In just two days, starting at 10am on Thursday, the Games on Demand crew will be running a huge selection of their favorite games! If you’ll be at Gen Con, come join us in the Marriott Downtown Hotel, Ballroom 6 on the second floor!
What games are we running? See for yourself!
(Fair warning, the tabletop PDF is nearly 7MB because it’s packed full of games.)
Follow @Games_On_Demand on Twitter for news during the show. We hope to see you there!
Are you going to be at Gen Con next week? Would you like to know where to demo, play, and buy all the great independent and small press games? Check out our Indie Games Explosion map!
Feel free to download this image and print it out to show your friends where you’ll be at the show.
Thanks to John Stavropolous for putting this map together.
Originally shared by Kira Magrann
Join Kira Magrann, John Stavropoulos, Evan Torner, and Mark DiPasquale for a discussion of some wonderful tips for new and seasoned GMs for both tabletop and freeform games.
Games on Demand at U•Con in Ann Arbor, MI
Shane Harsch is part of the U•Con event staff and is currently trying to recruit volunteers to organize an instance of Games on Demand there.
Are you a local, or someone interested in attending to help make this happen? Have you volunteered (or even organized) for one of the other shows?
This would be a great opportunity to create a fun, new event and broaden the exposure for a bunch of great, small games. If you’re interested in helping to lead this effort, Contact Shane and sign up!
I get asked regularly about how to start up new instances of Games on Demand for other conventions. I thought I’d write up some of the most recent advice for getting things off the ground as a first lesson, with more to follow.
Other organizers, feel free to comment with your own wisdom and experiences!
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My assumption is that you are an enthusiastic attendee who wants to organize a Games on Demand event (rather than a member of the convention staff).
In that case, my first suggestion for getting started is to talk to the convention events staff to see what they can offer to help you run the event- quiet space in a good location, free badges for GMs, maybe hotel rooms to encourage volunteers to come help, etc.
If you have trouble selling them on why they should help you, point out that you want to assemble a team of enthusiastic volunteers and run an event for free to entertain attendees at their show.
After that, make a guess about how many volunteers you need for the size of the show and start recruiting. How big is the show? Do you have any idea how many attendees to expect for the event based on attendance?
For a first-time event, 4-6 tables is a reasonable starting point. You’ll need to decide what the hours for the event will be and break that up into shifts for a volunteer schedule. You may not be busy enough to keep all the tables running for all shifts, but start with that assumption.
If you have the option, the Origins model is a great one to follow- 2 or 3 four-hour shifts with breaks for meals in between.
So assuming you run three four-hour shifts a day over 3 days — probably less on the last day, so let’s call it 8 shifts — with four tables at a time, that’s 32 shifts for GM volunteers. Add 8-16 more for a host or two to coordinate getting players into games during each shift, and that’s 48 shifts for a total of 192 person-hours.
At Gen Con we typically ask volunteers to work 16 hours to get a free badge. Some people do part-time and work just a shift or two. You can set that dial wherever you like, but if we assume a 16-hour commitment, that means you’ll need about 12 full-time volunteers.
