TableTop day

this week's Rolling for Initiative column looks at last weekend's International TableTop Day

Busy Weekend

We will have quite a busy weekend at the store. Friday night starts off the draft weekend for Dominaria at 6 p.m. We will have 2 more drafts on Saturday at 4 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m. Prepay for all 3 for $40 or $15 each. We will also host a modern tournament at 6 p.m. Friday night. Pokemon also gets some love with the pre-release for Forbidden Light at 5 p.m. Friday.

Saturday is International TableTop day and we will host board and card games all day. See the store website calendar or Facebook page for more info. Saturday is also the Sneak Peek for the new Yu Gi Oh set, Flames of Destruction. You can participate in the Sneak Peek starting at 10 a.m. Saturday for $20 or in the tournament at noon.

We will have a game of the Legendary Deck Building game at 4 p.m. Saturday and Munchkin at 7 p.m. In addition, there will be demos of the new Deckbuilding game Dobbers from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

See you this weekend.

International TableTop Day

This week's ICV2 column focuses on International TableTop Day

More on Selling Promo Items

Other promotional items are iffy. I have not seen any directives from Steve Jackson Games or Atlas Games regarding promos from them and stores were selling the promos from TableTop Day before the event even ended but the stores had paid for those promos and had not entered into any agreement with TableTop or Geek & Sundry.

In general, if the promos are part of an organized program and promoted by the supplier for the purpose of driving customers into the store, there are probably restrictions on selling them, otherwise likely not.

TableTop Day vs. FCBD vs. FRPGD

Had a reader ask,after reading my post about FCBD and FRPGD, about the differences between those two and TableTop Day from a retailer's viewpoint so, here are five major differences between the three:

1.  Promos/giveaways. All three days feature event specific giveaways for customers. In the case of Free RPG Day and Free Comic Book Day, the event focuses on the giveaways. In order to participate, retailers must buy the promo items. There is no such requirement for TableTop Day, which focuses more on playing games, with the promotional items as an afterthought.  As one of the requirements for participating, retailers agree to give away at least one free item per customer, while quantities last, to anyone who asks. Retailers may limit the number given or attach requirements to receiving additional books but must agree to give out at least one.

2.  Registration.  Stores may register as an official TableTop Day venue free of charge. There is no fee to appear on the website. In order to appear as an official FCBD or FRPGD venue, stores must both register and purchase a specific quantity of promos.

3. Events. Most stores run events tied into FCBD or FRPGD but the main draw is the free items, with the events creating more excitement about the day. With TableTop Day, the events stores run are the focus and a number of stores this year opted to run events as a sanctioned venue without any of the official promos, which is perfectly fine.

4. Costs. Retailers receive none of the official promotional items for free. For TableTop Day and FRPGD, stores may buy kits containing a given number of promotional items. They may purchase multiple kits but get the same items in each kit. For FCBD, retailers much purchase a specific number of books from the Gold Sponsors, typically 25 of each. After meeting that minimum, stores may increase their purchase of Gold Sponsor books and purchase as many or as few books from the other sponsors as they choose. A minimal purchase for any of the three Days runs between $50 and $100 but stores can spend hundreds or even $1000s.

5. Quantities. As indicated in #4, stores can, after meeting the minimum, purchase any amount of  FCBD books. For TableTop Day and FRPGD, stores can only purchase kits, each containing a specific number of promotional items. The only way to increase the number of promotional items to give away is to purchase multiple kits, resulting in the store receiving. promotional items for products it does not carry

Bounceback Experiment

Following up our bouceback coupon promotional strategy from International TableTop Day, wherin we gave players in various games over the day a coupon good for $1 off a game featured on the TableTop series on the following weekend, the idea being that customers will return the following weekend or “bounceback” to use the coupon. Given the number of coupons we gave out, I would have considered 5-10 of them turned in a successful application of the strategy. Unfortunately, we received a grand total of 1 (one).  Ah, well, there is always Free RPG Day (You do know about Free RPG Day, right?).

6 Takeaways on TableTop Day

International TableTop Day has wound down at the store to a game of Castle Panic, some Magic players and a charity game of Cards Against Humanity (No, not charity for the players. Each player had to donate 5 cans of food for the local food pantry for a seat at the table) going on in the back, so now seems like a good time for some quick reflections on today’s event. So the following six items in no particular order:

1)      I’m tired, and so is my staff. We have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 48 hours over the past month putting this event together and hosting it. We wanted to make sure that the players (whether or not they bought anything) had as good a time as we could present to them. That takes quite a bit of planning, more so than we brought to the two previous TableTop Day events.

2)      It was worth it and yet it wasn’t. We really did put in more planning and work on this event that we did the previous two TableTop Days and sales compared to a typical April Saturday showed it, with today’s sales up a healthy 40% above what I would expect. However, comparing today’s sales to last year’s TableTop Day sales, we had a statistically insignificant increase. So more work on the event, much more community outreach (4 media mentions the week prior to TTD) for the same amount of sales.

3)      We won’t know the full results for at least another week. All players received bounceback coupons, giving them a buck off a TableTop featured game or a game from our used section, for each game they played. These are good only next weekend so I want to track how many people come in to redeem them. I expect to see about 5 to 10 redeemed so would be ecstatic to get 10 to 20 back (typically coupons like this have very low redemption rates but I wanted to make sure that every player left with something with the store’s name on it.

4)      The TTD kit kinda worked. Unlike some stores, we had no promo hounds coming to the store specifically to get some of the promos, especially the Felicia Day Dead of Winter character pack, which as I write this sells for $30-$45 on line but I did have a couple of customers/players say that they chose to come to our store rather than play at one of the other local stores because they knew we had made the effort to get the promos. However, as I mentioned in a previous column, if a company wants to put a promo in the kit, they need to produce enough of them so that we can give them out to a reasonable number of players. Fantasy Flight Games, Steve Jackson Games and Looney Labs did good including 8-14 promos, Plaid Hat Games, Days of Wonder and Crash Games did not, only including 2 promo items. I know a lot of stores who passed on the kit and, unless there are changes, more will likely pass next year.

5)      Timing. The Perfection Fallacy came into play again. We received our kit on Thursday and I heard of some stores not receiving theirs til Friday, not nearly enough time to generate excitement in the store by showing off the promos to customers. Receiving them a week before the event and the poster 2-4 weeks would have allowed better use of those items TTD by stores.

6)      The Evolution Pack. North Star Games included a pack of items for their Evolution board game but with no explanation regarding how to distribute them. Was everything to go to one player or was the pack designed to get broken up and distributed to several players? I can figure out what to do with a single card but not with a collection of items like this.

Overall, I am happy with the results. Customers had fun and we had significantly higher sales. Already thinking about next year’s event and I hope the nice folks at TableTop are too.

TableTop Day: The Poster

International TableTop Day is this Saturday and we have events scheduled for all day. But I don't wanna talk about that. Instead, I want to talk about the poster that Geek & Sundry created for the event and that just arrived in our kit (that arrived today). You can see the poster I am referring to here.

Back from looking at it? You probably didn't see anything wrong with it but then most of the people reading this probably don't run stores. The problem is at the bottom where it tells people to look for an "event near you" and gives the TableTop Day url. The problem:  if you got the poster, that means you got the kit, which means you plan to run TableTop Day events. So why do I want to put up a poster telling people to go to the website to look for an event when we are hosting events in the very place where you saw the poster.

You see, retailers, once we have you in the store, want you there as long as possible. Many stores don't have clocks so you cannot tell how long you have been there and we certainly don't want a sign up telling you to elsewhere for an event that we will host at the store.

Oh, well, a paper cutter fixed the problem really quick.

Promoting TableTop Day

Guess what just showed up in my email inbox this week?  If you guessed solicitations for the promo packs for International Table Top Day over a month ahead of the event date, you would be right. In case you missed the blurb in ICV2 last week, this year’s International Table Top Day is scheduled for April 11 and we already know the contents of the kits way in advance.

As has happened with the previous two kits, there are problems with this one but not of Geek & Sundry, TableTop or PSI’s (the company coordinating the assembly of the kits) making. Instead, we apparently get to blame the manufacturers of the games getting promoted. Manufacturers we are looking at two major problems here:

11)       Your game was not on TableTop in season 1, 2 or 3 but I am getting promo items or a copy of you game in the kit, which by the way I do not receive for free. I get to shell out perfectly  good  Jacksons and Washingtons to pay for this kit and I get promo items for such things as Reverse Charades,  Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot, Roll for It,  Cash n Guns, Dead Man’s Draw, and Where Art Thou Romeo. If I purchase the smaller of the two promotional packs offered, with an MSRP of $250, depending on which distributor I place an order with, I will pay approximately $1.60 to $1.75 per promo item. If I order the more expensive kit, at $600 MSRP, the cost per promo item breaks down to $3.15 to $4 per item.  Granted, stores do get full copies of some games, such as Dead of Winter, Council of Verona and Geek Out (in the more expensive kit) which did appear on TableTop and which do help justify the cost, but I am also getting copies of Clubs, Dark Seas and Dead Man’s Draw, which have not appeared on the series. Still, I am not particularly enthused about paying to get promotional items that I do not want and cannot use but  that pales in comparison to 

22)      I don’t get enough of a promo item to give one away to everyone who plays in a demo of the game. I can understand getting one of the Munchkin hoodies and one of the Krosmaster promo figures (no, not on that one I can’t. They have enough promo figures floating around that I could get two or more), but the rest of the promo items are cards. There is no reason that I should get 1 Roll for It Promo Owlbear promo card or 1 Three Cheers for Master promo card. Granted I don’t publish cards but from everything I hear from publishers, they are cheap. Cheap enough that I should get more than one in the box.  Everyone who plays a demo of your game that day should walk away with a promo item, not just one person.  Steve Jackson Games, Looney Labs and Fantasy Flight Games did it right, including enough items so that everyone who plays should get something. A number of the promo items are listed as “1 pack”. Is that one pack to give to one person or a pack to break up and distribute to players? I don’t know and the solicitation doesn’t tell me.

I have already heard from a number of retailers who plan to register as a location for International TableTop Day but who plan to skip the kits altogether, contacting distributors and publishers directly to get promo items to give away. Hopefully, next  year publishers will take a cue from events like Free Comic Book Day or Free RPG Day. If you want me to spend money promoting your product, give me enough support in the kit to justify the effort to promote your product. Otherwise, I will pick the product I want to promote and contact those manufacturers for help.

How to Improve International TableTop Day 2015

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.