Well the event happened. So I guess it’s time for a debrief….or maybe a better idea is part 1 of a debrief as I still haven’t sent out and got feedback from my attendees about what they felt about event and what we can do differently next year. So what we have below is just my feelings and thoughts that I processed for myself but are not backed up by any other persons feelings or ideas. And with that lets get into it.
The Basic Run Down
I had booked an AirBnB from Friday until Sunday. The point of this was to replicate my experience at Breakout Con where we took the Friday off and drove to Breakout at around 10am, arriving there at noon and playing games that day and then leaving Sunday around 2-3 pm managing to get a few games in on Sunday. Unfortunately the Airbnb wasn’t as kind as even though I tried to contact the owners several times before to try to secure both an early check in and a late check out they kinda kept passing the buck until they were not able to offer either of those. Because of this I was only able to get into our place starting at 4pm and I was required to check out at 11 am sharp on Sunday which means no Sunday games were to be had and the Friday games definitely started later. So even with this system I effectively lost about 8 hours of gaming over the previous years.
How many games were actually played? And yet again how does it compare to previous years. This was fortunately helped by the fact that for the past many years I have been recording all my plays in BGStats so they can provide me comparisons (assuming I don’t mess up the dates)
| Year | Game count (3+ players games I brought) | Game Count (total) |
| 2026 | 9 | 9 |
| 2025 | 12 | 19 (including a free game we played many many times that weekend) |
| 2024 | 11 | 15 |
I mean I think you can see the problem. We played overall fewer games but also there was a bunch of games lost to what I call the “waiting for others” games. Quick 2 or 3 player games while you are waiting for everyone to get it together to start a longer games. Some of this is explained by the problem I described above. The 11 o’clock check out means that we ultimately lost out on all of the Sunday gaming which checking the same last 2 years was 2-3 games (though usually not at full number of players). So we can basically explain away the larger game plays are due to needing to check out early on Sunday and losing all that game time. However, the loss of the “quick” and informal games is something that requires a bit more explanation. In general I felt that when we were at Breakout there wasn’t much to do other than to game. That was always the main point. We played games and it was all we did. Sometimes people got burned out and they went to relax or something in the room while the rest of us stayed and continued to play games (leading to those smaller more relaxed games). On the other hand sometimes after big games that tired people out, everyone would go into “look at our phone” mode for a good 20-30 minutes before I could break people out to try another game. I don’t particularly see too many issues with this. I mean I get it games are often taxing on the mind and not everyone is comfortable just jumping between complex game to complex game without any break (I’m the weirdo here for wanting that). I guess giving people the ability to do this without making it that everyone is dropping the ball about playing games may be the problem that I actually have.
On the Other Hand…
I feel like the weekend has been a complete and total success. This is one of those times where I have to stop and think about what others expected from this experience as opposed to what my idealized version of this looked like. The other guests got to leave the house, come play some games that we don’t often get to with people who they really enjoy. We got to go out for dinner and grab some awesome spicy wings and other fun food experiences. We got to forget the rest of whatever we were doing in this time, just hang out play games and at the end of it just go home having a great weekend. I can’t be 100% sure of all of what I wrote above because this was my vibe check and what people initially told me. I am more interested in getting some feedback from a survey they I plan to be working on…and oh god does that sound a little cringe. Imagine informally asking your own friends for a survey about a fun little weekend you had, but if I do this again I am interested in making sure that this is something that raises my enjoyment but doesn’t kill the enjoyment of others in the process, because as I have often stated the most important thing for me in board games is to make sure that people come back and play with me again next time.
The Future RamiCon(s)
Like I said this isn’t the end of this and I don’t even really think this was a failure, this was a test run and overall I thought it went pretty well, but it wasn’t without it’s issues. There are a couple of things though that I would like to try.
- Booking the accommodations for an extra day: This is effectively a simple thing to do and I think it definitely helps me with some of my main problems. This means that now Sunday can be a full game day and we can just take off in the early to late afternoon, I feel like we can easily sneak several more games into the experience. The only downside would be an increase of 50% of cost for the fixed costs of the weekend. Though as long as we can keep it under $300 a person for the weekend it is still going to end up cheaper than going to BreakoutCon…which I think is a trade we are willing to take.
- Inviting more people: This is one that I feel would help me with having more of those little games, but also giving some people the ability to have a break while letting me keep playing larger games as need be. This will ultimately let some people do more resting between the games if the experience is a bit too much for them while also still getting to enjoy games. Though I can already see in my mind how this can backfire. The first and foremost is the “lets all play a game together” problem. At 3-6 players people never want to split up and play separately, now the problem is that this often persists for 7-10 players as well. People can usually want to play the same game all the time. This runs into the issue of….not having 7-10 player games that work all that well. Then I may just fall into the same problem but with more people where all 7-10 people want to take a break at the same time and now I have to work harder to get only a subset of them to play. I would also need to figure out a second table most likely but I think that problem would be already solved. But, if I have two games going at once, I am usually the one teaching games. So would I need to be spending more time teaching games than playing them? It is weird, for every problem I can see this solving, I can also see the issue being exacerbated and made worse. And then there is the absolute BEST part of this….I don’t even have extra people at this point that I would want to invite, or that I think would enjoy these heavier board or longer.
- Different locations and different times: OK this is a weird one, but before we were kind of relegated to downtown Toronto for the event. This time we went a bit outside but about equidistant for everyone to travel. I also kept the timing at the same as BreakoutCon as it was clearly meant to be a replacement. There is no reason for any of this to be true. We can have the games at any time during the year, anywhere that is a reasonable drive (2-3 hours) from everyone in the relevant accommodations. Maybe we make it a cottage trip in mid spring, or maybe in the fall where we can get cheaper rates on these cottages without it being too cold yet. How close do we need to be to a center of a town? Maybe if we increase the number of people we do our own cooking? There are a lot of variables to think about here and I guess it would happen on question and potential change at a time. I don’t think I would know how well it worked for many years.
This is getting a little rambly so lets pack it up
I feel like at this point there is too much conjecture about what to do in the future. I need more data on how people feel and what their expectations of the event is because overall I don’t want to lose the people that were a key part of what I enjoyed about Breakout and RamiCon. I need to start trying to expand my board game network to find more people that would mesh well with my group without causing issues and I need to just relax and enjoy some games. So I think we will leave it at this. I may do a follow up post when I get some survey results but until then, keep playing games and having fun!