May 2023 Newsletter
The Past
These past several weeks have been spent mainly doing 3 things:
1) Heavily promoting Gods of the Ancient World that we’ll run on June 24th.
Have I mentioned that I HATE promoting :) It seems never-ending and the amount of work I have to put in to sell just one more ticket feels astronomical. I have to tell myself that I’m brand building this year and that I have to throw a lot and see what sticks. More on this later.
2) Doing final playtests and training my control team for GAW.
We’ve just finished the final playtests and everything is running nice and smoothly. Of course, no plan survives first contact so the true test will be on the day. Either way, the control team now know what to expect and are ready to put on an amazing event. They’re all awesome and bring a lot of energy to my vision and I can’t thank them enough. For those folks who have signed up to help control who are not helping control this one, thank you for your willingness and we’ll find a spot for you in the future I’m sure.
The above picture is where we had 2 teams of 3 playing the senate game, where the top three were playing the Roman senate and the bottom three were playing as the Greeks. We also played 2 games of the military map and the Gods but I didn’t snap any pictures of those.
Also, why is there always whiskey involved?!?
3) Recruiting volunteers for Gencon 2023.
Speaking of control team, it is my responsibility to get volunteers for Gencon - all the games the Megagame coalition are putting on, not just the ones that the Dukes are going to run. That’s a fair amount of coordination but we’re lucky that the community is awesome and there are lots of people attending Gencon that are wiling to help. I’ve ended up with about 25 people so I’ll be trying to fit them in game slots and align schedules next.
The Present
Promotion
Yes, I’m still actively doing it and will until I get the maximum player count. What I can tell you is that we now have enough players to put on the game which is wonderful news. Of course, the true magic of a megagame is when you’re at max capacity and there’s so much chaos going on you can’t possibly know what’s going on everywhere.
As I’ve said before, word of mouth still seems to be the best form of promotion. I can much more easily describe what a megagame is face-to-face and tell you hilarious stories from the games than I could ever do on Facebook or via email. So if you know of any nerds in your lives, anyone that’s interested in political simulations, or history buffs, please let them know.
Putting the game components together
Now the game is fully tested, I need to put the game together. I’m already half way through this but this is a fairly large job. It involves a lot of printing, laminating, cutting out cards, writing control documentation, etc. It’s a fairly easy process, just a little time consuming.
Discord fireside chat and Q&A
Next Tuesday (5/16) @ 8:30 ET, I’m going to do the first of (hopefully) many fireside chats / Q&A with the community. You’re all welcome to attend to just listen in or come prepared with questions. Here’s the brief agenda I’ve penciled in:
Gods of the Ancient World June 2023
What the game is all about
How the planning is going, playtesting, etc.
Gencon 2023
What games we’re running
Organizing & volunteers
And here’s the direct link to our discord server and the event itself:
https://discord.gg/CmGy3qBg?event=1105949319057637479
The Future
I’m on vacation starting next week so advertising will mostly grind to a halt (at least by me). I’m off to sunny rainy England to spend time with family and my childhood friends and their families. We’re also planning on doing some touristy stuff but most relevant to this audience is that I’m going to play a 200+ person Megagame in London! It’s called “First Contact: 2035” and I’m playing as the Israeli Prime Minister. Here’s their official trailer:
Very Large Huge Games are a newish group but are made up by long-time megagame designers and organizers. They do a really good job of bringing a level of professionalism to the hobby and this will be the second run of this game. If you’re not aware, the UK is the “home” of Megagames and they have a really active (and much larger) community than the US. If I can ever grow my audience large enough, I’d love to bring a game of this scale to Louisville. If this ever happens, it’ll be several years away.
I’ll definitely be writing up something for the blog when I get back and have chance to reflect on the chaos. I can’t wait to play it.
Yet more promoting…
As I’m going to be gone for a couple of weeks, I would greatly appreciate if you wouldn’t mind dropping the occasional post on social media.
In super fun news, over the weekends of 20th/21st and the 27th/28th, you’ll hear our sponsorship of Louisville public media on the radio if you’re in the Louisville area. The stations to listen to are 89.3 WFPL News (NPR), 90.5 WUOL Classica and 91.9 WFPK Music. Our little message will be played every hour for 5 hours across the 3 stations. I have ZERO idea if it’ll be worth it financially, but as I said previously, you have to throw a lot out and see what sticks. It’ll be very interesting to see the site analytics over those 2 weekends. I’m considering it an experiment which I may never repeat but we have to try things.
Reduced timeline for Gods player assignments
I’m guessing that we’ll still be advertising to get to maximum player count through June. Therefore, we’ll have a slightly reduced timeline for communications leading up to the event. If you are playing with us in June, I’ll probably be sending the team/role request survey to you about 2 weeks out and give you just a few days to respond. Then we’ll use that data and send out the team/role assignments to players with about a week to go. Somewhere in all that I’ll also send out the finalized documentation. I think for previous games we’ve started this process with about 4 weeks to the event date as we were full on players, hence the reason this event will be a bit different.
Once again, thanks for reading and I am so grateful for all of you - your support and kindness. Gamers truly are a wonderful community and I couldn’t do this without you all.
~Tony