Hello World,
I spent this past
Labour Day weekend at Fan Expo in which I got to meet some of the major
designers in the tabletop industry. I got a chance to speak to Robin Laws, Eric
Lang and Johnathan Lavallee among others over my two days at the convention.
During this time a was able to attend numerous panels on a variety of topics
regarding the tabletop industry. It is my hope to share some of what I learn
with you today in this post.
The first piece of
information I am pleased to share with you all is that tabletop games are
hitting their renaissance. Board games and RPGs have exploded in popularity
over the past few years and it has never been a better time to design or enjoy
playing tabletop games. Games of all types and genres are becoming increasingly
available to players through the internet as well as the invention of the board
game café – which has become an enormous community in Toronto, where I live.
This increase in availability has lead to much greater attention put on the
tabletop industry. As an example of this the attendance of Gen Con – the
tabletop gaming convention – has been increasing steadily over the past 5 years.
With the increasing community along with the invention of crowd funding sites
like Kickstarter, the barrier of entry has been dramatically reduced allow for
more games to be released
Crowd funding was
actually the focus of one of the panels I attended. The panel speakers consisted
of tabletop Designers, Comic Writers and a representative from Kickstarter.
Most of the panel focused on topics involved with running a successful
Kickstarter. With the main point being that the best way for a project to gain
attention is to have the creator be excited and passionate about their project.
The panelists went on to talk about projects in which the creators were not
excited about their project, which ultimately led to the project not building
the momentum needed to get funded. They continued by stating that people who
were passionate about their projects and that treated backers as partners, each
with their hand in the project, were much more successful. The more that you
can make your Kickstarter interesting and fun, the more people are going to
notice it and want to get involved.
Robin Laws, Author and
RPG designer stated “…It is as though Kickstarter was made for the tabletop
industry. Kickstarter’s size and scope resonate perfectly with that of tabletop
games”
I was also able attended a panel about board game design. A
large portion of this panel talked about areas of design I have talked about on
this blog, namely Know Your Audience, Fail Faster, and Play Testing. The discussions in the panel followed pretty
closely to what I have written in those articles, and rather than repeating
myself you can follow the hyperlinks to those articles. One thing that was
repeated numerous times throughout the panel was the simple lesson that in
order to design better games. Play more games. Play games you like, play games
you think you won’t like and most importantly play games you know you don’t
like. Only through playing a large variety of games can you develop a better
understanding of good game design. This is an interdisciplinary skill to, if
you are looking to make an RPG, play some board games. They are bound to have
some form of design information that will help with your own design.
Overall Fan-Expo was quite the learning experience and it
was great to meet some professionals in the field. I am sure I will release
future articles which contain the information I've learn over this weekend, so be on the lookout for those.
In the meantime thought I have finally created a twitter account
in which Intend to post game design musings as well as updates regarding the
blog and my games production. If you are
enjoying the blog and/or are interested in my upcoming game please follow me
@MTTJ_Patrick. Next frontier, a Facebook page!
Thank you so much for reading,
-Patrick
If you wish to receive playtest document as they are released feel free to sign up as a playtester on the right hand side. You can also stay up to date on blog posts by following my on Google+ or onTwitter @MTTJ_Patrick
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