Rampage Boardgame

 The first version of Terror in Meeple City was titled Rampage and featured Godzilla knockoff monsters scoring points by destroying a city and its inhabitants. Unfortunately the name and theme of the game provided far too close to the Rampage video game and Repos Publications received a cease and desist order causing them to change the name. you can watch Wil Wheaton play the original version of the Game here on International TableTop Day back in 2014

Jay's Favorite Games: Red Dragon Inn

I like Red Dragon Inn because it's a fun party game about drinking and gambling. It can be played with two or a near infinite amount of people and anywhere in between. It's a great game for people ages 13 and up with very simple or very complex rules. Over all I love it a lot and think you will too.

- Jay

Wither TableTop

This week's ICV2 column looks at the lack of a TableTop bump in retail stores with the release of the 4th season of the series.

TableTop

Interesting decision by the TableTop web series this year. The plan is to release season 4 behind a paywall for the original run of the season later this year then open them to the general viewing public in 2017. The price to access the episodes isn't too bad, only $4.99 per month, and you do get access to the rest of Legendary Entertainment, and by default Geek & Sundry's, premium content.

Problem is, how many people feel the additional material produced by Legendary is worth the $4.99 per month to get it early. The only thing I ever watch on the G&S website is TableTop. I used to watch Talking Comics Weekly but that got discontinued a year or so ago. The rest of the material on the site just doesn't interest me, though it certainly may interest others.

I applaud G&S for working to keep TableTop on the air as, while the "TableTop bump" has certainly diminished from years 1 & 2, it is still the best venue the industry has for attracting notice to the games that we specialize in, the ones you won't find in the game aisle at Wal-mart (though you might at Target now). The same model was adopted by Sesame Street last year, producing new material for 1st run on HBO then releasing it for free on PBS later. Childrens Television Workshop says the organization has lost money for the past several years as licensing and product sales have slowly dried up, and this plan has brought in enough money for CTW to put it back in the black. I hope the model works for TableTop as well.

7 Questions for Publishers at the Alliance Open House

With the annual Alliance Open House coming up this weekend in beautiful Ft. Wayne, I came up with a list of questions I would like to ask a number of the attending publishers:

1.        WOTC--The focus on Magic and Dungeons & Dragons is great and I know that is where your bread is buttered, so to speak but what about your catalog of boardgame titles? TableTop gave a nice boost to sales of Betrayal at House on the Hill but are there any plans to promote other backlist titles such as RoboRally, Guillotine, Great Dalmuti, Risk 2144 or Diplomacy? All still sell slowly but I would sure like to see what they could do with the sort of promotional push Magic and D&D get.

2.       Fantasy Flight Games—Congratulations on getting the X-Wing Core Set included as part of Force Friday. I haven’t seen a copy of the game yet so could you tell me if there was anything included in it that sent purchasers to the LGS to buy additional ships for the game, those ships that Target doesn’t carry?

3.       And while we’re at it, Fantasy Flight Games, Days of Wonder, Z Man Games—You have track records of running out of your best selling titles during the holiday shopping season. Have you made any plans to build up inventory this year in order to avoid a repeat?

4.       WizKids—You have really started pushing Organized Play registration this year, so any plans to create OP software that we can download to the computer to make uploading results easier? It can be a bit of a pain to handle reporting when the internet is running slow. Also, you finally announce that stores with remaining boosters of War of Light could start selling them without violating our agreement with you. When will you post a date allowing us to sell off old Organized Play products from Star Trek Attack Wing and D&D Attack Wing? OP for both games has died off here and we have months old OP materials sitting in backstock that we would like to liquidate.

5.       Plaid Hat Games—Will Dead of Winter return to stock in time for the holiday selling season and will you have enough product to supply sales through the season? Do you have any plans for expansions and if so, when?

6.       Steve Jackson Games—Any more releases planned for Evil Stevie’s Toys? The ducks didn’t do that well but I can always sell more Cthulhu plushies. Do you have any research showing demand for the guest artist versions of Munchkin?  I can understand guest artists on new versions of Munchkin (Munchkin Kitchen, anyone?) but do you have anything indicating that Munchkin has a strong enough fan base that a player will want another copy of Space Munchkin that only differs due to the art?

7.       Green Ronin—Fantasy Age? Titansgrave? Will we get these while there is still a buzz from the first season of the web series? Any chance for us to get a limited edition signed by the Titansgrave group?

Make Game Events a Sub-Category on FaceBook

A big problem for game stores with social media has always been classification. Sites like Facebook, Google+ and Yelp do not have a category for “Tabletop Game Store” or most of the time even “Game Store”. The closest we generally get is “Video Game Store” or “Hobby Store” or “Book Store”. It’s enough to make a store feel unwanted and unloved. Give the amount of searching that is done by people looking for a game store on places like Google, Yelp and Facebook, not having such a category makes it that much harder for potential customers to find us.

 The “ comic book store” classification does help those stores that carry both games and comic books, but quite a large number of game stores specialize in that area to the exclusion of the other and the ones that don’t care comics would do themselves no favors by listing themselves in that category, only to have to put off customers who come in looking for comics. Same problem with using the “video game store” category. It is fair to say that there are a lot more video game stores than there are tabletop game stores (though probably far fewer as more video gaming moves to mobile platforms) but listing a store in the video game category would just disappoint customers coming in looking for video games.

Game stores have a similar problem when it comes to categorizing store events. Facebook offers a very powerful tool for stores to promote in-store events with its “Events” section on a store’s business page. However, none of the categories in the event section work particularly well for a Pathfinder Society session, a Yu Gi Oh Sneak Peek, a Pokemon league, a Warmachine tournament or even a scheduled Friday Night Magic. Stores could probably fit in the categories of “Entertainment” or “Interest”, but once there, the choices for Entertainment are Comedy, Concert, Dance Performance, Nightlife or Theater, while under Interest they are Conference and Meetup, none of will really applies well to the tournaments that most stores create as events in Facebook.

When he learned a few weeks ago that Facebook planned to revise how the website handled the Event category in its software, Pat Fuge of Gnome Games decided now would be a good time to try to get  “Tabletop Games” added as a choice in the options offered so he sent out the following email, reprinted in part below:

We all want people to play games together.  Telling people about the Tabletop Game Events that are being played is an important part of bringing people together at the table; and Facebook is one of the best social media tools to do this.  But currently there is no option for us to do this.  We can have an event that is a festival, a dance competition or a sports event - but nothing resembles a simple tabletop game event.

I am asking for your help today. Like and share www.facebook.com/TabletopisanEvent and if you so desire, put a pic of you playing your favorite game on the page as well. Use the hashtag ‪#‎tabletopisanevent and tag Facebook too to help increase the exposure.

As Fuge pointed out in another section of his email, doing this will not cure cancer, fix the economy or anything like that. If it Facebook makes this change though, it will make it a little easier for people to find other people with which to play games and that is certainly worth a smidgen of effort.

Games You Can't Go Wrong With

Here are a list of 27 games that people enjoy playing year after year. Most of them have appeared on Tabletop, but not all.If you are looking for your next game to play, and haven't played all of the games on this list, give one of them a try.

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.

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.

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.