Make sure everyone gets to play board games at your convention

The difficulty of organising games at conventions

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You’re getting ready for your convention, let’s call it AwesomeCon. You spend hours, days, weeks, months planning the layout of the space, accounting for flow during the busiest times, and, most importantly, figuring out how to get everyone playing board games with no one standing awkwardly around the periphery looking longingly at players already involved in games.

You might have a flag system so people can indicate if they need more players or a teacher, you might have a host or hosts near the game library to help people get started with something, you might just encourage folks to walk around holding the game they want to play over their heads until they find some players. As you know, these approaches have varying degrees of success and they often work best when it’s a smaller event with an established tradition.

Despite our best efforts to help people play more games, there will still be people like, let’s say, Alex, who struggles to find a group to join, who goes up to a table with a “looking for players” flag only to be informed that, oops, the flag shouldn’t still be there, who feels shoe-horned into a game that a helpful volunteer pushed them into just so they would be playing something, who looks around at people having fun and can’t find a way in.

On the other hand, you have somebody like Todd, who is still wandering around trying to get someone, ANYONE to play that super complex game about agriculture and commerce in the twelfth century. Maybe someday, friend.

A handy tool to get more people playing games at board game events

Aftergame is a social board game app available on Android and iOS, with shared play histories, intuitive play logging, and (drum roll, please) the ability for any attendee to plan a game at your convention. What does that mean?

As a player, Todd can go into your AwesomeCon event within Aftergame and make a mini event for the game he wants to play. He selects:

• the game and any expansions,
• the time he’d like to play at,
• the location within the venue,
• the number of players he’s looking for,
• and what experience level with the chosen game he’d like the other players to have.
• He can also invite specific people if he wants to, leaving some or none of the seats open to be claimed by other attendees.

The game he’s just created will show up in the list of games being played at AwesomeCon, ordered by the scheduled time so the first ones people see are happening soonest. Now anyone looking for a game to join (Alex, perhaps?) has the option of claiming a seat at the table for his agriculture game.

For many people, finding a game to join with strangers can be an anxiety-inducing scenario. It’s so much easier to join an open game by tapping a screen than to interrupt someone’s conversation to ask if they still need a player. It takes the guess work and nerve-building out of the equation altogether.

Aftergame even helps get those tricky games to the table. Whether it’s got a large player count, a weird theme, or some intricate mechanisms, when so many people can see the game event, there’s a much higher chance of matching players to their preferred games!

More cool things about using Aftergame at conventions

On top of this basic functionality, Aftergame has a lot of flexibility and additional features that can enhance the gaming experience at AwesomeCon:

• Plan games in advance: Set up AwesomeCon’s event in the Aftergame app up to a month in advance so people can start planning their days.
• Edit details anytime: With updates sending a push notification to all players in the game, no one misses the memo about where exactly at AwesomeCon the game will be happening.
• Chat with the players in your game: Let your players know that the game will be starting 10 minutes late because your game of Dune ran a bit long.
• Flexible location details: Personalise your location format to best suit AwesomeCon. This could mean preloaded zones that players choose from, a text box for entering a table number, or an interactive map you can drop a pin on, for example.
• Detailed game library: Make your game library available for in-app perusal so players know what their options are.
• Player profiles: Players create their own profiles, and with the ability to import past playlogs from various sources, they won’t need to leave anything behind.
• Player ratings and reviews: After a game, players can rate their experience and leave a review, giving valuable feedback to other players and helping them choose games in the future.

Get in touch if you’d like to explore the possibility of using Aftergame at your next awesome convention or event.

With Aftergame, you can ensure that everyone at AwesomeCon has a chance to join in the fun, no matter how niche their favourite game is. Even Todd.