09-20-2016, 11:37 PM
(09-12-2016, 05:01 PM)ixnay Wrote: I attended a board-game convention this weekend, in DC. It was my first time ever attending something like this -- in all my years of gaming, I've never gone to an actual con. Very well-attended -- maybe a thousand people over 2 days. There were family games (kid-friendly), euro-games in great abundance, social/party games intended to get people mingling, role-playing games, card-driven games (like Magic the Gathering), and even a light scattering of war games.
I met one fellow in particular, who lives in my general area, whose focus is on RPGs. He plays online, using a system (d20?) in which a web server keeps track of all the stats and I guess they play via voice chat and/or text. He remembered the PBM days and was interested in hearing of new developments.
As a number of us sat at one of the many tables and played several euro-games, a guy dropped off a leaflet advertising another upcoming local con. It occurred to me that we ought to have some sort of presence at these gatherings. We ought to have a few leaflets ready to hand out, a newbie-friendly web page to welcome them, and some good games to direct them to (galac-tac comes to mind). Maybe even arrange a live demo of games in which turns can be run by the moderator "on demand". It would be wild to see a "live" game of Alamaze packed into a 2-hour window!
Thanks for the report Ixnay. Attending Origins or GenCon as a PBM purveyor was expensive in 1987 for Alamaze (won) and Fall of Rome in 2004 (won). For Fall of Rome, we had a big booth, a projector, speakers, thousands of flyers, a 9 foot vinyl poster, a life size standup figure of a Frazetta warrior, and you need to fly and put up a couple friends: one person can't do it. And they hit for everything: it might have been $50 to rent a folding chair. It was over $10,000.
So, wandering around and talking to people, just paying to be admitted and sneaking in flyers (they frown on that: avoiding all the other fees) and talking to people playing sophisticated board games is probably the way to go at a convention.
At Alamaze we are nearing completion of a conversion from HTML to SQL, which will have several advantages: for increased versatility with color and fonts and graphics in turn results, and the implementation of the legendary "Ready Button" we introduced in Fall of Rome. Just weeks away. The Ready Button means instead of having a deadline (and in Alamaze, turns are due various days of the week no later than exactly noon Eastern USA and are available within 5 minutes after the deadline), a game can process as soon as all players have hit the Ready Button. Players will choose whether they want this faster format or stay with the traditional deadline in any particular game forming. But our Duel format: just two players on a smaller map with a light fixed fee for a game of no more than 18 turns should really enjoy the Ready Button. But most players accustomed to the old style PBM with 2 weeks turn around take awhile to get used to two turns a week, although there is no waiting for the mail to be delivered.
Even so, I think players' heads would explode trying to play even a Duel game of Alamaze in a couple hours, but 9 turns in each day of a weekend, or for bingers a 12 hour day could be a fun new experience.