How to Make a Sustainable Board Game: A Step-by-Step Guide

We’re honoured to have won the Green Games Guide Award for Sustainable Product Design for 2026. We want you to feel empowered to design a sustainable board game too and here is our step-by-step guide on how to do it. 

Quick summary: Sustainable board game design means starting at the concept stage, not bolting it on later. It comes down to three things: (1) deciding your cost/quality/time trade-offs upfront, (2) designing components around sustainable materials from the start alongside your design of artwork and mechanics to avoid defaulting to plastic, (3) choosing a manufacturer willing to be innovative and creative with you.

1. Start With Concept, Not an Afterthought

From your first idea of your game and its mechanics, theme and design we invite you to think about sustainability. It is infinitely harder to impose sustainability later on than to design it in from the beginning. As Figure 1 shows, the longer you leave designing in sustainability, the more expensive those changes become.

From the start you need to think about three things: cost/quality/time. There will always be a trade-off between them. If you need to make something quickly then you might have to pay more or reduce the quality. If you want to make something high quality then it may cost more. Decide what is most important to you and in which area you can be more flexible.

When designing Kavango, we didn't want to compromise on quality of the product or cost to the consumer so we had to spend a lot more time on the design to achieve the results we wanted within the same price and quality bracket.  A couple of key examples in Kavango are the card trays and the box sleeve which were both designed as sustainable alternatives to components that would usually be made from plastic. It took a lot of iteration and teamwork with our manufacturer, Panda, to get these right but we are very pleased with the end result.

We feel that sustainable products need to compete directly with the alternative in both cost and quality. Only then will we start to shift the powerful systems that are driving our consumption patterns. Hopefully this blog will help you save on the time-element of the cost/quality/time triangle if you come to the same conclusion as us!

Figure 1: Evolution of the sustainability impact, of the possibility of influencing it, of the cost of design change and of the actual design effort with a traditional design process and with an integrated design process over the different stages of a construction project (Mathern, 2019).

2. Choosing Sustainable Materials

We suggest you have a collection of sustainable materials and components in your mind, ready to draw upon, when you are designing your game. There is so much that can be done with paper and cardboard, they are amazing materials. They are so versatile, can be made from recycled materials and failing that can be sourced sustainably.

Cardboard (greyboard) - think punchboard sheets, player boards, and the box - is often made from ~80% recycled materials and is a great option because it can do so many things: from tokens, to inserts, to complex dice towers. You can check with your manufacturer that the cardboard components are made using recycled greyboard.


Other components can be made from recycled materials too. For example the deck of cards for our upcoming game, Scavengers, is made from 100% recycled materials! It’s a little more expensive than the common card stock but we think it’s important.

If your component can’t be made from recycled materials, then the next best option is to use FSC-certified paper/card/wood. Ideally the whole game should be a combination of recycled materials and FSC materials. We would really encourage you to take a strong position on FSC certification. Anything that isn’t FSC certified uses paper or wood from unsustainable sources and is contributing to deforestation.

It is helpful to group your game into the following component parts and use the Green Games Guide to help you make decisions on materials:

1. Gameplay components 
2. Boards 
3. Box
4. Box organisation 
5. Box protection and packaging

Think about the specifics of what you need and then use the Green Games Guide as your reference on which materials you can select from. Thinking this way frees up a lot of creativity in the mind.

I learned this way of thinking when I became vegetarian 12 years ago. I was encouraged to avoid thinking "I need to make dinner" because then all of my historic habits of what I've consumed for dinner my whole life will say "meat" and will block my creativity. Instead I was invited to think about the kind of meal I’d make, i.e. pasta, curry, soup, salad. Once I started thinking like that, it became easy to see the ways to swap out the meat for a vegetarian alternative. The same logic applies to changing any established habit or way of thinking and it applies to board game design too and helps us become plastic-free!

A great example of sustainable innovation within board games lately is re-wood. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s made from recycled wood and resins and can make incredible 3D pieces. If you need 3D miniatures for your new game, try thinking from the outset about how you can make these using re-wood rather than plastic. Or could you even make them as 2D laser-cut pieces instead?

3. Finding the Right Manufacturer

Find games that have been made in the way you want your game to be made and see who manufactured them, they may already be very comfortable with sustainable board game manufacturing. Don't be afraid to push your manufacturer to be innovative and explain that this is vital to you from the start. A good manufacturer will be able to make your product the way you need it made, without hassle or issue. Remember we are making board games here, not cars. In the world of manufacturing, what we are doing is relatively simple and all is within the realms of possibility.

FAQ 

• Does sustainable board game manufacturing cost more? It can but good design massively reduces the cost. Our paper sleeve for Kavango costs more than shrink wrap, for instance, and we absorb that cost rather than passing it to customers. We believe sustainable products need to compete directly with the polluting alternative on both cost and quality and that people shouldn't be penalised for doing the right thing. We've still made Kavango cost-effectively, which proves it's possible.
  
  
• What materials should I embrace when designing a board game? Recycled paper, card, and punchboard where possible, and FSC-certified paper, card, punchboard, and wood everywhere else. Starting with this list before you finalise your components gives you creative boundaries to design within, rather than defaulting to plastic because it's the easiest option.
  
  
• How do I find a manufacturer that will work sustainably? Start with a game that's made the way you aspire to make yours, and find out who manufactured it. If you don't have one in mind yet, visit your local board game café, browse what they stock, or ask staff for recommendations.
  
  
• Can small/independent publishers realistically do this? Yes, absolutely. We genuinely started from zero with Kavango. We had no board game industry contacts, Matt was teaching himself to draw as we went, we didn't have a mentor or anyone to talk to about it. For a long time, Instagram wouldn't even let us post content because of different licensing rules in Botswana! We came at it completely new and from scratch. The Green Games Guide helped us loads and now we want to share what we've learned to help you too. 

This should be enough to get you started and we can share more if you let us know what you're interested in. Please drop us some comments below if you found this helpful and if you have any other questions. You can also always reach out to us through our website contact page if you want some more advice and we are very happy to help.

Dream big, don't limit yourself and good luck! If we can do it with zero board game industry knowledge, contacts or experience, you can absolutely do it too. 

Thanks for reading! 
Zara & Matt 


References:
Mathern, Alexandre. (2019). Sustainability-, Buildability- and Performance-driven Structural Design. 10.13140/RG.2.2.24712.16643.