Friday, October 28, 2011

Promotional Materials

Looking at the front window of the store, I see a couple of edge lit signed courtesy of WOTC, an edge lit schedule from WOTC and Alliance, a pair of matching illuminated Yu Gi Oh signs and several posters for Magic and d&D including a full length Innistrad window cling.  Approximately 17,000 vehicles a day pass by the store and see these promotional materials in our windows.  Why?  Because these are the only two companies that send up promo materials I want to put into the window and that are large enough for a car to see as it cruised by the storefront at about 30 miles an hour.  The other promo materials we receive, standard sized posters and flyers, does get hung up, but it's inside the store, where only customers can see it.  If you want to get in the store windows, send us higher quality promo materials.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

WOTC Portal Problems

WOTC has changes to a gateway systems for handling email from stores now.  Still in the early session of shakedown as weare having problems with WOTC’s email portal.  It appears to not like the saved password I put into it and, when I answer questions to retrieve the password so I can change it to one it find better, the retrieval email vanishes into the internet either.  According to the WPN customer service representative, who answers the phone quite quickly and is very helpful in resetting the password and otherwise getting me back into my portal account, even on a Saturday evening, it might have something to do with my using an AOL account as the portal does apparently not like AOL email addresses.  Hopefully, the company’s IT people will look into that as I have no intention of changing my email address for the portal’s convenience.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Deluxe Munchkin

Just wanted to point out that Deluxe Munchkin is a limited run version of the game. Steve Jackson has said they are already sold out of it and have no plans to reprint it.  The production cost is too high to justify a second print run. According to the company, the plans are, once distribution runs out of the game, to reprint the board and paws in a separate boxed set, but for more than the current $5 add on to the cost of the core game.  Heck, Munchkin has so many additions now that no one will notice one more.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Boardgames

Would really like to start up a boardgame night (or day for that matter) but we have had little success with one in the past.  It seems that most of our customers who buy boargames prefer to play them in their own homes, rather than at a central location.  Since we are now staying open until 9 on Saturday night, running them later in the afternoon on Saturday might be an option but we would really need someone to take point on them.  Scheduling them in advance in the past, without a leader pushing for them, has generally resulted with a turnout of zero.

In fairness, we haven't done a great job of pushing in store play of them either.  We probably need to schedule them and have someone available to run them when players come in and get them on the schedule a month ahead of time.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

More on Little Egypt Wars

For those interested in more statistics from this year's LEW, we had 115 full attendees. with 26 judges and 89 players, with 6 visitors  Pathfinder was the most played RPG event with 2 tables rnning in slots 1 & 2 and one table at  7 p.m.  D&D 3.5 was next strongest, with one table played in each slot,  followed by FAST, with one table played in botht he 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. sessions.  Various World of Darkness games  ran in the morning and afternoon.  There RPGS are definitely ones the con will solicit for next year.

Magic pulled 20 players for the Standard tournament and about half that for the evenings Commander tournament.  Since we were able to provide prizes to the Magic tournaments without busting the convention's budget, that's a practice we will endeavor to continue in the future.  Yu Gi Oh pulled 11 players for all three sessions so we will plan on running a full slate of Yu Gi Oh next year, hopefully adding Pokemon into the mix.

Boardgames ran at least 2 tables in the 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. sessions and 1 table during the 7 p.m. session.  Thanks to the Centralia judge group for running the boardgame room.  We hope to get a highly visual game such as Lego Wars or Clay o Rama in for next year's event.

Miniatures was the real suprise, with only 5 people turning up for the day long Warhammer 40,000 event.  While they had fun, the all day event wound down long before the end of the second session.  Hopefully a Rogue Trader run next year will pull more people.We had a little interest in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle Rogue Trader, enoug that we will run at least one WFB session at Egypt Wars and a couple of games of HeroClix.