2014’s TableTop Day is winding down in the store as I write
this. We have a few diehards playing one more game of Ticket to Ride in the
back but everyone else has packed up and
left, allowing me to ruminate on the event.
For us, overall , it worked. Sales today were roughly 75%
above those of a typical Saturday. Really hard to argue with figures like that.
We had customers in playing (and buying) games from 10 a.m. until close. Kudos
to Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day, the crew at Geek & Sundry, and especially
Boyan Radakovich, who busted his tukas to pull this year’s (and last year’s)
event together. I doubt a second TableTop Day would have come together without
Radakovich, so a round of applause to him.
We received a greater variety of promo materials than we did
last year: posters, bag stuffers, and shelf talkers. All laid out very nicely. Obviously some
money had gone into their production.
Some very nice giveaways too, including the Wil Wheaton 7
Wonders leader card, promo Loonacy cards, promo Roll for It Express games, as
well as a reprise of last year’s Munchkin bookmarks and Gloom promo packs. Some
headscratchers too, such as promo Killer Bunnies cards and some cards for which
no game was indicated. This leads into item #1 of What Did Not Work:
1—No Packing List. We ordered the Premium Merchandise
Bundle, solicited as having the following in it: 3x Big Geeky Smash Up Box, 1x Smash Up +
Smash Up: Awesome 9000, 1x Krosmaster Arena, 10X Wil Wheaton 7 Wonders Leader
Card, 1x Rise of Augustus, The Builders, Koryo, 1X Loonacy + exclusive promo
cards, 1x Space Sheep, 1x Golbins Drool, Faeries Rule + Puzzle Set, 5x Gloom
TableTop Expansion, 6x Roll For It Express with 6 dice, 3x Fictionaire:
Naturals, 4x Origins Game Fair Golden Tickets, 8x Tokaido Felicia Traveler, 2x
Castles of Burgandy promo set, 1x Munchkin Deluxe + Guild Promo Card. Most of
this arrived, some is missing and we received items not on the above list.
Including a packing list would have made it much simpler to know what we should
have received and what arrived extra.
2-Timing. Someone decided the bundles should arrive on April
4, the day before TableTop Day. Remember all those really nice promotional
items I mentioned three paragraphs back? Most went directly into the recycling
bin. We received 8 large TTD posters, 7 went into recycling, 1 went in the
front door approximately 18 hours before the event started. I can only assume
that someone, worried that stores would sell the promo items, decided to delay
shipping as long as feasible. Bad idea. I know at least one store that had UPS
delays and will not receive the TTD kit until sometime this week. Stores also
did not get any information about the Premium bundle until the last day of the
GAMA Trade Show, much later than we should have.
3-Mis/lack of communications. I originally ordered the
standard TTD bundle and to the Premium, dropping the standard bundle after my
sales rep told me the Premium bundle contained all the items in the standard.
It didn’t, so the store wound up short all of the items Wil Wheaton showed in a
TTD promo. Incidentally, Wheaton’s promo left the impression that all attendees
at TTD would get a 7 Wonders leader card, Love Letter game and KrosMaster Arena
Dual Pack, when stores only received a limited quantity of each item. ‘Quantities
Limited’ needed to get mentioned prominently
and it didn’t. Also, TableTop announced several times that it would livestream
its Los Angeles event. Wanting to stream the event in the store, I sent several
tweets to find out where to find the livestream. No response, so we ran
episodes of TableTop instead, which players enjoyed just as much.
There were a few other things, such as the GAMA Golden
Tickets included in the bundle with no explanation regarding their purpose (I
learned alter that some stores had a complimentary pass to Origins included,
ours did not) and the extremely limited quantity of the bag stuffers received.
If they had arrived earlier, we would have been out in less than fifteen
minutes, but those are fairly minor. If the three things above are improved by
next year, I will be quite happy.
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