Single company gaming company conventions (Like Warhammer Fest): Yay or bollocks?

Nah. Cobblers. Very few companies have enough content to justify a single-company convention. Plus, I like to see collaboration between suppliers; much of tabletop gaming is a “cottage industry” – and there’s much value to be had when smaller companies work together (on complimentary rather than competing ideas) to produce great content, instead of each trying to become the next GW. So conventions with lots of different things to see are preferable for me.

Do you prefer giant events with a mega amount to do or rather smallish hands on experiences?

I think @pagan8th makes a great point – you want there to be enough variety that you feel like you’ve had a day out (or a good few hours at least). Since you’ve got to organise getting to the event (often a good few hours away) it’s got to feel “worth it” (travelling three hours or more to spend 20 minutes wandering around a one-company new product launch just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the hassle). Lots of different companies and plenty of variety, please. But not so much I’ve got to find somewhere to stay overnight and spread it over two days. It’s a fine, fine balance!

Have you ever *organized* a convention of any scale and would you do it again?

Many years ago, I was involved with setting up the first MakerFaire in Brighton (one of the first in the country at the time) and I was involved in subsequent ones for a few years. It was brilliant fun. But a *lot* of hard work, and most of it thankless. It was the community of people behind it that made it special. I’m not sure I would (do it again) unless I was sure it was a good team working together. More recently I’ve helped put together a few music festivals. All pretty low key. Those were less fun (but that was mostly because I would rather someone else organise them so I could be on the stage playing!) but still enjoyable in a weird kind of way.

Enjoy your XLBS @sundancer – I’m off to brainstorm a new game idea.
I was super-excited about Demon Ship but have really gone off the boil now. It followed an idea I had after watching a DungeonCraft video a few years ago

His suggestion is that rather than build a massive dungeon on the tabletop, or mess about with loads of terrain and walls and clutter, to be more “1960s Batman” and just dress a single game board with a few pieces (watch the video, he explains it really well) and have the players move from location to location.
This “room based” approach has stuck with my for a while, particularly since it also reflects how some of my favourite computer games, like Atic Atak and Head over Heels worked – a large map is broken down into distinct rooms, which the player must move through. But how to make a tabletop game more like a ZX Spectrum classic from nearly forty years ago?

I thought that DemonShip had cracked this conundrum.
Since its launch, there was very little to go off, except some photos of the board layout and a generic description of a “room based game”. But even that was enough to get me excited. Except on the day of its “launch” it turns out it wasn’t really a launch after all – more like a pre-launch get-the-money-in-to-spend-getting-the-thing-finished kind of launch. Which I’m not interested in; I wanted to see some rules (which, btw, I’m more than willing to pay for – I’m just not keen on stumping up £39 and getting absolutely in return other than a promise of delivery in a month or so).

Then the other day I saw this playthrough between the game designer and “Witty”.

And it looked ok. There were a few things I wasn’t sure about (mainly because I still hadn’t seen the rules and had little idea of what was going on). But it also felt like a lot was left to chance and dice rolls, more than player decision. And given it’s a solo-play game against an AI, it seems like the player being able to influence the outcome of the game is pretty important – otherwise you may as well toss a coin twenty times, count the heads and decide if you’ve won or not!

And then I saw this video.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1785186479

Where the game designer basically asks if he’s made a truly terrible game or not. And his attitude seems to be “I’ve no idea. It might be great. Or it could be crap. If you die, try again with better dice rolls”.

And suddenly all my enthusiasm for Demon Ship evaporated completely.
An in almost inverse proportion, my enthusiasm for making my own room-by-room solo-play explore-a-thon (that’s a word) went through the roof.

So now I’m back to trying to make my own tabletop game.
And my bank holiday weekend (or what’s left of it now) will mostly involve large amounts of squared paper, felt-tipped pens and an assortment of dice and cards. I feel like I’m twelve years old again!