An Eventful Gen Con
This year was a big year for us at Gen Con. In addition to having our usual booth in the expo hall and having our first combined booth with our Possum Creek imprint, we had both the 25th anniversary of Munchkin and the release of Munchkin Second Edition to celebrate, and we knew we wanted to do it properly.
We had no shortage of big ideas, but the limits of time, money, and space often bring them a little closer to reality and help narrow them down. We still managed to tackle one of our biggest Gen Con presences in recent memory, with nearly 100 scheduled game sessions, a full retail sales booth, the Munchkin Second Edition Championship, and the Munchkin 25th Anniversary Party!
How did we pull it all off? We got creative, made some compromises between ideas and reality, and we got some help.
We first thought of getting one of those big rooms off the main hallway for a lot of demo space, a museum of Munchkin memorabilia, and more, but it turns out those are in pretty short supply, and reservations are competitive. So we turned to what we could do within our own booth space instead. This ruled out a big museum of all things Munchkin from the past, but thanks to Michelle and Bridget, we tracked down photos of many Munchkin things, people, and events over the years and turned it into an hour-long slideshow of over 100 slides to run on a TV at the booth all weekend.
We also secured a dedicated demo space out in the demo hall to run our scheduled games all four days of the show. We wanted to have a schedule chock-full of things for fans to join in on, from dice games like Zombie Dice and Gelatinous, roleplaying games like Last Train to Bremen and Toon, classics like Groo and Wiz-War, to new titles like Brigand's Bluff and Purrfect Potions . . . and plenty of Munchkin, of course!
This is where we ran into one of our other limits…staff. While Steve Jackson Games has been around for a long time and is well known for many of our games over the years, we are currently a company of less than 25 people, not all of whom are able to go to conventions, so we didn't have enough people to run all of the events we wanted to have this year.
So we reached out to a company named Merchant Guild. Chris, Tom, Alex, and the other great people over at Merchant Guild have been running large events for games like Catan and Star Wars Unlimited at conventions and stores all over. They were excited to work with us and helped us get set up with a great group of people to run our games and booth demos. Their demo staff was great to work with, taught all of our Munchkin Second Edition Learn to Play sessions, and helped run the Munchkin Championship series of games we had going on all weekend. Their team also developed a research survey for us to gather feedback on people's impressions after playing the new edition of Munchkin for the first time. The folks at Merchant Guild took a lot of the logistics of bringing on extra staff (HR work, accommodations, travel, etc.) off our shoulders so we could focus on everything else and offer many more game events than we could have managed on our own.
We also wanted to do something bigger than just a slideshow for Munchkin's 25th anniversary, so we thought back to the times when we had the Munchkin Tavern, which many folks remembered fondly from previous years at Gen Con. Our old stomping grounds of The Tavern on South were still there, so we knew where we wanted to start, but we wanted to do more than a themed menu and a meet-and-greet this time.
Again, we had a lot of ideas, but less time and experience turning them into a specific event, so we reached out to Lila Quests for help. Chris and Haley have done a number of fantasy-related events over the years, and were also big Munchkin fans themselves. Together, they worked with us to come up with the whole series of quests for the event, found places to get the swag we wanted for guests made, had some software made for the boss fight(!), and coordinated getting it all together and staffing the event. At the same time, most of us were busy running things over at the convention center. The anniversary party turned out to be a great evening for us and for all of the fans that got to come out and experience it!
This was probably the most involved Gen Con presence we've had in the 20 years that I've been here, and weather issues and construction aside, I think it was among our best showings at Gen Con. I want to thank all of our staff who took time out of making the games and getting them to everyone to come out to Indianapolis and share them with people. We couldn't do this at all without you, and I know you all had larger inboxes to get back to once we got home. Thanks to Merchant Guild and Lila Quests for helping us out this year and letting us pull off bigger ideas than we could usually do all at the same time. Lastly, but certainly not least, thanks to everyone who came to see us at Gen Con this year, whether it was at our games, stopping by the booth to shop or say hi, or at the anniversary party. We could do it without you, but it'd be kind of pointless if you weren't there to take part in it all!