Sustainable Game Production with Ben Hammer (We All Take from the River)
If you’ve read some earlier blog posts, you might know I’m very interested in producing the physical copies of my RPGs as sustainably as possible. I recently met Ben through our local game design group, Designed in the DMV. His game We All Take from the River is a 1-5 player board game of environmental policy, inspired by real river ecosystems. Board game production has many more steps than RPGs, so I thought I could learn a few things from him that might be useful when making future games. He kindly agreed to be interviewed for my blog.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lyme: To start with, do you have a background that was useful for making a game sustainable? Where did you go to find information?
Ben: My background was in policy. I worked as a Congressional reporter for a while, and then I moved on to a very strange job doing state website tax analysis. A lot of the design of the game was based on things I had learned while working in policy and my knowledge in general. A lot I learned online – Jamey Stegmaier has a great blog. I ended up picking Panda for my game manufacturer because they made Wingspan. I was like, “here’s a known, reliable manufacturer.” I got a couple quotes from an American manufacturer, but manufacturing in America was three times the price. I might use them in the future, maybe for a card game.
Lyme: Was there anything you did in the design of the game itself to make it more sustainable?
Ben: No plastic. This was the design from the get-go. I tried to make the game so the game would have no plastic parts. I looked at other games and went, “what are the pieces in other games I would like to have in my game.” So the tokens are painted wood, wood with UV light images put in them. The card, the punch board tokens– none of them are little plastic figurines. From the start I was telling the factory, don’t shrink wrap anything, don’t put anything in plastic baggies, don’t use any plastic in this game.
Panda promised me no plastic. The reality is there is plastic in this game, it’s just less obvious. The inks they use in their game have plastics, the coatings have plastics. The way I know it is these guys called Earthborn Rangers made a nonplastic game. It looks very different and interesting – it has a lot of brown paper. Also, I thought about making a legacy game, but that’s a one-time use product, so it wouldn’t be sustainable.
Lyme: Did Panda push back at all?
Ben: No, not at all. They didn’t push back at all. They didn’t say “we have to use plastic.” They did forget sometimes. A lot of the prototypes they sent me used shrinkwrap. I wanted them to use stickers instead.
Lyme: Why stickers and not shrinkwrap?
Ben: Normally a game is wrapped in shrinkwrap so you can tell it’s all together. Instead of that, I used two paper stickers to seal the lid.
I actually ran into a problem with that when I got the proof copy. It showed up wrapped in shrink wrap instead of stickers. I called up Panda and said, “What are you doing, I said no plastic many times?” They were apologetic and said the people in the factory probably just instinctively wrapped it in plastic. Then I wasn’t able to verify how well the stickers would work. If the stickers broke in transit, the game would fall apart, and that wouldn’t be sustainable. It turns out the stickers worked okay, but they’re just plain white, which is disappointing. I wanted them to be colorful. I got complaints from people who were upset that they were difficult to take off. It’s really hard to peel off a sticker. I just cut them open, but then you have plain white stickers covering the artwork on the box. If they had had imagery on them, that would have been fine.
Lyme: Were there any other challenges you faced?
Ben: I would say the biggest issue is the shipping. When you’re talking about making a sustainable product, no matter how sustainable the board game is, I had it made in China. It was shipped over in a big freight ship. The freight carrier was going to make that journey anyway.
Lyme: Actually, I think freight ship is one of the most efficient ways to move cargo. They use a lot less fuel per pound and per mile than a plane, truck, or train. It’s because moving a ship on the water takes less energy than rolling a vehicle on land, there are efficiencies of scale, and they go slowly to save fuel. I couldn’t take advantage of that for my game because you need a full pallet of goods to put them on a ship. RPG books take up a lot less space than games boxes, so even my full print runs didn’t take up that much space. It’s also a shame you can’t travel to Europe on a passenger ship anymore – if you want to go by ship you have to take a cruise liner, which ends up being less efficient because it’s also a luxury hotel and not just a way to get there. Sorry for the rant.
Ben: Even if freight is an efficient way to move packages, it’s still silly. Someone in Japan bought a copy. It was taken on freight from China to New Jersey and then mailed from New Jersey to Japan, because that’s the most cost-efficient way to do it. Same way for anyone who bought it in Europe. Same on the West coast, it skipped over the West Coast. So, really inefficient paths for every individual game. Which, maybe if you look at logistics, might be more efficient, but it feels very silly to me.
Lyme: You used a distributor in New Jersey?I used a distributor in NJ called Fulfillrite, and they’ve been very good, they’ve been great.Was there anything Fulfilrite did that attracted you?
Ben: They did not use plastic, by default. They use cardboard, and they crumple paper instead of using plastic peanuts. But what was best about Fulfilrite was they had great customer service. Every time I reached out to them, there was one point of contact who cared.
Lyme: I have a theory that any time you work with a business that prioritizes sustainability, you’re more likely to be working with people who care about what they do instead of just punching the clock, and even the things that have nothing to do with sustainability will be better.
Ben: Yeah. And I think because they know you’re putting in a little extra, because it is a little more expensive, they try to be a bit nicer to make up for that.
Lyme: Tell me about the certifications you looked for.
Ben: There’s a standard one. Panda had already set it up and offered it. It’s FSC, the Forest Stewardship Council. I kind of took that at face value, and said this is what I have.
Lyme: Any other thoughts on sustainable production?
Ben: I’ll open up a new game and every single part will have its own plastic bag. I can sort through that. You don’t need to put every piece in its own bag. When you get We All Take from the River, there’s lots of different pieces, and they all come in one big wax paper bag. Nobody’s complained about that yet. To me, that’s just way better. Why should all the red excavators have their plastic bag, and all the blue excavators have their plastic bag? To me that’s just stupid.
Lyme: Is wax paper a good replacement for plastic bags?
Ben: I think you would want a cotton bag for that. Wax paper fulfills the function of holding something, but once you open it, it’s very hard to reseal. It’s very functional for just game packaging, but not as functional for reuse. My solution for that was I just put a very simple cubby design, a cardboard insert in the box with six cubbies. If you put the pieces in the cubbies and just close the box, it should hold well enough. It will rattle around a little, but it won’t spill. But I think for a lot of people, that’s enough. Making inserts is hard, if you want to do it not out of plastic. Most of the really nice inserts you see are made out of 3D printed plastic or molded plastic. It’s expensive to have a really nice cardboard insert.
Lyme: So you paid for a really nice insert?
Ben: No, I paid for a super simple cardboard insert. An example of a fancy one is the game Mycelia, which came out recently. I think there are two games called Mycelia. At any rate, it has a molded cardboard insert that has a slot for every token. It makes everything fit together really nicely. It’s impressive work, it’s a really nicely designed insert, but I don’t think it’s necessary for We All Take from the River.
Lyme: Let’s talk about cost. How much more do you think sustainable practices added to the cost of the game?
Ben: I think 3-5 dollars per game. Which is a lot; it adds up. It’s hard to know, because I didn’t get cost estimates for using plastic. Here’s an example of something else that was a challenge: the game comes with a spin-down 12-sided die that was made out of wood. And making a die out of wood is very hard. The way you make a die out of wood is you sand down the sides in some machine. You can make a fair 6-sided die out of wood because it’s simple, but not a 12-sided die. If you look at it, the faces aren’t all equal sizes. Panda did a great job, but it’s not a fair die. And it doesn’t have to be, because it’s a spin-down die for tracking numbers. Also, they’re more expensive than if I just had resin ones.
Lyme: So that’s $3-5 extra production cost for you?
Ben: I think it could be. Maybe that’s an overestimate. The wooden pieces were a bit of a splurge. Those could have been cardboard, that’s even cheaper than plastic. I think about $1 a game. But having a nice physical three-dimensional piece is nice, and having a piece of cardboard is just not as nice.
Ben: So about $1 a copy. Do you think you sold more copies because you told people it was sustainably produced?
Ben: Probably, yeah. It’s really hard to tell, but I think my target audience cares about that. And seeing the amount of effort I put into it made them feel more comfortable buying the game and more excited about buying it. Since making it, I’ve had a lot of conversations with professionals in sustainability. They like to see I put thought into that.
Lyme: How did you price the game?
Ben: I priced it with similar sized games. I went with an MSRP of $65. In retrospect that might be a little high, but it’s a complicated game with a lot of components. And as a smaller designer, my margin of error is much lower, so since I expect to sell fewer games, I need my margin to be more. It’s actually a pretty complicated game with a pretty long play time for the price. Looking at a game like *John Company*, that’s actually a $120 game. I don’t know their printing costs, but I don’t think they’re twice We All Take from the River. Probably not. I wanted the price to be on the low end so people don’t think I’m gouging them, but on the high end since I’m selling such a small number of games, and need more of a profit per book to be okay.
Lyme: I publish RPGs, which are basically just books. Do you have any advice for people printing books?
Ben: I printed a book as a Kickstarter addon to We All Take from the River. One thing I did was I have a PDF version as well, that is cheaper to buy and available online. I love a physical book, I love having that, but I think particularly for zines - are you familiar with Small Press Expo? I go there a lot. I used to sell there when I did more comic stuff. I had print stuff printed from Mixam.
One of the issues I have is there’s this blended standard for the quality of the print. They love the idea of this cheaply made zine that’s low cost to print, you can fold it or staple it, but I don’t think people hang onto those that much. It’s a cool product, but if something is too cheaply made of a product, it lacks the beauty to keep around in your home. People have a limited amount of space in their homes. I get a zine, I read it and I like it, but I don’t want to hang onto it for long and there’s nowhere to put it so I end up recycling it. That’s where in the digital age, you can just make a PDF. I’m not saying don’t print a thing, but especially for an RPG vendor, people have done very well selling PDFs. That’s kind of antithetical to a growing sentiment at Small Press Expo, because the expected level of the products sold at SPX keeps rising. There’s actually a kind of inflation there, so the little guys for whom it isn’t a full time career are left behind. It’s actually really nice to go to a convention and see these little guys there who aren’t full time, just selling a construction paper zine. But I try to hold myself to a standard, if I’m going to make something, make it something worth owning. At this point in my life, because I don’t like just owning stuff, I’m really careful about the physical objects I buy.
Lyme: The scary thing about PDFs is that in these days – we’re having this interview July 26, 2025 – there’s no trust in distribution platforms. Both Drive Through RPG and Itch.io have had major censorship issues very recently that are still ongoing.
Ben: I am a little aware of that. I’ve used Itch before. There’s another one around, it was a website to use PDFs and then it turned out a Nazi guy was the best-selling on the platform. I run a website. It’s not that hard to make your own website. I’m sorry, that’s rude to say. It is hard to make your own website, but there are a lot of great tools to make your own website. There are great payment tools. I use Shopify. You do have to pay a monthly subscription, so maybe if I had fewer sales, it wouldn’t be worth it. I think a lot of people use those prebuilt markets because that’s a way to get discovered, and I disagree with that premise. I think there’s so much stuff on those websites, you’re not really getting any marketing. You’re doing your own marketing. I think everyone should have their own website.
Lyme: Why don’t you tell me about We All Take from the River, and why people should go out and get a copy?
Ben: The thing I think makes We All Take from the River really cool, is that it’s the only game I know about that accurately captures policy decision making. What I mean by that is that when you’re making decisions about policy, there’s not a clear relationship between players. Most board games, when you go into it, either there’s one player coming out a winner, or we’re all winning this game together. What I think is really cool about We All Take from the River, and what I strove to achieve and thought I did a really good job with, is players win or lose the game separately. It's highly interactive because everything you do affects everyone else. Your agenda is hidden, so it’s a highly realistic scenario where you have to figure out what your relationships are going to be to each other. That’s going to be much more like what policy is like. You think Congress is going to be straight opposition, but everyone in Congress has their own agenda. It’s not necessarily a zero-sum game, it’s not that in order for me to win you have to lose, it’s that I have my own conditions for winning and you have your conditions for winning, and they’re going to collide.
Lyme: Where can people find your game?
Ben: Online at wealltakefromtheriver.com and basically nowhere else. There’s a few other places, but it’s not in many retail stores.
Lyme:I’ve seen it at Pure Panic, our local comic and game store.
Ben: That was a funny interaction. I said to Ala, “I’m a local game designer,” and he said, “Oh, I’ll buy it” before I said anything about it. He just wants to build that community. It was very nice.
Lyme: Yeah, Ala is a great guy. Where did you source your art?
Ben: Oh, I made all the art. I did everything. The only thing I didn’t do was manufacturing and fulfillment. That’s kind of my perspective – I don’t expect everyone to do everything for their game, and I have a background in illustration so that puts me at an advantage, but you can figure it all out. I had to put in the time, but it was really fun.