Convention Planning: Play-to-Wins

Are you thinking of starting your own convention? That is amazing! From my experience, it is a fun and stressful labor of love that becomes more rewarding with each passing event. While we are always learning and growing, we can share what we have learned so far. Hopefully, this series of articles can help you create something people will be excited about! This post talks about the art of handling play-to-wins.

There are many great ways to add value to attendees of your convention. What better way than winning things for free! And if you have good support from the industry, they cost you just your time.

What are Play-to-Wins?

People are playing new games all the time. What if you had the chance to win the copy of the game you just played? That is the basis behind play-to-wins. Attendees take a game, learn it, and play it, which enters them into a chance to win that game.

They are a fun and exciting addition to any convention. Play-to-wins benefit more than just the attendees of an event.

Benefits

The benefits abound here. Attendees, publishers, designers, vendors, and organizers all enjoy having play-to-wins at events.

Attendees

The easiest to to see benefit is for the attendees. The game can only get played so many times. Because of this, the chances of a player winning the game are relatively high. Worse case scenario is they play a new game which they learn is not for them, but more often than not, they are at least enjoying a new game.

Publishers

Publishers love play-to-wins! For the cost of a game, they get a good amount of exposure in a community supporting way. A bunch of people, in possibly a new market, get to see and play their game. If it is something that one of those people really enjoy, even more people see/hear about it as word-of-mouth spreads.

Designers

Depending on how you run your convention, you may or may not have designers being highlighted. If you do, play-to-win is another way for designers to gain more exposure. If the designers have a game in play-to-win, then attendees are more motivated to try their game. They also enjoy being able to teach their games to attendees compared with other play-to-win titles. In these ways their games get even more eyes on them.

Vendors

Having vendors at your convention, whether they are publishers or retailers, also enjoy play-to-wins. Sometimes when people don’t win something they are really excited for, they want to buy the item. If they know they can right away, the vendor can satisfy that impulsive desire. This works well if the vendors are open after the play-to-win drawing.

Organizers

Last but not least, the organizers enjoy having and supporting play-to-wins. The more benefits you add to your attendees’ experience at your convention, the more they will want to come back and the more they will spread the word. The more people talk about your event, the more it will grow.

Outside of attendees, you are also building relationships with publishers and vendors. These connections can grow into more than just play-to-wins. Gaining sponsors is another way to support your convention. The more connections you have, the better the chances of sponsor support.

How to Get Games

When running your first convention, it may be hard to get support from publishers. Your event is new and unknown. However, focusing your approach on a few key strategies can help establish relationships that can last a long time.

Local Companies

Reaching out random publishers might work, but we find reaching out to local companies is a great first pass. Starting with your favorite local game store is a great way to find out what local publishers might be around and which of them can help grow the community. Getting an introduction from the retailer can help open the door to communication with the publisher regardless of their size.

Smaller publishers might not support all the conventions they want, but supporting something in their own backyard that they can attend for little cost is a different thing entirely. Larger publishers that are local might not attend given their busy schedules, but they are usually very helpful with local endeavors.

Designers

Another great way to source play-to-win games is from the designers themselves. Many designers are just getting started and maybe trying to self publish. They need all the support and exposure they can get.

We have a special section called Designer Alley that highlights a selected group of designers. Many of these designers are self-publishing or have copies to give away. Talk to your designers about the benefits of play-to-wins and how they help increase knowledge of their game.

The Stonemaier list

Stonemaier Games is a publisher that is a big supporter of the play-to-win system. Jamey Stegmaier, founder of Stonemaier Games, has put together an article and a Google Doc of events that take play-to-wins.

Putting your event on this list means you may get games from Stonemaier Games and possibly other publishers. If your event is too small you may get nothing but it doesn’t hurt to try. We have gotten games from a few additional companies via this list. While those aren’t huge numbers, they are something that helps establish relationships with publishers you might not have before.

Random Outreach

While the random email is a harder path, it is something that can still pay off. Make sure you personalize your messages to the publishers you are reaching out to, and how your convention/play-to-win system will benefit them. Some may respond, many won’t. The other thing they may respond with is a 3rd party company that manages their play-to-wins for them.

Double Exposure

We only know of one third party company that handles play-to-wins for publishers, Double Exposure. You can reach out directly to them instead of going through random publishers. If you are a new or small event you may not get any games for your first request.

When we have gotten games from them in the past, there has been a good amount. While this is a decent idea, we prefer working directly with publishers to build our relationships. So we have focused more on local companies and designers than anything else.

As Your Relationships Grow

Hosting a successful convention which shows the benefits to all involved will build stronger business relationships. As you continue running new events, the relationships you have cultivated will benefit in more and more ways. Offering sponsorships and expanded play-to-win sections help create an outlet for this growing mutually beneficial connection.

Lessons Learned

While there are many benefits, over the years we have hit a few hiccups that have caused us problems with having play-to-wins. While these pitfalls exist, they should not make you wary of having play-to-wins. The good far out-weight the bad here.

Having too Many

Most of our problems have come when we have received too many play-to-win games. Being able to display, manage, and distribute efficiently these games can be tricky. Having too many can cause issues in several places.

First, the attendees may get overwhelmed by the number of games to choose from. This means the publishers won’t see as big of a benefit if their games are not getting played. This could lead to vendors not getting as many sales of play-to-win titles.

So the next question is how many is the right amount? For our 500 person event, we try to have around 25 play-to-win titles. When we first started out with about 200 attendees, having about 10 was perfect.

Drawing & Distribution

While many attendees love play-to-wins, not everyone cares. When we first started, we were using a simple ticketing system for entry and drawing. We would announce the winners to our large ballroom. This interrupted everyone from their games for the drawing and distribution of play-to-win.

While this worked, we felt interrupting everyone was a bad policy that we wanted to limit as much as possible. Our next iteration we did the drawing offline as we had far too many games. As stated above, this made the drawing take a long time. We announced that we did the drawing and posted the winning numbers and had everyone come to the main desk to collect their prize. The downfall of this is if someone had left or for some other reason did not claim their prize. When a prize went unclaimed, we would have to redraw and let people know.

Our Format

While we are always trying to improve our procedures here is how we are now handling our play-to-win titles.

Visibility

We feel that play-to-wins are such a big benefit to all that we give them a lot of attention. If we are getting the list of games early enough, we put them up on our site’s event page with instructions on how to play. That way people can find out ahead of time what games they want to play and learn them. This allows those interested to get through more games.

We also put the play-to-win games right next to our registration desk at the convention. As we go through our registration spiel about the convention, we explain how the play-to-win works. We point out and highlight a few games to get people excited.

Entry

When we first started, after playing the entrants would go to the registration desk to get an entry ticket (which differed from other entry tickets for things like raffles). They would then go back to the play-to-win games and put their ticket in the entry box for the game they played. While this was good for a first pass, it lead to some not great things.

People would get confused and put them in the wrong containers. Entrants could game the system a little and drop them in other play-to-wins on purpose. Tickets were a little cumbersome to manage as far as drawing and feedback (more on that later).

We moved to an application we purchased. The app allowed us to enter multiple winnings and winners and had QR code scanning. With this we put QR codes on all badges, then when a group wants to enter, they bring the game and everyone who plays to the registration desk. We select the game and scan all the badges. This is a much better system. It streamlined not only entry but also the drawing.

Drawing

The drawing is the most exciting time. When we first started, we would interrupt the event and announce winners in real time as we drew tickets from the entry containers. This was good for getting through all the games and making sure people were present to accept their winnings. What we didn’t like about it was the time it took our attendees away from playing. While some were okay with this, we wanted to reduce interruptions to the main purpose of the convention, playing.

Our next iteration on this was to draw the tickets and post the winners. This fixed the long interruption, but took a long time to do after we closed off entries. It also introduced people not claiming their winnings as they left or forgot about it.

With the application, it fixed the draw time down to almost nothing. We are still working on the issue where people aren’t claiming their winnings. We always end up finding a winner as we draw another name, but it is less than ideal.

Feedback

When we first started doing this, we had one small publisher asking about getting statistics on the number of players for their game. At the time we did not want to take on this extra workload as we were still trying to figure things out. With the app, we now have the data without having to work at it.

As per our privacy policy, we never share or use any personal information outside of our need to run our event. The information we relay to publishers are things like how many people played, how popular their game compared with others, and how many bought the game via our vendors. While some couldn't care less, some are really excited to get the data.

At the very least, it shows that you care about what the publishers are providing to you and your community. The more you show that you care about them, the better the relationships evolve.

Take-Aways

While there is a lot of good things here for the publishers, inundated with requests for support from conventions can overwhelm them. Bottom line is you should not expect a publisher to respond or send you something just because you asked. Always be courteous and appreciative to publishers. You never know when a new relationship might get established with someone that had not responded before.

Play-to-wins are a great mutually beneficial perk that you can add to your event. They can be a hassle but their effort pays for itself in goodwill for everyone involved.