Everyone loves convention. Board gamers REALLY love their game conventions. The ability to break away from everything in the world and just play games. With no distractions, no other responsibilities (outside of keeping yourself fed), just playing games with friends and having a great time. Many treat it like a little (or big) vacation, or as an excuse to engage in our favourite hobby within a hobby, consumerism. For several years in a row I have been dragging my friends to the big local boardgaming convention Breakout Con in Toronto. It was three (now four) days of just gaming in hotel boardrooms. Now there were more things offered, there were RPGs, panels, hosted games, many other great things. Though I didn’t really engage with them. The only three things I engaged with them for the most part was the bring and buy store, where I mostly tried to sell some of the games I no longer wanted to own, a math trade where I occasionally traded some things. Lastly, there was a game library where I would borrow small games for when I needed something quick and I didn’t want to pack it. That was all. I never really interacted and played with other participants, I just stuck to my own groups and we played mostly the games I brought from my house. Last year I examined this and I decided….was the convention really necessary for this?
The real reason to host your own game weekend/convention
Yet again, dear reader, I am not being completely honest with you. I enjoyed the experience but I started having a nagging question in my head. Couldn’t I just do the same things just….cheaper? I had already proved that I mostly just played the items in my collection during this time. The cost of the convention wasn’t prohibitive by any standard, only about $100 for three days which seemed very reasonable. Where the costs ballooned is in the accommodations. You see, we stayed in downtown Toronto, so hotels weren’t exactly cheap. Sure you got group rates which helped a bit but there were five of us which was just enough to not fit comfortably into a single hotel room. So we needed two hotel rooms and even then you had five guys sharing four beds which meant we had two rooms that were separated and some people had to share a bed and others didn’t and it was always weird to dole everything out. Not horrible by any stretch of our imagination but not everyone’s ideal arrangement. Lastly we had the food costs, these would exist anywhere but downtown Toronto food prices are definitely higher than your random city food costs even if you include delivery. For a slightly higher price than our convention passes costs you can rent a house on your local short term renting website that has more rooms and a bed for each individual person. It seemed like there was no way this could go wrong!
How it could go wrong
I usually joke that while I am not a pessimist, I am highly risk averse. While I don’t expect everything to go wrong I just think up the worst cases scenarios and try to cover for them. I have thought about this as well. For all the negatives I give above, the lines, the effort spent trying to find places to sit, and all the other unpleasantness that might come with being surrounded by large crowds all day, the convention has one thing that is very hard to replicate. The hype. The feeling that you are surrounded by people who are there to do exactly the exact same thing that you are there to do, to enjoy games and hang out with people while enjoying games. That’s it. No one who wants to be at a convention just sits on their phone on a couch all day, no one refuses to interact with their surroundings and just chill or tries to pull people into things that are not part of the convention when at a convention. Through the implicit assumption that people have paid to show up to this thing they are all there to immerse themselves in the experience.
On the other hand the event that I am planning has not reached critical mass of people and is populated entirely by my friends who in addition to enjoying board games do enjoy each others company just as friends. Which leads to the worry, what if a sufficient majority feel like not gaming? (and a “majority” would only need to be a few people since this is a first test). How can I keep the energy of the event high and enjoyable? Do “ground rules” or other expectations need to be made clear when setting this up? I don’t want to come off as a rules stickler or suck the fun out of the experience but ultimately I want to play a bunch of games!
The steps I am taking
As I noted above this whole thing seems to be a compromise but I am working to “add” some things to the experience. First I want to “build hype” I want people to be excited for this so that when they do show up they are present. It’s corny, but we are creatures that aren’t immune to hype even if it is corny. So I started a countdown along with pictures for the event. Every day I post how many days are left to go along with some pictures about what I am up to. It includes either games, or the nice little poker chips I have, you know just stuff to show off and get people thinking (and maybe even talking about it).
The second thing I have done is build a little meta game to go along. My youngest has a little toy pac-man claw machine with little balls. I am planning to print out little bonuses or random silly challenges for the winner of each game that they will pull from the claw machine after they win a game. The challenges had to be interesting, I didn’t want too many repeats and to have everything sitting in the same category, but I wanted people to have something to play for more than just the enjoyment. It could also potentially end up with stories and memories and who doesn’t love silly games. If this works out in the future I can see myself investing in a little gashapon (or gachapon…depending on who you believe) prize ball machine (which you can get somewhat affordably online as I have since then learned). The other thing in the “a reason to play for”, I have made a trophy for the event. Whoever wins the most games will receive the trophy to keep after the event is over. Yet again something to compete over and have fun with. While the ideas are good, I kind of realize that they won’t scale well if I do end up increasing the number of people I get to come out to this event but the idea was to make this work this year and then go from there.
At the end of the day
I think I have done what I can to prepare. I already have some thoughts on how it is going and what I may do differently next time but I hope that after this weekend I may have a few more of those. I am hoping that at the end of this there will be a debrief post, not just talking about the games that were played but whether the weekend went down as expected. Until then, lets all keep playing games!