Recently, our local gaming community held the second annual gaming convention, known as NJCon.  It’s a general gaming convention meant to draw in all the local gamers for a 2 day convention.  It’s nothing fancy like Templecon, but it’s full of solid games, has a fleamarket, and a respectible number of vendors.  We’ve been averaging about 150 gamers so far. 

Each year so far the organizers sponsored a Steamroller 4 tournament.  The first year we did it we got about 18 players.  Some came from upstate NY, Massachusettes, and NYC.  It was a good time.  This year we only got 8 players, all from our local store except for one notable exception from southern New Jersey.  Bad news indeed.  And the organizers are not keen on renewing the tournament as a result because we take up so much table space.

I happened to meet Grant, the organizer of Templecon, up at the New England Team Tournament.  I asked him how they got started.  He said they did this:

  • Advertised on every gaming venue on the web
  • Gave posters to each gaming store in the area along with a stack of flyers
  • Personally contacted each local pressganger to let them know about the event so that they wouldn’t schedule a tournament against it, or better, would attend the convention themselves

And that was it.  He did say that a store recently closed at the time, so there was a group of players itching to play again.  But he said the biggest chunk of players were Pressgangers.  We advertised the convention on all the local gaming groups’ message boards.  This included 2 stores in NJ and one in PA, along with the Privateer Press forums.  We did find out that a pressganger scheduled a PA tournament against NJCon, so that certainly didn’t help.

Naturally once the first Templecon attendees got there and saw the great terrain Templecon had and also the nice atmosphere, they liked it and came back.  But what is intruiging to me is what makes people go in the first place.  As I posted before, gamers don’t like to travel.  And why bother going to a convention if you could just do the same gaming at your own store more conveniently?  Our costs were in line with store tournaments ($10.75 if you preregistered) plus you got all the perks of the tournament environment (other games if you wanted them, fleamarket, vendors, food, etc.).

Maybe what we needed was more events.  Something to make people want to come and stay.  Templecon had 3 events over the course of their first convention.  NJCon is on a friday and saturday though so maybe that’s the issue.  I’ve been pushing the organizers to make it a saturday through sunday con instead, but don’t know if that will happen.

What could you suggest we do to improve turnout?  How did your regional conventions grow?

–Norbert