I should be able to make it Tuesday to Arsenal unless some of my teachers have conferences they want me to sit in. I'll post Tuesday if I can't be there.
I'll be available to run games at Game Preserve Greenwood tomorrow night if necessary.
Thanks, Jeff. See you tonight!
We had another good event last night, at Gamerz in Greenwood.
Probably the strangest thing was that they wouldn't let us bring in any kind of food or drink or all. I get it, they sell food and it's probably a health code violation to allow anything to be brought in, but when you can't even bring in a water bottle, it seemed to go too far.
Once that cold prickly was out of the way, though, it settled into a very fun evening. We often had three games going at once and at my table I really enjoyed the contrast between once group that was demolished by Citizen Dawn, who had 79 hit points when we lost, followed by another group that destroyed her, never allowing her to flip and ending with nearly full HP.
Being at the store during a card tournament was a mixed blessing. On one hand, there were lots of people there who seemed intrigued by what we were doing, but on the other they were all busy with the tournament and only a few could come over and play.
Wow! Saturday's events were amazing.
I hope you all aren't tired of me posting about this. I am about to gush.
We had five, count 'em, FIVE, games going simultaneously at Game Preserve Lafayette yesterday afternoon. I, personally, helped a group of five players, four of whom were brand new to the game, make an amazing comeback win against Akash' Bhuta, and I heard about some other really incredible games, including Nightmist and four incapacitated heroes pulling out a victory.
The most incredible part of the day, though, was once again witnessing the generosity of the Sentinels of the Multiverse community. One of the players had fallen in love with Expatriette, but couldn't afford to buy the Rook city expansion. Another player, completely unasked/unprompted, who had not known the first before yesterday, simply bought it for her. There were hugs. There may have been tears. Brian, hats off to you.
After tearing ourselves away from the mob of happy players in Lafayette we hoofed it down to the Game Preserve Greenwood and had another big crowd, with four games going simultaneously there. Towards the end of the night Christopher started breaking out the playtest decks for some of the more experienced players. One of the joys of playtesting directly with Christopher is getting to see his designing in action, as he will sometimes change the cards on the spot. For Christopher, this is an opportunity to see directly how players are thinking about the cards as they play them.
Again, my thanks to everyone that helped out. We had a number of the more experienced players step up to help run games and help new players. It can be a fine line between telling another player what to do and helping them understand their choices, and as I hear it the people running games did a great job. I want to thank Carlos from GP Lafayette and Phil from GP Greenwood, in particular, for welcoming us in and providing a great space to play.
I hope you all aren't tired of me posting about this. I am about to gush.
Please keep it up. I like hearing how these encounters with the locals go :)
Howdy, I was one of the players in Greenwood (though certainly not one of the experienced ones :P)
I had a great time playing with you, definitely looking to come out to one of the meetups in the near future.
Had a good time playing today and hanging out with Christopher afterwads. It took us over 2 hours but we killed EVERY Ennead in the deck! :)
If I can make it out after work tomorrow night I will see you at store off Keystone.
That stop in Lafayette was excellent, I must say! A great turn-out, and I got some sneaky peeks at Chrono Ranger and one of these newfangled environments.
And, as that NightMist with a dead crew, I had some of my favourite games ever, since nothing tops introducing new players to a game you find fanciful.
Hi all, seventh of eight store visits was today, at Game Preserve Fashion Mall Commons. We had a decent turnout and had three games going at once for a while. Hahnarama has already mentioned the win over the Ennead. I didn't see that directly myself but it sounded great. I spent a good portion of the time playing with a father and his seven year old son and we had a blast. My thanks to Steve (Steven?!) who let us use his game so we had access to the Infernal Relics decks. That seven year old was cute as a button and knew his stuff. Well, he may have gotten some friendly advice from Dad, but he had no trouble figuring out which bad guy he wanted Ra or Haka to hit.
Why wouldn't we have Infernal Relics decks? You mean I haven't mentioned yet that more silly shipping problems (albeit much more minor) have befallen Greater Than Games? Turns out that the shipment coming back from Spiel/Essen has gotten held up in customs for some unknown reason, so the regular playtest games, all of the promo cards, and all of the copies of Infernal Relics that have (A) Left China and (B) Not been sold, were stuck in customs.
"Wait, you mean there are still games that haven't been shipped from China?!" That's right. The print runs for the last Kickstarter were so big that they couldn't all fit in a single shipping container. When the problem with the wrong-sized cards was found, Greater Than Games asked the printer to reprint all of the Enhanced Edition games that had not yet been shipped from China, which the printer has been doing (has done?). The saga continues ...
Thanks again to our helpers. One game night left (Monday at Comic Carnival on Keystone, a bit south of 86th street), and then I won't have an opportunity to play Sentinels again until our regular meetup the next night at Arsenal. :)
Also, one of the perks of arranging a bunch of game days for the designer of the game is, apparently, that they will show you the odd tidbit here or there that hasn't yet been released. A couple of us had an opportunity tonight to playtest against one of the villains that even the playtesters have not yet seen. OH. MY. LORD. This villain is not for the faint of heart.
Blah... I didn't get to peek at the new villain that even the playtesters didn't get to see...
Interesting, does this mean that future copies of the EE will have normal 88mm tall cards instead of the current, 90mm cards? I might have to kick an extra $40 into the kickstarter, and give away my current copy when that comes in.
I'm curious to here this as well. If I could get an 88mm copy, that would help a lot with sleeving, as the 90mm are very hard to sleeve.
Thanks to everyone involved in this. It is my 7 year old that was at the Game Preserve yesterday. It means a lot to be able to spend time like this with my son. We might make it tonight, but if not, we will probably start trying to make the regular sessions at Comic Carnival.
JD
Hey, all!
Whew. It's finally come to an end. We had our eighth event tonight and were once again surprised by the turnout. Three simultaneous games at a comic book store? On a Monday night?! Pretty cool.
For those who don't know, I am on the card 'The Deputy' from The Chairman's deck. We also had two of the people on the 'Enforcers' card there tonight. I believe they got to beat themselves up in one of the games, though it's possible that the beating was mutual.
Thanks again for the various help we received over the past six days. Lots of people let us use their copies of the game to play, helped teach others how to play, helped us set up and pack up, and were just generally ready to lend a hand as needed.
It is kind of amazing to me that after so, SO many games day after day after day I am still enjoying this so much. There is still a lot for me to discover in this game. Sure, I know just about everything in a few of the decks I've played the most, but a lot still surprises me. I played a game against Apostate tonight and realized that I've probably not played more than a handful of games against him before.
Oh, and Christopher gave me just the _tiniest_ of clues about what the next game is going to be like. It sounds _really_ cool.
One last thing: If you're not in Indy and you wish this were happening where you live, maybe you are the best person to make it happen. Send me a private message if you'd like my advice.
I would absolutely love to run demos at the local gaming store here. There's a perfect place for it, but...
1) I've only got one full set of the game, so that means only one copy of every deck would be available for use at a given time. So running more than one game at a time might cause people to not get to play as whoever they want.
2) It's a pretty small gaming store, and I'm sure when they have game nights and a crowd shows up, they're all focused on whatever else the game of the night is.
Maybe I can do something like this once my friends get their own copies of the game (which will be a little while from now; they're getting them from the Kickstarter), and if I can convince them to go out and demo the game at this store.
If you can get your local gaming store interested in the game itself, then you could allocate official times for Sentinel games. The local gaming store could even offer promotions at said time to increase people actually interested in the game, as well as potentially increasing revenue at the same time. If the store is also really interested, they could sacrifice a couple sales and have a store owned demo copy. Much more appealing if the game store has consumable goods such that a large crowd of people will buy every time they come in to play. This is what makes Arsenal such a great place for a meetup, as they love to promote new games, they already have a store demo copy (even though it's just core set, I believe, no expansions yet), and they are also a cafe, thus they can make money off of a lot of people showing up buying food. Gamerz would also be a good place for this, as they are nearly set up the same way as Arsenal, but, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be nearly as much interest as with Arsenal.
That's a good idea. The best thing I can do in the immediate future would just be to encourage them to carry the game and have it out for demos. I'll definitely give it a shot, and tell them that they should carry it, but I have no idea how far that will go. Honestly, from what I've seen of the store, the owners might not be all that interested in doing much in way of promotion. I'll bug them about it, but they seem to be running a gaming store just focused on Magic and D&D players here on campus. I'll just have to ask when they get their biggest crowd, and ask if they'd mind if I ran some demos when there is a decent crowd of people.
You guys in Indiana just seem to have better gaming stores. I'd probably be able to run demos and get stores to promote the game better if I was back in Louisville. There are far more and bigger gaming stores there. I might be able to do that soon. That'd be my better option.
I've been exchanging email w/ one of the owners at Gamerz. We'll see what may come of it.
I'm doing two things in Indianapolis – organizing regular meetups and organizing visits by Christopher.
For regular meetups, there can be a lot of variety in why you decide to get together and how much the store supports it. At Comic Carnival, Tim wants to have a Sentinels Game Day. He is the 'game guy' at a comic store and is motivated to increase the game business. A super hero game fits great. It's not clear to me how excited he will be about Greater Than Games' next game, if it doesn't involve something related to comics. At Arsenal, they make their profit mostly from food sales (as Jeff pointed out), so anything that brings people into the store is good. Bill at Arsenal was also mentioning possibilities like offering discounts on Sentinels merch on Sentinels meetup days, but those are in the early idea stage.
Magic and D&D are both games that tend to lead to ongoing purchases, so it makes sense for a store to cultivate a group of players, because there will always be more things for them to buy. It's not clear to me that Sentinels falls into that category. What probably makes more sense for a game store is to have a general boardgame meetup where players will see a variety of games and then want to buy one of them.
So, does it make sense for a store to support a Sentinels game day? Maybe. Depends on the store. The other question, though, is does it make sense for you to organize a meetup, and, if so, to have that meetup be at a game store. Your goal might be to get together with people you already know and the game store might be centrally located or just a really cool place to hang out. Or your goal might be to meet other people who enjoy the game and provide a welcoming place where potential new players can enjoy the awesome.
To summarize:
Stores: Might be excited to push any gaming or to sell food. If not, probably a hard sell. Might be passive supporters (allowing you to play in their space) or active (publicizing and/or providing incentives.
Meetups: Could be private (just your friends), in which case you'd only do it at the store if it was convenient or cool, or could be public, in which case the aim is meet others who like the game and/or help expand the community of players.
All of that discusses organizing meetups at games stores. But what about getting Christopher to come out to your store/area? That's a negotiation with Christopher, of course, but let me comment on both why he might want to do it and how you might make it more likely that he'd be willing. Christopher is interested in expanding the number of people who get to enjoy his games. They are his babies, he is proud of them and he (rightly so, I think) believes that it is generally a good thing for more people to enjoy them. Sure, sales are important to enabling him to keep doing what he loves, but the driving factors are (A) Expanding the number of people who know about the game, and (B) Getting people even more excited about the game (in part so that they'll tell others about it).
So, Christopher is more likely to show up at events where:
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More people will be in attendance – lots of people at the same event/store (GenCon) or lots of events in the same trip (Indianapolis' eight events)
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It's inexpensive to attend in terms of both time and money – Christopher can drive to it, has a free place to stay, etc.
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It's going to be easy and fun – you're doing all of the organizational work and Christopher just has to show up; you are a trustworthy, dependal, pleasant person who's not going to ask all sorts of annoying questions or otherwise be antisocial.
That was fun to write down. If anyone's thinking of organizing something, I'd love to hear about it.
Good advice, thanks, really.
Of course, I realize there's not even a little chance to make a huge splash here in Bowling Green, but once the winter semester starts here and I'm back in Louisville... That might be a different story. I know for certain there is a gaming store downtown that has regular gaming days, and in fact, there's one this weekend. I'm gonna brave it on my own and hope to meet a few people and get them interested in the game.
Once I'm in Louisville for my winter break, I'll probably return to that store more frequently to see if more people will be interested, and this place seems very likely to want to carry the game. I'm definitely up for giving this a shot. Heck, maybe I can stir up a few more kickstarter backers before it's over. But either way, I'd just like to plant a seed back home, and maybe it'll grow by the time I make it back there to stay a while.
Of course, I don't expect to make it to a point of spending a whole weekend bouncing around stores and demoing the game. But I am hoping to get to a point where I can make it to some stores every weekend I'm there and make a some buzz about the game. Let's hope my one single set of Sentinels can handle so much work...