Foundation Gaming Convention

[Foundation Games]

Hello! Foundation Gaming Convention is a three-day gaming convention in Lansing, Michigan, and will be held April 1-3, 2005.  We are always looking for more games to add to our schedule, and I thought that with some of you here on the Forge located in the Chicago area, you might be interested in possibly attending Foundation to promote and run your games, or find someone in our area who could do that for you.

I realize this is short notice, but I only recently learned of your website through one of our roleplaying GMs.  For those of you who can't make it in April, we do run other events: MichiCon in Warren, Michigan (just north of Detroit), which will run in July (dates to be announced before the end of this month - it will be late July, so it doesn't interfere with either Origins or GenCon), and we run Foundation in Lansing again in September. We plan on adding another convention to our schedule in late fall of this year, location/date will be announced soon.

This will be our sixth convention in Lansing over the last three years, and our expected attendance this spring is 1200 individual people over the weekend. The Lansing Center is a large convention facility with a cafeteria (cheaper than GenCon!), cheap parking ($4/day), and is attached to the Radisson Hotel in downtown Lansing, two blocks from the Capitol Building, on the banks of the Grand River. There are plenty of restaurants and other activities to do within walking distance, and Michigan State University is only two miles away.

We offer discounted and/or free admission for GMs and judges, and we also offer a small publisher discount on our exhibitor booths, for companies that have a small number of products and are not nationally distributed to thousands of stores yet.  Exhibitor booths normally are $200 for the weekend, but with a 30% discount for small publishers, a booth would cost $140 for the weekend. Booths are 10'x10' surrounded by pipe and drape, and come with one 8' table. Additional tables if desired are $7 each (our cost - we don't mark those up).  The booths are located in the same hall (30,000 square feet) as the majority of the gaming, so you'll have plenty of exposure since nobody has to leave the room to find you.  We have plenty of gaming space for you to run your games also, even if you don't want to get an exhibitor booth to sell your products.

We would also be happy to put together workshops or panels for anyone attending who would like to do one on either writing for games, producing games, self-publishing, world building, or simple Q&As about your company and games you produce, or anything else related to games.

Some of our other highlights:
-$2000 Cash Prize Magic tournament
-Chaosium will be exhibiting all weekend and running Call of Cthulhu events all weekend long
-Video Game Tournaments - Halo 2 Team event winners each receive an iPod Shuffle, other tournament winners will receive XBox and PS2 games as prizes
-Michigan Lego Users Group will have a large display and run Lego games all weekend
-D&D Legends of the Shining Jewel Premieres, plus more D&D, Star Wars, Toon, West End D6, Living Greyhawk/Arcanis, BESM, Shadowrun, and other RPGs
-Painting Contest
-Open Gaming, Origins Game Library, Demo teams from Looney Labs, Steve Jackson Games, Mayfair, Out of the Box and more
-EA Sports will be demoing and running tournaments for some of their new video game releases, all on a large projector screen, as well as giving away prizes and free promo items to participants
-Movie room showing gaming/scifi/fantasy related movies and anime, some produced locally in Michigan
-National Championship Qualifiers for 10 different board games, plus a Puffing Billy Tournament and many other board game events
-250 scheduled events over the weekend so far, and counting...

If anyone would like more information, or would possibly like to attend any of our conventions to either run events or to be an exhibitor, please contact me at the email or phone number listed below, or post a reply to this message, or simply visit our website to learn more and to see our complete event list for Foundation Gaming Convention.

Thanks!

Tim Hunt
Foundation Games
(517) 484-9740
www.foundation-games.com
timhunt@foundation-games.com