My favorite way to market our products is to facilitate and encourage them to get to the table more often. Your table, my table, the tables of reviewers, ambassadors, etc–any table will do. The more our products get to the table, the more they’re exposed to people, and hopefully the more fun people can have with them.
This is a big part of the reason why we support our products with reprints, expansions, and ongoing reviews, as well as focusing on accessibility (Watch It Played videos, ability to teach to new players on the fly instead of frontloading rules, etc). Our goal is to bring joy to tabletops worldwide, but a key element is that our games must actually get to the table.
Perhaps my #1 favorite way to accomplish this goal is through play-and-win donations for game conventions and 100+ person events.
Play-and-win is a convention concept where people can check out a game, play it, and then enter their name in a lottery to win that specific game at the end of the convention. If I donate a play-and-win game to a convention, it can be experienced by dozens and dozens of people in a short amount of time. Only one of those people will win it, so if other people liked the game, they’re now informed in their decision to purchase it later.
I’ve been talking about play-and-win on this blog for a while after discovering it at St. Louis’ own Geekway to the West (which I’m attending again this year–I highly recommend it), and I’ll post those links at the bottom of this entry. Play-and-win was paused due to the pandemic, but with conventions starting to bustle once again in late 2021 and 2022, we’re back to sending out dozens of games each month to support conventions around the world.
Today I’m going to focus on the play-and-win Google Doc that I created and maintain, as well as my current approaches to maximizing the potential of play-and-win for publishers, conventions, and gamers.
Publishers
If you’re a publisher who likes the play-and-win system, but you don’t like getting solicitations from hundreds of conventions, the Google Doc is for you. You can simply enter your information on this tab, which communicates to the participating conventions that you’re in the know and don’t need to be contacted individually.
As a publisher myself, my process for sending out play-and-win games is that I have a calendar alert late each month to remind me to check the Google Doc for conventions happening 2-3 months in the future. So, today (March 27) I’m looking at conventions happening in May, June, and July.
The number of games I send to a convention depends on the size of the event. Sometimes the play-and-win coordinators enter their information on the Google Doc and forget about it, so I help to remind them of what the package is by including the words “play-and-win” as part of the address label.
I try to keep our ambassadors informed about the various conventions that feature our play-and-win games. If any of them attend those conventions, they can make sure to drop by from time to time to see if players have questions. Otherwise, you don’t need to be worried about having teachers present–people who use play-and-win are usually comfortable to learn the game from the rulebook, and random fans of the game often stop by to help out.
Last, while we donate our games to play-and-win sections for free, it’s perfectly reasonable for you to offer a convention a discount instead of a free game. This can actually be helpful to the convention, as it lets them buy exactly what they think will be the most exciting for their attendees (instead of letting you choose).
Conventions
If you’re completely new to play-and-win, read this blog entry about the core details (or these instructions on the Geekway website). Then take note of the following:
- Please enter your convention on the Google Doc (use open rows at the bottom of each month or insert a new row). In doing so, you’re committing to use any contributed games for play-and-win, and you’re committing to actually having a play-and-win section with at least a dozen total games (even if it means allocating part of your convention budget towards buying games specifically for this purpose). You can now indicate if you prefer different games or multiple copies of the same game.
- In filling out the Google Doc, there’s no longer a need to contact publishers–particularly publishers on this tab–to solicit donations. You will either receive games 30-45 days before your event…or you won’t, in which case you have plenty of time to purchase games to fill your play-and-win section. Even the publishers on the Google Doc aren’t required or obligated to donate games.
- At least several weeks before the convention, tell vendors which games were donated for play-and-win so they can stock those games at the event. The play-and-win section should close before the vendors close their booths.
- When you receive the games, prepare them to be played (i.e., punch the punchboards, open shrinkwrapped decks of cards, sort tokens, etc). This serves the attendees hoping to show up and start playing.
- It never hurts to follow up with a publisher after a convention to let them know how their games did in the play-and-win section (number of plays and ratings from participants). I understand that this is extra work, and I won’t ever hold it against a conventions for not doing so, but it’s really nice when conventions do this (in recent memory, TantrumCon and TokenCon did so).
- I recommend only letting each person win at most 1 game–that way you spread out the prizes among the most people. Also, instead of interrupting the convention to announce the winners, simply post them at a few key places around the convention hall or on an online forum designated for attendees to check.
There are other tips from specific conventions on this tab of the play-and-win Google Doc.
Gamers
If you like the idea of play-and-win, feel free to check out the conventions listed on the Google Doc. You might discover a nearby game convention that you haven’t heard of.
If you’re new to game conventions, I think you’ll find them to be very welcoming. I’m an introvert who does not get excited about big events, but my experience at Geekway has been really invigorating. There are countless times when I’ve been invited into a game or when someone offers to teach a game, which I really appreciate.
***
What are your thoughts on play-and-win?
Also see:
- a developer has created some proprietary play-and-win software
- An Open Letter to Small Game Conventions from a Tiny Publishing Company
- The New Play-and-Win System
- The Hard Data Behind Play-and-Win
- The Magic of Play-and-Win: Data from Geekway 2015
- 5 Google Spreadsheets That Can Help Every Tabletop Game Creator
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16 Comments on “The Current State of Play-and-Win (2023)”
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[…] Play-and-win conventions: We send hundreds of games each year to play-and-win sections at conventions whose coordinators added their information to our publicly available Google Sheet. […]
Thank you so much for your periodic posts about Play-and-Win, Jamey.
Have you ever had to hire a 3rd party organization to act as intermediary between Stonemaier and the conferences? Your experience has always been that the conferences run the Play-and-Win sessions, without Stonemaier having to arrange staff or volunteers for those sessions, correct?
My pleasure! For play-and-win, I am the intermediary: Conventions fill out the Google Doc, and I create “orders” for our fulfillment centers to send the games. For conventions in general (particularly those at which we attend or have an official presence), my coworker Dave coordinates them.
Thanks, that fills in the missing bits.
Hi Jamey!
I reached out regarding hosting a play-to-win for our local board game community and was informed it’s limited to conventions. Would you consider expanding that to include consistent groups?
My intention was to host the play-to-win over the course of a month (we have 2-4 meetups each week) and tracking everyone that had played over that period before conducting the lottery.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!
Thanks,
Justin
Sounds like you have a great gaming community! How many people attend each meetup in your group?
We’re getting there! We’ve started up a weekly game night as a part of establishing the community and worked with other organizers to incorporate meetups that were happening already, but didn’t have a place for folks to connect or organize outside of just attending the nights.
We get about 30 people on our main night with 10-20 on other days.
That’s great! We’re giving away a game that we would honestly prefer to sell, so we need to reach a certain number of people to justify the expense (100+ people per event). However, maybe you can find a way for everyone to contribute $5 and vote for a few “games of the month”, you buy them with the funds, and a few people take home the games at the end of the month.
I run a board gaming league at a board game store and I am looking for things like this to support the league. I enjoy doing lucky-door prizes because I want people to have fun while playing, rather than trying to win.
Games like MtG have special promos that they send to trusted stores who sell a certain amount of product to encourage the game to be played further, and I am wondering whether this is something that exists in other games at all?
I think most publishers–even if they don’t have an organized play system–will gladly support retailers who go above and beyond to host events around specific games.
Hey Jamey, great article and recommendations here. Thanks for the brief mention of TokenCon, too! Your final recommendation of allowing any individual to win only one game is something we don’t do, but have considered. The reason we decided against this is it tends to make people only want to play games they think they most want to win and maybe not take a risk on games they haven’t heard of – even though they can choose not to be entered in every game they play. It can also create some logistical issues where a game has only a few recorded players and they have all previously won something else, which means you really need to randomly draw the winners of the least popular games first. But then someone may win the game they are less interested in and be out of the running for the one they really want. I don’t think there’s an easy answer and it probably depends on the individual con, how many PTW games they have and how much participation they have. We’ve found the spread is usually good anyway without having to restrict wins, but we have a lot of participation.
Thanks for sharing that perspective, Paul. The way Geekway gets around that is that they give you the option on a card to note whether or not you want to be eligible to win the game. This encourages people to try lots of different games but only pick a few that they’re eager to win. That system has worked really well, and I think it’s been much better received by attendees than the years when some people would get lucky and win 5 games while 5 other people wouldn’t win anything.
Jamey, do you have any thoughts about something with FLGS? For example, this summer (I am a teacher and have summers off) I was thinking of leading various sessions of games (possibly SM exclusively – Expeditions for sure when I receive it). Is there something I could give participants that boost both SM and the FLGS?
Mike: Thanks for asking about this! Something that some Stonemaier Ambassadors have done is to host learn-and-play sessions for our games at their local game stores. Stores like it, and there are definitely people who would rather learn a game from a great teacher than from a rulebook. :)
I probably get only 1 – 2 emails a year from having filled out the Google Doc. Just sharing my experience for any potential publishers who are looking to fill it out as well.
That’s great! Not that it’s bad to hear from conventions, but I think having the Google Doc enables more automation and decreases friction.