Thanks, Val! If you come by the booth, I hope you'll say hi. And please consider volunteering in the future.
Today's greatest success, perhaps? Finding tape and a knife. They hadn't been shipped from the US, there aren't any obvious stores nearby, and we'd missed our chance to look for them when we'd gone grocery shopping and then later shoe shopping (there's an Ecco store here) on Tue and Wed. Asking at the information desk in the hall I was told by someone sheepishly that there's a little shop on the premises that is supposed to be open, but no one was answering the phone. I was given a hand-drawn route that took me through one of the halls and then out a service door to the loading area. Hunting around I found a little corner shop that was closed. Peering in I saw a combination of a few tools, shipping paraphenalia, snacks and drinks. But, as mentioned, it was closed. Unwilling to give up, I approached the next person I saw, who was nearby having a smoke, and asked if they happened to have any tape I could use. He proceeded to put out his cig, walk past me back towards the shop and motion me to follow. He then unlocked the door, turned on the light, invited me in, and went and stood behind the counter. A short while later I emerged victorious with a roll of duct tape and a box knife.
Today was very good. Maybe just a little busier than yesterday, but mostly the same. I found it quite exciting when we had demos going in three different languages at the same time -- English, German, and French. Over the two days we've also had native speakers of Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, and Russian that I know of. We also had at least a couple people who looked to be of East Asian descent, but I didn't interact with them enough to know what their native languages were.
Not sure if I misunderstood how much stock was left yesterday or if sales were just significantly slower today, but the current estimate is that the expansions will maybe sell out by the end of Saturday and the core games some time on Sunday. There are about ten people who have still not picked up their Shattered Timelines Kickstarter rewards. That product is going to be released to others on Sunday, which will provide a precious few more oversized villain cards and mini-expansions that are otherwise sold out.
I love our volunteers so much. It has just been super fun to have them in the booth. At any given minute I might not be showing it, because I'm focusing on the crowds, but it has just been great to have their help and hang out with them.
We had a fair number of tables today with people who'd played before -- sometimes tables that liked the game enough and wanted to play again immediately, sometimes people returning from yesterday or even just fans of the game who came by to play. At one point we had two different games going against Iron Legacy simultaneously. One lost and one won, though the table that won probably should not have -- they went for a few rounds on Iron Legacy's flipped side before they realized Iron Legacy was supposed to heal on that side. There was also a group that had complained about the game being easy, who then next took on Voss. I wanted to make sure they had a challenge, so stacked the deck such that the Stalwart and a Forced Deployment were the first and fourth cards. They ended up winning that, though again I think there might have been some missed rules here and there.
Tomorrow/Saturday, like any convention, is expected to be the biggest crowd. We may have to try to be more careful to keep the games to simpler/faster decks, though it's unclear how much more we can do. We are a bit hampered by the fact that we are using three sets of decks to cover five tables. Not every game can be Baron Blade in Insula Primalis with the volunteer using Legacy. We started off using Omnitron in place of Baron Blade, but those games have been running pretty long. We switched today primarily to games involving Ambuscade, but those can run pretty long, too, and I saw a group of players get absolutely destroyed by nasty combination of lots of devices, lots of one shots that lead to more card plays, and the Ruins of Atlantis causing a bunch more villain card plays. I switched to Plague Rat for at least a couple plays, which I like fairly well, but can be pretty complicated unless the person leading the game can explain the Infections and flip mechanics succinctly. Other possibilities include La Capitan and Akash'Bhuta, but both of those are often quite long games, too.
The heroes get interesting as well. If two games are run out of the same box and I put Legacy, Tempest, Ra, Expatriette, and Chrono-Ranger (the last two so that I could get a couple of expansions represented) at the first table, who do I put at the second? I settled on Visionary in place of Legacy and Haka and Fanatic were pretty clear choices, but after that all the heroes are a little less straightforward for one reason or another. Wraith and Tachyon ended up being used. What I wanted was to give new players less complex heroes, have multiple expansions represented at each table, and have a good mix of genders of the heroes at each table. That's a pretty tall order.
Lots of people have asked about Galactic Strike force or about translations (usually for German). The GtGs folks are looking seriously into the translations, but nothing is set yet. I get the sense that there's a pretty decent potential market in at least a few places if there were translations available.
And now I'm off to try to figure out if there's anything I can reasonably do to make my super scratchy throat feel better before I try to get some sleep.
Hope you all enjoy yourselves!
