I'm thinking that we should prepare to have a Forge booth at Spiel Essen this year to sell and promote independent roleplaying. I have several reasons:

• I'm quite ready for exhibiting myself - I've got a couple of products of my own that deserve display, for instance. I'm pretty confident that if I can get some more people on board, it'll be trivial to make the project pay for itself.• Other Forgistas in Europe are also going strong. There are plenty of Brits out there, a couple of Germans, even some Italians, Polish people and such who might well be interested in a get-together and convention booth in Essen. Western Germany is reasonably central from all directions and the convention is late in the year, so one would imagine that if people wanted to meet up here in Europe, this might be a good spot. The Americans are constantly having get-togethers, so I don't see why that wouldn't work here as well.• We already did this in 2006, and even with relatively few designers making a personal appearance, I found it a worthwhile and rewarding experience. Spiel is a huge event, we met all sorts of interesting people and sales were rather good for a first try. Repeat attempts in -07 and -08 didn't get off the ground mainly because everybody had other things on their plate, but perhaps now would be the right time to do this again?• I have this hobby of running boardgaming culture projects of all sorts here in Finland, and I'm sort of planning to establish some sort of Finnish boardgame prototype booth at Essen to make contacts for Finnish designers in the German boardgame industry - so if I'm going to go to Essen this year, I might as well make sure we have an indie rpg booth as well there.

For those who don't know about it, Spiel is a German public game fair with attendee numbers somewhere around 130,000 people, making it quite handily the largest game convention in the world. The majority of the visitors are families and mainstream boardgamers, but roleplaying, comics and other genre hobbies have a healthy presence as well in the humongous convention center. A considerable number of the visitors are German-language only, but many gamers are bilingual and most if not all exhibitioners know English.

To get this thing off the ground, what I'd like to have:

• Some German-speaking participants would be cool - ideally we'd have at least one German-speaker in the booth at all times. Perhaps Frank, Harald etc. can tell us about their own plans and/or suggest some German-language contacts?
• Something like half a dozen or more designers or other committed and knowledgeable booth participants interested in promoting and selling their own and other people's independent roleplaying games at Spiel. If we get this thing going I'm probably coming with several people myself, but I also might end up spending some considerable time with the yet-hypothetical Finnish prototype booth. Ideally I'd like to have at least two capable and trustworthy designer/activists I know myself... the Collective Endeavour people from UK come to mind, as well as the aforementioned Germans, and I know for a fact that there are others I wouldn't hesitate to have running the booth as well. Americans are of course welcome if they'd like to take an European vacation in Essen.

Ideally somebody who is not me would also take care of booth reservations, furniture and perhaps consulting us foreigners about travel and rooming - my own strengths and greatest experience in this convention thing are traditionally in program and demo planning, training and such. We'll see what sort of team comes together on this.

So, any takers? Schedule-wise I've been told that one should start reserving hotel rooms soonish, but otherwise I'm not at all sure when the pertinent deadlines are.

As somebody who's both visited Spiel as an attendee and been a booth person, I can thoroughly recommend it. Even if you just want to meet up with folks and trawl the halls playing every new boardgame demo in sight, it's well worth it. For UK-based people getting there is pretty easy too (though £ vs € might be an issue this year) and basic German skills are useful, but far from essential. The German Indie crowd are a great bunch of folks too.

It still technically ranks as my highest selling individual convention, and I put a large part of that down to being there and not just buying in to the booth in-absentia. For clarity on the numbers, I sold thirty copies of Covenant at, and more because of, Spiel 06.

I believe the deadline for booths last year was mid May, so I'd expect it to be similar this time round, but their website isn't up to date yet.

-Matt

Great idea! I'd love to see a Forge / indie booth at Essen. I remember the Forge -- Nexus/Projekt Odyssee cooperation from 2006, it was a great thing to happen.

Unfortunately, due to interesting job times, I cannot make any commitments for myself. However, I put the link to this discussion on the Nexus e-mail lists. There are a couple of (German speaking) people with a huge organization experience on for role-play booths.
Also, Nexus is a registered non-profit association, if we need one.

I could also help in fund-raising to support the booth fee.

    Daniela

Ah, most excellent. I thought that the Nexus cooperation worked pretty well last time, although I am personally necessarily quite outside the loop on their activities. They provided a large number of motivated booth hands last time and did not encumber the booth operations at all with their own side of things. Perhaps the only weakness last time was that ultimately there wasn't much I or other non-Germans could do to help with their stuff, so the mutuality was somewhat one-sided.

Hello.

Just a question: Should this be a Forge booth or is a Forge/Nexus booth a thinkable alternative?
I don't want to pile us in, but if we group together, it will be an easier task to fund raise the money for a booth.

However this is your decision, but if a joined booth is wished, I will ask the Nexus executive board for fund raising.

Bye
Matthias

www.nexus-berlin.de
www.nexus-stuttgart.de

I find a joint effort unproblematic based on our experiences in -06, as our priorities didn't seem to clash to any discernible degree. The Nexus folks had some motivation towards running full-length sessions at the booth, I understand, but due to the circumstances not a lot of this ultimately happened. If anything, you should ask from the Nexus people who were with us then about how they felt about it - was the joint booth useful from their viewpoint?

We will find out very easy if someone from Nexus has an objection to the -06 or the -09 booth. If we didn't find people who want to join with work and, or money, this booth is not a topic of interest and there would be no participation of Nexus. But before I ask the Nexus people I want to know if the participation is welcome from your side.
After this I will ask Nexus.
I can't promise anything, but I will promote in Nexus for a participation. Additionally Daniela has a strong position into Nexus and many people listen up if she says something.
However, I haven't heard anything negative about the -06 booth, so if we can't bring the money or the people, I am pretty sure its nothing about the Forge people or the booth.

Bye
Matthias

www.nexus-berlin.de
www.nexus-stuttgart.de

Quite so, I understand how a public association works. Feel free to let the Nexus people know that cooperation is more than welcome - not only would we appreciate having a solid number of German natives in the project, but the Nexus folks proved smart and enthusiastic last time as well - can't imagine any problems working together this time, either. We can look into the practical issues such as who takes the lead on reserving the booth and such matters when we see what sort of enthusiasm this gets from Nexus.

Eero,
I'd love to join the booth. If the idea gets no traction within Nexus, I'm sure I can find a couple of helpers; especially some of the people who did independent Indie promotion on various conventions over the last two years.

Cheers,
    Harald

Most excellent, I want Harald there. Selfish reasons, he'll be most excellent for the sales of Solar System, I'm sure. You might want to consider making some paper copies of the German version for the occasion, too.

Eero,

Could be fun. Went to Essen 2008, definately want to go again. This time I can bring Montsegur 1244 & get to know even more people.

Though I'm not sure how much time & money I can put into being a booth monkey.

Best,
Frederik
http://thoughfulgames.com

Hi Eero

I'll come if I'm still in Europe at this time of the year (I'll know more about that late February-beginning of March). I speak German (and Swiss German dialect for what that's worth) and already know some of the Forge games quite well. I most probably will not have my own product to sell, but I like doing booth monkey jobs.

For those who know the convention, is there any chance that products in French could sell? If yes, I might be able to fetch an author or two from the French-speaking scene.

Ah, Christoph would certainly be useful. Especially to me, as he knows Zombie Cinema so well :)

Based on my last visit my impression was that a majority of the visitors at the convention are German natives, so I'd imagine that French product would be at something of a disadvantage. I don't have a feel for how common French skills are in Germany, though, but I'd imagine that most people wouldn't be confident enough in their skills to buy whole books in French.

Hello,

I have asked around, but there is only one Member who is interested. There are some members who will try to do an own booth with their products.
However, if you can realize a booth, I will try to help.

Bye
Matthias

www.nexus-berlin.de
www.nexus-stuttgart.de

At this moment it seems that I personally don't have the time and the energy to spearhead this, not and get actual projects finished. So unless I find somebody else to take care of the logistics, this'll have to wait. Having to prepare for this sort of thing months in advance is pretty annoying, makes it difficult to get everything done in time.