Abstract game with cork board and pushpins — any publisher leads?
I have a board game with a solid ruleset and a clean prototype and I've been looking for an interested publisher for a while now, but I'm running into two main obstacles.
The first is that it's an abstract two-player game — which already puts it in a niche within a niche. But the bigger challenge, in my opinion, is how unconventional the components are: the board is made of cork (my first prototype was literally a cork bulletin board meant to hang on the wall — I used to joke that I had invented the second wall-mounted game after darts), the pieces are pushpins, and the core mechanic revolves around white and black polyester threads that hook onto the pins via small clasps attached to them.
The thing is, when a designer pitches a game built around cards, wooden or plastic meeples, and cardboard tokens, a publisher already has the production infrastructure and supplier relationships in place. With components this unusual, though, a publisher would need to be genuinely motivated to take on a production pipeline they have no existing framework for — and all of this for an abstract game by a first-time author. I honestly struggle to see what would drive that motivation.
Has anyone been in a similar situation and found a way through it? Or does anyone know of publishers that have a particular appreciation for abstract games and are open to working with non-standard materials?
(As a side note: I recently developed a digital version of the game, but for me the physical edition is the real thing — that's what I'd love to see published.)