Conventions Against Humanity (PAX East 2014!)

PAX East is over!! For some, it was a a great way to spend a weekend. For others, it was yet another convention on the schedule. For us, it was months and months of hard work, stress and anticipation. Before PAX, we had only done a small launch at TempleCon in Rhode Island (with much success). For PAX we aimed to quintuple our first print run, get a booth and then sell and demo at said booth with little prior experience going to something so huge as anything more than a guest. This post is going to recount our experiences leading up to and showing off at the best convention in the North East.

People and Paper

People and paper. These were the biggest deciding factors in whether going to PAX was going to be feasible at all. In terms of paper, a booth on the PAX showfloor costs $1550 minimum for a 10×10 booth, with a several hundred dollar, non-refundable deposit locked in by early February. A booth in the Tabletop section costs about $1200, and a dedicated demo space costs about $800. $1550 is a big number to front for a game that, at the time, hadn’t even been printed yet. Information on the prices(and floorplans, vendors, etc) for the Tabletop section were scarce, and we didn’t even hear numbers on that until we asked at PAX itself. An $800 demo space was out of the question though, we definitely needed to sell and get A.E.G.I.S. in the hands of a lot of players.

Early this year, the great Kelly Wallick of Indie Megabooth fame delivered a talk at Boston Post Mortem, a monthly meet and greet for local game developers. After that we began talks with her, and we heard word of there being a brand new tabletop-centric Megabooth (How convenient!) sponsored by Cards Against Humanity. The prices were vague at first, but we submitted A.E.G.I.S. anyway, since we had nothing to lose. A few weeks later we were in, but then the bill came: They wanted $600.  We were in.

Aside from money, we had to go into full production mode again. That involved a lot of paper. For our PAX release, we again went in and hand-made all of the boxes and rulebooks. It was a very long process, but the results were pretty good. Thanks to all of your support, we should be moving to better, faster, more traditional methods in the future.

Then there was a logistics issue: Templecon was about 4,000 people, whereas PAX is upwards of a 100,000. We needed more space, more people, more everything. So we went and found some really great guys to help us out all weekend: Marc McCrevan, Jonah Sanville, Tyler Trulson, Josh Smith, Erin McWay and Sam Goodspeed. If you stopped at either of our booths, these peeps may’ve been the ones helping you out or telling you about A.E.G.I.S. The convention wouldn’t have been possible for us without them and each has a great future ahead of him! Then of course there was the typical convention process of figuring out transportation, lodging, meeting up, etc between a dozen or so people each day. We had some amazing help with that too.

72(96) Hours of Power

After weeks of preparation, PAX finally rolled in. We set up on Thursday and got to see all of the cherry pickers and forklifts assembling the expo hall, which was a lot cooler than you’d think. Our Megabooth space was shared by the awesome folks making Funemployed, Alteil Horizons,  These French Fries are Terrible Hotdogs, Wizard Dodgeball and our friends at Nasty Dragon Games. Check them out!!

Then Friday was our pitching day. We went into PAX with 500+ business cards and a bunch of demo materials. And so for 9-ish hours our amazing team yelled over the stadium speakers around us about our awesome robot game, getting dozens of people’s interests, while managing two booths and running around to handle a half-dozen other logistical things. It was rough and physically exhausting, but at the end of the day we had dozens interested and/or playing our game, and we got to hang around the expo hall with our fellow developers and head to some parties, and that was really neat.

Saturday morning at 11am was our first sale, and it cascaded from there. Seeing people want your game is very rewarding, but seeing those fans buy it is something else. It’s just a really awesome feeling. Saturday raged on late into the night, and then we reorganized all of the messy demo materials.

The final day kicked off almost immediately with people from the previous days coming to buy a starter set or two. We were set up in a third place for a while, and we were getting slammed with interested people for hours on all fronts, it was actually more hectic for us than Saturday. We ran many, many demos. The day was a completely exhausting blur and before we knew it, PAX was over.

Finale

And so, the biggest convention in the land has ended. We made a few dozen sales to people who are hopefully quite happy with our game. Our next big stop is the Boston Festival of Indie Games on September 15th, but we’re going to be hitting up many places and others venues in the meantime, which we’ll be sharing on our Facebook and Twitter as they come up.  We’ll also be updating our online store soon for those who couldn’t grab a Starter Set at PAX! Make sure to follow us!

Fight and Unite!