Battle Lab: Your First Convention

Continuing our series of articles being reprinted from elsewhere, here's one that originally appeared in the now-sadly-defunct Scrye, talking about what to expect out of your first game convention.

Your first convention

Planning
Conventions can be a great way to get your game in front of your audience. The high concentration of gamers and the foot traffic in the exhibit hall make for a target-rich environment for a new company. If you're looking to spread the word about yourself, setting up shop at a convention is a great way to do it.
The first question you really need to ask is “Why are we going to the convention?” Are you focusing on selling product? Building some buzz around your company? Trying to meet people and show off your game for another company to pick you up? If you don’t go into the show with a solid definition of success, you won’t have much of a measuring stick to gauge your overall investment in time and effort.
One of your next decisions needs to be "which convention?" Staying close to home, or with a friend, can cut down the overall cost. If a local convention is not an option, then try to shoot for a convention whose major events are closest to your core products. GenCon is a heavy RPG show; Origins is a role-playing and board-gaming mix, with some card events for good measure. There are many smaller, local cons as well, and they are often willing to offer booth space to a company at a low rate.
Get your deposits in as soon as possible. The difference in cost can be dramatic. As an example, at Origins 2006, a booth cost $555 if paid by January 10, but went up to $671 if paid at the end of March. For a new company, the $120 difference might make or break your first show.
Finally, you need to decide on your booth crew. Drafting a friend is a cheap way to man your booth. But you need to make sure that folks working your booth are as well-versed in your product as you are. Remember, the customer doesn’t know that your buddy is just here for the free convention; the customer sees a representative of your company behind the table.


much more after the jump!

Yet Another Origins Follow-Up

Here are the attendance numbers from Origins' Homepage.

We know everyone is interested in numbers. This year, we sold 101 more full badges than last year. In 2010 we sold 6,444 full badges, and 2011 we sold 6,545. This is a 1.5% increase. We sold 732 more day passes than last year. In 2010 we sold 4225, and in 2011 we sold 4957 day passes, a gain of 17.3%. Overall our attendance increased by 833 attendees. With 10,669 attendees in 2010 and 11,502 people attending the show in 2011, that gives us an overall increase of 7.8% for 2011.

My question, posed on Facebook, was whether or not GMs and other comp'ed/free badges are counted in those numbers. For example, my badge was free b/c of the hours of programming I was running in the War College. My son's badge was free b/c he's a child (last year he's free! where's the time going!?). Do those count as badges "sold" or are there still more people unaccounted for in those headcounts?

Will update when I get an answer!

UPDATE: Here's Joby Miller's response on the Origins Game Fair Facebook page:

We don't take personal information for day passes so they are not necessarily unique attendees. The badges are unique and include all badges issued at the show as all the badge types allow full access to the show. GMs, Volunteers and other "unpaid" badges do, in Origins opinion, "pay" for their badges with their time and expertise. Origins relies on these individuals to put on the best show possible for attendees and so we place a high value on their contribution. Many of our GMs and Volunteers spend their off time playing at the show and so it is reasonable to count them among our attendees. As for the breakdown of our attendees, Origins generally does not make public its demographic information.

By: Brant

Another Origins Follow-Up

No mention in this article of the confluence of Democratic Party apparatchiks and the Origins game crowd at the convention center on the same night, when Veep Biden was there to stir up the masses.

Apparently the Secret Service detail alternated their time between freaking out over the TerrorWerks guys with their combat gear and AirSoft guns, and posing for photos with the leather-bustier-steampunk crowd. Meanwhile, the suit-and-tie-sheep mumbled something about Origins being the "end of Western civilization as [they] know it". Key phrase - "as [they] know it" - maybe that's a good thing, eh?

By: Brant

Some More Origins Coverage

Here's some Origins coverage from other folks. First, a pretty nifty video of "one cool thing I saw at Origins"



The North Coast Gamers Origins 2011 Recap from their blog (now included in our Grog Game Links!)

And the Pulp Gamer podcast from Origins 2011.


By: Brant

Origins Exhibit Hall

Engage! from Valley Games -- BRANT * Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins Staff Wargaming: Decisive Action (videos)

Here's a couple of videos from the Staff Wargame for Decisive Action


Part of the initial staff planning


Watching combat go down


By: Brant

Origins - More General Thoughts

Some non-staff-gaming-specific comments

- Origins + ComFest = big crowd. Origins + ComFest + Saturday night arena district traffic = big crowd with lots of traffic. Origins + ComFest + Saturday night arena district traffic + the Vice President in town to give a speech to a bunch of Democratic apparatchiks in the same f'n' convention center as Origins = absofreakinlootelystoopdid

- The biggest buzz in the show that I've been hearing is what a train wreck everyone expects Origins to be next year. Looney Labs has already bailed. The War College seems about to implode without several 'name' speakers and no publicity. At least three different vendors I talked to don't expect to be there. And all this during a year when the story should be a resurgent exhibit hall with a bunch of newer retailers and some great new games out there.

- Conquest of the Empire for $20?! It might just have to go home with me.

- A lot of wargame companies in the exhibit hall:

• Lock'n'Load
  
• MMP
  
• Decision
  
• ATO (also selling Legion Wargames)
  
• Ferkin/Columbia
  
• Clash of Arms
  
• Collins Epic Wargames
  
• Grognard Simulations
  
• Worthington Games

and I probably missed someone, without intended to. Oh, and Mayfair, Valley Games, Atlas Games, and others were all selling war-themed games, even if they weren't all true grog-quality wargames (Engage!, Panzer General: Allied Assault, Tide of Iron, etc).

- A lot of unnecessary snarky smartassness about the wargame companies in the exhibit hall that aren't someone-or-other's favorites (paging Pason Jipes!)

- There's a LOT of boardgaming out there now. In '05, when I first went, there was a crapload-and-a-half of MtG, and the Pokemon Nationals were there. Since then, Pokemon has pulled pitch, and the CCG crowd has nose-dived. The minis hall has also steadily contracted. However, boardgaming - all manner, but especially family/Eurogaming - has has exploded, with BIG presences from Rio Grande, Mayfair, Loony Labs, and others.

- Zombie fascination has not worn off. Vampires seem to be declining, however. Pirates are virtually invisible. I wonder what the next "it" thing is going to be. People keep pushing steampunk, and while there's a certain 'cool' factor to it, without a major media license to help tie it all together, it's tough for folks to rally 'round it. Mummies? Maybe, but the movies are a bit dated at this point. Any ideas folks?

- Dad's lecture on arms control inspections seemed to go over really well, and he had a very good crowd in there for it. In fact, he had more people than any 2 of our staff wargaming sessions.

By: Brant

Origins Staff Wargaming: Persian Incursion (videos)

3 more flicks after the jump!

Origins Staff Wargaming - Lessons Learned

This is the longest I've had to sit still and write something around Origins going on right now, so this is going to wrap up lots of ideas, thoughts, and feedback into one extended list of bullets.

- This is hard. There's a reason you have to spend a lot of years learning a lot of different parts of the staff process before you're considered to be merely competent, never mind an expert.

- This is hard. James Sterrett is an underappreciated guy. Putting these exercises together takes a lot of time and effort in identifying the scenario, prepping the handouts and player materials, teaching the basics of staff operations, and coaching the staff through the process.

- Process matters much, much more than outcome. The entire point of this is to learn how the staff is expected to function, and how the roles work within the staff, and to gain an appreciation of how much work this is. That's far, far more important than sitting in front of a computer game just trying to pwn a noob. It's one thing to punch buttons to just take down an AI, but an entirely different thing to develop a plan with other people, arrange all the moving parts, conform to something resembling doctrine, and then execute it and adjust it on the fly.

- In the FlashPoint Germany game, the players were the reds, with the US cav running into them in a large meeting engagement. The players had a pretty good read on the US movements but didn't trust their recon, and then didn't reinforce their recon once they gained contact, which ceded the initiative to the cav. After that, the cav came rolling at them. I'm not sure the players had a true appreciation of just how much combat power a cav squadron rolls out with.

- In Battles from the Bulge, the players were a German unit heading west through the Americans, past some place called Bastogne. The thing they really learned in this one was to establish some graphic control measures, as checkpoints, phase lines, and support/firing positions. It saved the players from referring to "this intersection" or "that town" and instead got them all speaking the same language to locate things on the map.

- The Strat/COIN game, using the GEMSTONE system from the NDU, was - unfortunately - a terribly slow game because of the computer interface. To be fair, we are busy fixing that interface, but we never really gave the players a truly tough set of choices to make to have to sort through the different priorities and figure out what to do. This was a failing on the part of exercise control, in not fully preparing a good, solid set of tools in advance, with the worksheets, maps, briefings, game setup, etc. This one was run a little too off-the-cuff, and it suffered for it.

- I was not at the naval wargame, but from all I've heard, a key lesson there had to be that when you lose the key organizing member of the team, it's time to call off the game, or change to something completely different, rather than try to plow ahead with something not quite fully-baked.

- Decisive Action had a barely-engaged, and -interested commander, which trickled down to the rest of the staff. One of the keys to DA is teaching the players how hard it is to integrate all the different moving parts that are more abstracted, or less relevant, in the other games, such as logistics, fire planning, route/traffic management, etc. However, with only a few players, Snyder took on the fires role, and I had the logistics. I was never even asked to brief the log plan, or offered a briefing on the maneuver plan and asked if/how I could support it. Ditto with the fires. I guess they assumed if the exercise control staff had it, then they didn't even need to think about it. In truth, we did, but they shouldn't've been afforded that luxury.

- Persian Incursion had the possibility to really go off the rails, with the us abstracting out a LOT of details from the game, and trying instead to focus on the air campaign planning. We gave them a variety of initial constraints, and turned them loose. Then the game's designer walked in. Oy. In truth, Larry Bond was a delightful addition to the process, in that he was very helpful when we had some resolution/adjudication questions, and he seemed to really enjoy the changes to his game that we made for the purposes we needed in the campaign planning. We had 5 players, and split them as CO, S2, Current Ops, Future Ops, and Ground Boss/maint-readiness (note to USAF readers: no idea if this is realistic or not, but we went with it and it worked). We threw them some curveballs, but they really took well to their roles and reacted as a great team. By the end, this turned out to be one of our better exercises.

- Unfortunately, with the date change next year, we can't be there as a team running these again, which really sucks. Maybe GAMA will come to their senses and realize they're screwing up a lot of really good things. Or maybe not, and we'll try to find a new home for this.

By: Brant

Origins War College Staff Wargaming - Persian Incursion

Larry Bond coaching the OPFOR... mwuah-ah-ah-ah!

-- BRANT
* Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins War College Staff Wargaming - Decisive Action

Detail view of Decisive Action -- BRANT * Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins Exhibit Hall

Grognard Simulations -- BRANT * Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins Exhibit Hall

T-shirt for LongBlade -- BRANT * Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins Exhibit Hall

MMP -- BRANT * Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins War College - Decisive Action

The team sitting down to plan. -- BRANT * Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins Exhibit Hall

Collins Epic Wargames

-- BRANT
* Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins Exhibit Hall

Mayfair Games (part of it, at least)

-- BRANT
* Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins Exhibit Hall

Blood and Bridges on a Geek Chic table -- BRANT * Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins Exhibit Hall

Crazy Egor's! -- BRANT * Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *

Origins Exhibit Hall

Aerodrome. -- BRANT * Sent on-the-go from the Bayonet Jump TOC *