I set up a public game night for a non profit organization. The event space has a bar on one side and Pizza and snacks are available. All ages are welcome as the bar side is segregated from where the gaming area is. We posted it in some FB local groups and I found some local subreddits and discord servers. I even made an Instagram account but it flagged my flyer as spam. It’s a smallish town with about 14k people but near a much bigger college town by about 30 minutes. I’m at a loss as what to do since I’m going to give it a go this week too. We discussed having a vintage video game competition such as an old arcade game. Am I missing something or are game nights just not that popular?
Here’s is the flyer minus the address and location.
Readers probably assumed they had to bring their own games, from skimming just the big text
Personally I would want to know what kind of games. There’s a wide range. Monopoly? Catan? A six hour indie extravaganza? Same with cards and video games. Like I would go to a sekiro tournament but avoid a CoD thing.
Good point. Ambiguity isn’t your friend here.
I threw a LAN party or two back in college (faculty sponsored gaming club). We actually got Bawls Energy and some now-defunct PC peripheral companies to sponsor. I designed and hung posters, put an ad in the student paper, did some word-of-mouth adverts in classes.
The first event had what I thought at the time was good turnout of about 30 people. Most people were OK with mainstream LAN multiplayer games of the time, but there is always that one dude who wants to play Hello Kitty Island Adventure or whatever.
In other words, maybe be somewhat specific and name games that are likely to be played.
I just mostly brought party games with me since it’s the first time. Like codenames, Uno flip, flip 7, coup, fuse, and also some decks of cards and a cribbage board in case anybody older showed up. As far as video games, pretty much same with some jackbox games, packman dx+, but if someone wanted to they could play fortnite or rocket league I put a bunch of games on there. I figured I would let the players set the tone for what they wanted to play and we would just provide the space and let it develop it’s own culture over time. I did have the idea to have themes like spooky games for the month of October and like I said maybe have a tournament once a month or something like that.
Yeah I think the sheer open-endedness is actually harming you here. I would narrow down to the point where you have some sort of concrete theme or intention beyond “come play any type of game”. You might even want to start with one specific game that’s somewhat flexible in terms of player count, at least in your promo material; you can always have backups and other options on hand in case more or less people show up than you were planning for.
Once you have a few regulars, you can start expanding. I think this sort of catch-all approach is better when you’ve already got some regulars and are starting to regularly get new people who express interest in other things.
Kind of unrelated, but are you cross-posting to places like Meetup? That’s how I found my old board game group, though that was years ago so it might be less active these days.
I think I’m going to push pacman tournament this week since that seemed to be a hit with the older crowd. It’s pacman championship edition dx+ so I think is more accessible than other pacman editions.
Agree with the other poster - too open is a net negative. There’s like 3 games I don’t want to play for 1 game I do.
There’s an RPG meetup I go to sometimes. They list some games on their blurbs so people know it’s not just a DND hangout.
That’s a banging flyer. As someone who has hosted big events myself, it can take a while and a few tries to gain traction. Don’t get discouraged yet.