were made with the level of attention and detail I wanted. I also didn’t want the game that came out to be significantly different than the game I designed.
Truth be told, having designed several well-received games, it’s more likely that a publisher will let me have more creative control than if I was a newcomer.
And it’s very possible I’ll work with publishers in the future on some new games, but there are some games that I think will be better if I kept control, so I wanted an outlet to handle that.
Not on this list: Making a living off my games.
I did that for 6 years. It was really rough. I now have an awesome day job that I was extremely fortunate to land. I don’t need to make a living off my games anymore.
What is POD?
POD is an alternative way to make physical media like books and board games. Traditionally, for these products (using what’s called “offset printing” as opposed to POD), a publisher orders several thousand units to be manufactured. They hold these in inventory and if they are lucky, they sell them all in a reasonable amount of time. But if they order too few, they run out of stock too quickly and lose customers. Order too many, and they will have to liquidate useless stock.
In POD, each product is manufactured one-by-one, as each customer orders it. No inventory is needed. No estimating how many units will likely be bought. No dealing with shipping or warehouses. And from an environmental point of view, it’s way more efficient, as there’s no chance of wasting resources printing hundreds more games than I will be able to sell.
It’s a great fit for me.
What are the downsides?
POD has a few downsides, which is why most board game companies don’t go in that direction.
First: it’s more expensive. Games from Informal Ferret will cost a bit more than Formal Ferret’s games when they originally came out. It won’t be an arm and a leg, but there is a price difference.
Second: the quality is solid, but not spectacular. Informal Ferret boards will have gutters. The colors will not pop the way Formal Ferret games did. Some components may have text and images that aren’t aligned as well as they should be. The game may smell a bit like burnt wood when you first open it, as POD often uses laser cutting to make tokens. It’s nothing awful, but the bar for board game components is incredibly high these days, and Informal Ferret Games may disappoint gamers who expected Formal Ferret levels of manufacturing quality.
Third, and this one breaks my heart: international shipping is way, way harder this way. Anyone outside the US trying to buy an Informal Ferret game will have to pay far more, sometimes double the price. Shipping is already expensive, but losing the bulk discount that traditional publishing offers means that crossing a border will add to the cost of the game, especially if tariffs and duties become involved.
Fourth: No retail presence. This also sucks, because so many retailers have treated me so wonderfully. But retailers get a discount when they buy in bulk, and bulk discounts in POD aren’t nearly enough to make sense for most retailers, at the quantity most of them will want to work at.
So those are the downsides. After a lot of deliberation, I’ve decided that the positives outweigh the negatives.
Can’t you just lower the price?
If I’m selling using a POD manufacturer’s platform, like The Game Crafter (TGC), they set a minimum price to make sure they don’t lose money. So I can’t lower the price to an amount where it would make sense for an international customer or a retailer without buying it myself and shipping it to them, which is the kind of stress that Informal Ferret is supposed to avoid.
That said, if a game I release through TGC seems like it’ll have some demand to it, I will run a “crowd sale” for it. This is TGC’s version of crowdfunding, but it works very differently. The more people “back” a game, the cheaper it will be for everyone. It’s far less risky than something like Kickstarter, because the game will come out one way or another; it’s just a matter of how much it will cost for that crowd sale. Once the crowd sale is over, the price goes back up to normal.
So if a lot of people want my game, that’ll be a way to get it for a little less money than normal. I’ll announce any crowd sales I do as time goes on.
Is there any hope for retailers or international customers?
Retailers could participate in a crowd sale to get an Informal Ferret game at a cost that may let them sell it for a reasonable price.
International customers may buy PNP (print and play) versions of my games at a significant discount. That means you will have to print and cut out all the components yourself. But that ensures that shipping won’t be an issue, because it will be a digital download.
What games will Informal Ferret be releasing?
My first two releases will be Formal Ferret games I still have rights to.
Bad Medicine was the first Formal Ferret game. It’s a party game about making terrible pharmaceutical drug. Each round, the condition you are attempting to treat is the side effect of the drug that won the previous round. The 3-4 player game is a bit more complex than most party games, but there’s a different ruleset with 5-8 players, and that is how you want to play it.
Weird Stories is my one-shot GM-less storytelling RPG that evokes the work of David Lynch, Haruki Murakami, and Jeff VanderMeer. You will tell a story that will not always answer all the questions it raises, but will still feel compelling and complete.
I will likely release new games this way too.
Will you release The Networks, Wordsy, and High Rise through Informal Ferret?
Not anytime soon. AllPlay has rights to those games. They are currently a better custodian of those games than I would be right now.
Do you use any generative AI (GenAI) in your games?
No, not for art, text, or anything else. I enjoy the process of making a game, and GenAI is a shortcut that would defeat the purpose. That’s in addition to its subpar output, using training data without consent, and enormous environmental cost.
I know some folks like to use GenAI to brainstorm, others like to use it for prototype art, and still others like to use it to write and edit text better than they can. But it’s really not for me.
Why ferrets?
Think of an animal with the mannerisms of a kitten or a puppy, but who keeps behaving that way for almost their whole life. They’re the best.