Ubercon 4, Oy vey

[Luke]

Just waking up from my post-con crash. This time around the nerds and I were at Ubercon 4 in Secaucus, NJ at the Meadowlands Crown Plaza.

Let's start with the good:
I had players for nearly all my slots -- and was able to fill out thin turn outs with friends and fellow nerds. So the BW table was generally hoppin'.

I definitely made a couple new converts and reminded a few people who bought the game last year that they want to be involved and play this game!

And, I ran my biggest game ever. 20 people played in (and very much enjoyed) my Poisonous Ambition game. Some returning players, but mostly they were new to the game.

On that front, the con was a success for me.

The con staff, as always, were friendly and accomodating (and almost comedically disorganized). I like the Ubercon staff, and I think they earnestly try to put on the best show possible. They are remarkably successful in bringing a host of diverse games and events to the table -- RPGs, CCGs, wargames, board games, console games, LAN games, makoto, contests and other good stuff. Ubercon has the best game services for the local cons -- outstripping the defunct Lollagazebo and even beating out ICON.

The Bad:
Once again, we have returned to the hotel of infamy. Wherein the dealer's room is at one end of the hotel, and registration, the rooms, the restaurant, the rpgs, consoles, and wargames were at the other end. A long five minute -- OUT OF THE WAY -- walk to go between them. Now, the dealer's room is in the same room as the board games and the LAN games, but it just didn't work for us. Few of those kids were our customer base. Most of them just wanted to play games, the dealer's strung out along the walls were very much an after thought. I know I supported combining the dealer's room with gaming, but something's not working.

To exacerbate the problem of having the con divided in half, once again on Saturday afternoon and evening there was a wedding. Once again the con-goers had to WALK OUTSIDE IN THE RAIN to get between the two halves. Alternately, we were offered a tour of the back of the kitchen to get back and forth.  An ugly tour of unpainted concrete, buzzing flourescents and grimy doors. Not all that encouraging. I wasn't in the dealer's room saturday afternoon, but according it aaron, it was dead.

I know that from 3-6 on saturday my table was dead. Not one player. (I only had two players from 12-2; but my 10-12 slot was full.) I left at 6 to get some dinner, came back at 8 to run my big game. But 3-6 on saturday are generally prime hours for me, I was kind of annoyed that no one showed. I don't know why the table was dead, but the timing does coincide with the wedding. Perhaps other people had the same experience?

Lastly, the sales for the weekend were poor (I think the nerds made up most of the sales, actually):
Coming in on top was Dogs in the Vineyard with 5.
4 Monster Burners
3 With Great Powers (after Mike left on sunday, but a direct result of his demos).
2 character burners
2 BW CDs
1 MLwM
1 Universalis

Would have sold Inspectres, but I didn't have any stock. :(

No NPAs (as far as I know), no Sorcerer (which is very rare!).

Pax Draconis and Multiverser still don't sell from our table. No interest in FVLMINATA, though I think I'm the only person in the universe still carrying it.

Last Ubercon (at a different hotel), I sold close to twenty BW books alone plus a ton of the other games. Very disappointing this time around.

After talking with Aaron post-con, we've decided that it isn't worth it for us to return to that hotel as vendors. Which is a shame (the next Ubercon's goint to be at the same hotel). I'll go and run games, but not to sell. Better to just hand out postcards and drive sales to our websites. Not as many sales, but far less cost.

-L

[Michael S. Miller]

3 With Great Powers (after Mike left on sunday, but a direct result of his demos).

Wow! There was only one sold before I left at 2PM on Sunday.

I ran InSpectres for 4 on Saturday morning (9-1pm). They had a great time and I told them to check out InSpectres.com for ordering info.

My afternoon With Great Power game had 6 people signed up, but no one showed (well, one apologized for feeling too woozy to play after having given blood).

7pm was NPA sampler. I had 3 people signed up. One showed. I roped my wife into playing, as well. I let the single registered player pick a game and he chose Cell Gamma. It was a poor fit with my particular GMing style, but he said that he enjoyed himself. Evidently not enough to pick up the NPA.

On Sunday morning, my 9-1pm WGP game had 8 people show up (many of them having missed the Saturday afternoon game for various activities such as contests or LAN games--I think these sucked a lot of the life out of the con on Sat. afternoon). My wife, Kat, came through in a pinch to demo the game for half those folks. Then, after she was done, our own Thor Olavsrud wanted a run-down of the game, so she explained it to him in detail. I sat and watched--it was very instructive.

As for the con, it was better organized than I expected, but the layout is horrendous. The only possible way I see of boosting sales might be to secure one of those dealer tables in the lobby near the gaming rooms rather than the dealer hall itself. I'll gladly go again and run games 'til I drop, because I can see that there is a pool of players willing to try something different. (of course, it helps when Luke takes some of his BW addicts and sits them at my table and says "No more Wheel for you until you play InSpectres.")

It was a good experience for me on the whole, and I look forward to the next one.

[Thor Olavsrud]

I had a lot of fun at the Con, but almost all of it stemmed from hanging out with our huge Nerd crew for a weekend. I got to play a rousing game of puritan horror in Burning Wheel, and Brennan (inthisstyle) ran a fantastic demo of Dogs in the Vineyard for us Nerds (i'll try to post an Actual Play at some point). And Michael and his wife graciously demoed the mechanics of With Great Power for me, despite the fact that I overslept and missed his demo (but he had 8 players, so perhaps that was for the best). Thanks Michael!

But if I had been a vendor or exhibitor, I would have been extremely disappointed. This was surprising, because last year, at Ubercon 3, they seemed to find a perfect setup. Everything was close together, everyone had to walk past the dealer hall to get to all the other events, and a lot of people would duck into the dealer hall between events just because it was so convenient. In short, it seemed like a success for all the vendors, and was also a lot of fun for the attendees.

And then we come to this year, and everything was poorly laid out, disorganized, and inconvenient.  You had to be really invested in shopping to bother to go to the dealer hall, because it was a good 5 minutes walk from everything else. Not to mention the wedding, which all but shut off traffic to the dealer room for the prime sales period Saturday afternoon/evening.

On Saturday afternoon, a lot of the Nerds were hanging out near the Nerd table and playing card or board games, since the room was nearly empty.

I stepped outside for a smoke and was soon joined by one of the con organizers, who asked me what I thought about how the con was going. Despite the fact that there was almost zero traffic to the dealer room because of the wedding at that time, he seemed genuinely surprised when I mentioned that several of my vendor/exhibitor friends were not too happy and explained why.

Then he tried to say that it was better than Ubercon 3, because everything was more spread out and they had received some complaints from attendees last year that everything was too crowded.

As Luke pointed out, the only thing that made Ubercon 3 such a traffic jam were the tables that lined the halls themselves. If those had been moved, or confined to the dealer's hall, it would still have been a very active con, but without the crowding issue.

[M. J. Young]

Let me echo some of the positive things that have been said about the Ubercon staff. They are friendly, helpful almost to a fault, and eager to do whatever is within their power to solve problems that arise.

I agree that there is a big problem with the dealer room being in the exhibit hall; it also doesn't help that the RPG rooms are on the second floor, and the elevators are a bit out of the way. I can't count the times I was up and down the main stair, and although sometimes I was taking them two steps at a time, I'm not as spry as I once was and sometimes reached the top rather winded. The wedding was also a disaster--which was the same disaster that was difficult for Ubercon II. I think that if they're going to use this hotel over the long term, they're going to have to commit to renting the ballroom as well, and probably fill it with the vendors rather than exiling them to the exhibit hall with the board games and video games. At present, though, they don't have the numbers.

From what I gather, at Ubercon III they included something called Penny Arcade; I vaguely recall reading that it was there, but never knew what it was. That was not present at this con. Unofficially I have it from one staffer that the Penny Arcade significantly boosted attendance at III, such that IV had a lower turnout than III, although if the Penny Arcade audience is discounted there's been consistent growth across the series. I don't know how much impact that might have had on the vendors, though.

I had a lot of problems with the hotel used for III, incidentally. It was difficult to move around most of the time, no matter where you were. In the board game room there was not space to pass between the tables. This was also true in several of the RPG rooms (I think Luke had prime territory), which were very crowded and we often felt like we were right on top of the group at the next table. Even in the halls it was difficult to maneuver, and sometimes confusing as to how things were laid out. There were very few chairs outside of those in use in the rooms, particularly as compared with the many cushioned seats in the lobby of the II/IV hotel--I often had a difficult time finding a place to sit, and was on one occasion told that I could not sit in an available chair because it was in the Star Wars LARP room (but that did not mean the LARPers didn't pour into the RPG game rooms while we were playing and shout at each other in character, disrupting everything in the room). Further, the hotel for III was not terribly conveniently located; we had trouble finding it each time we drove in, and we had trouble finding our way back to the highway. On Friday night, we were miles away before we determined that we must have missed it. None of our Friday night registrants showed up at III, and I can't help wondering whether they, too, were wandering around Secaucus trying to find the place. Finally, many of the larger events, including the chapel service and several panels, were held in the large room at the end, containing the swimming pool and the food service. This room had terrible acoustics such that it was difficult to hear or be understood; and on at least one occasion hotel guests went swimming in the midst of an event. I would not want to go back to that hotel, I think.

On the other hand, I did sell a few games to players at Ubercon III, and since Multiverser didn't sell from your table I conclude that no one bought it this time. That's not a complete failure. We had a couple of players get very excited about the game (one has showed up on our forum to play there, as well). Also, for reasons that were entirely our fault, we started with the setback that none of our events were in the schedule, so all our players were pickups who knew nothing and expected nothing.

One strategy that worked well for us this time, I think, was to play as a means of attracting players. Two of us attend, but I run the games and he helps me with logistics and such. He complained that for all the gaming we did at recent cons, he never got to play; so I brought his character papers along. Since our games weren't listed, settling in to our table (again, Chris Calley and Kevin Jagh, along with other staffers whose names don't come to mind at this instant, were wonderfully helpful in getting us time and space) and starting a game with him caught the attention of others. I particularly noticed both last time and this time that there were often referees sitting at empty tables waiting for players to appear, and players wandering into rooms wondering where the games were for which they'd registered. Having a live game going looked much better than sitting there looking like we'd been abandoned, and in fact at one session we picked up the referee from another game whose players didn't show, because he said it looked like we were having a good time (which we were).

Of course, one of the attractions of Ubercon for us is that it is not expensive for us. We have gas and tolls for about three hundred miles travel for the entire weekend, including back and forth to stay the night at my parents' house; since that's probably half an hour away, we get free room and good food. We've been supporting the convention as well as we're able since the second, and have been guests of the convention, so we don't pay to be there. (We also participate in the panels and any guest events requested of us; that cuts into our play time, but also exposes us to people who wouldn't come to our demos.) We're counting it as profitable exposure, and expecting that some of those who played or watched us play are going to carry positive impressions of our game back home with them.

I'll be disappointed that NerdNYC isn't there in March, but understand that there are financial considerations in that. There were several booths selling T-shirts, as I recall, so it may be that there wasn't enough variety in the retailers for the turnout. It's also probably the case that we're getting a lot of the same gamers from one Ubercon to the next--they're only half a year apart, and there were a lot of familiar faces. Hopefully attendance will continue to increase, they'll manage to grab the ballroom to eliminate the distance problem, and you'll be back.

--M. J. Young

[LordSmerf]

A quick note regarding Penny Arcade.  Penny Arcade is technically an online webcomic.  It is a rather interesting phenomenon beyond that.  It is a rather loose community (i.e. people who read Penny Arcade generally feel an immediate sense of connection with other readers) consisting of a couple of hundred thousand (if my numbers are correct) readers.  The target audience is video gaming geeks.

I am not entirely sure how this audience would respond to table top games, but I am sure that some of them would be at least peripherally interested (since you often see video gaming and table top gaming in the same general demographics).

Thomas

[rafial]

I am not entirely sure how this audience would respond to table top games, but I am sure that some of them would be at least peripherally interested (since you often see video gaming and table top gaming in the same general demographics).

In fact, PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) which was held here in the Seattle area recently featured a track of Clix and other collectable mini type games in addition to all the expected LAN gaming.  So there is definitely crossover.