KiwiRPG at the Auckland games fair - A Post Mortem
Last weekend I had the privilege of running the kiwiRPG booth at the Auckland Cancer Society Games Fair, and I’m pleased to say that it went really well! We had plenty of players, designers, and members of the public stop by and chat about the organisation and tabletop games in general. A huge relief considering that it was just me at the booth all weekend, that I had never done anything like this before and was anxious as hell, and the fact that half the stuff that we were planning on having at the booth didn’t arrive in time (cheers to NZ couriers for that fun little headache).
From this experience, I have gained numerous insights, immeasurable wisdom, and a laundry list of shit that I am going to do differently next time.
There is almost nothing you can’t fix with tape (and Post-it notes)
It is honestly fucking comical how many problems got solved with tape and Post-it notes. People joke about this all the time, but it’s TRUE. Signage? Taped Post-it notes. Keeping boxes together? Tape. No business cards? Post-it note. Need someone’s details? Write it on a Post-it note. Sign keeps falling over? Tape that sucker UP. If our biggest supporter for the weekend was the Cancer Society, our biggest second supporter was the unextraordinary office products of paper plus.
I suffered for my hubris (not bringing enough food)
Every con guide tells you to bring enough food and drink. This is not new advice. However, I am (famously) a bit of a dumbass and thought, “I’ve worked shitty restaurant jobs without eating anything for longer hours; this’ll be nothing,” skipped breakfast and brought a single bag of chips with me. Unsurprisingly, I was hungry as hell by hour three of the first day and, with the only options around being out of my budget, I just had to deal with it. Learn from my mistakes and make some sammies before the event.
They stopped for the pretty books and stayed for the one-pagers
We had a decent selection visible at the booth, but the big standout was Dave Elvy/Imaginary Empire’s games, which had fancy colourful colours and a strong reputation (several people recognised them from a distance). Lots of folks walked up primarily to take a look at them, thinking I was the designer, before I explained what KiwiRPG was about.
Once they did walk up though, many people stuck around to read the one-page games and take some with them. Usually, the conversation involved me gushing about what one-page games are and the design freedom they represent, to which they would say, “Ooh, like Honey Heist, right?” to which I’d shrug and say, “Yeah, pretty much.”
The lesson here is that while not visually striking enough to draw people on their own, one-page games make great handouts and conversation starters at events like this.
People fucking LOVE business cards
We were meant to have pamphlets to hand out with our details, but unfortunately, they didn’t arrive in time. Dale, however, was very clever and sent a stack of business cards with his games. These flew off the table like hotcakes. I don’t know how I feel about them from a wastage standpoint, but it seems like having a solid stack of business cards or pamphlets is basically essential for doing stuff like this.
There’s a lot to be gained by teaming up with other creators in the industry
Talking specifically about boothing together at cons here. I got to chat with a boatload of other creators throughout the weekend, and the one thing that almost always came up was the challenges that tend to come up with events like this. There were two things that were mentioned pretty consistently:
Booths are prohibitively expensive. The Cancer Society were incredibly generous in allowing folks to have a presence at the event for free (only asking that 20% of sales go to the charity), but this is far from the norm. Most cons charge up to 1000 bucks or more to have a booth, exceeding what most small creators can reasonably afford.
Eftpos machines are also super expensive but basically necessary if you want to sell anything. At least in New Zealand, cash is becoming increasingly uncommon payment-wise, and many cons lack an atm. The price to rent an eftpos machine can run up to a couple hundred dollars a day and, if you’re mainly selling 5$ - 20$ zines/books, anything less than a total success will leave you sitting at a loss.
I think both of these problems could be solved by getting a bunch of us together to share a space, possibly as a “KiwiRPG Creators” booth. It’d be a way to enable a bunch of people to show off their stuff who’d usually be unable to.
Giveaways should be dead simple
Before the event, I came up with a microgame to do giveaways. It was fun, sort of interesting, and entirely too complicated for what we were doing. After trying it with a few people, I quickly realised that people check out if a giveaway takes more than two sentences to explain. In the end, I stripped it down to its bare essentials and that ended up being much better. Unless you’re really clever, don’t do anything fancy for stuff like this.
The conclusion
The fair was a good time. We spread the good word of KiwiRPG and made some new mates. Yeah.