I assume Chris will have something to say on this, but I got into a 45 minute discussion with the CCG coordinator Monday at ConQuest about how to get CCGs to work at cons.  The reality is that they are dying off.  Even KublaCon, which has its roots in ManaFest - a convention originally for only CCGs, is seeing a major contraction.

 

The fundamental problem is that it's not cost effective for someone to go to a con just to play one event (or multiple minor events), unless, like what happened in SoCal recently, the con will give a reduced rate for limited con access, something I don't think any of them will do.  In SoCal, in the past, the V:TES draw was that there were 4 tournaments each convention, so you could spend the entire time playing.  In NoCal's past, there was critical mass of interest to where people would play all night and pickup games were happening constantly throughout the con.

 

In SoCal, they ran into the "why don't we just play in Mike's garage and spend money on prize support" problem.  Up here, we ran into "Where the hell are all of the Sacto/Davis/middle of nowhere players who wanted to play all of the time?  Oh, they got older and moved on." problem.

 

One of the things about CCGs is that they are huge investments, each one of them.  I don't mean in terms of money, $300 will get you 22,000 V:TES cards after all.  The number of people who crossover between any particular CCG and any other gaming pursuit is significantly less than the number of people who only have the time and interest to play one CCG.  Some, maybe a lot, of this is a function of age, of course.  Then, the number of people who are into multiple CCGs is significantly less than the number in one CCG, so there's hardly any CCG crossover.  I kept up with 3-4 CCGs at once for a while and that was crazy and I had tons of free time back then.  I used to get annoyed at the Magic players who wouldn't try something else back in '95-'96 and became much the same about a decade later.  Specifically to V:TES, there's a dearth of young players to replace older players who run into issues with jobs, kids, other interests.

 

There's a reason that you see the same folks - Brad, Paul, Oliver, Jeff Y, Russ, myself - in the V:TES events at the cons - we have varied gaming interests.  With the lack of varied CCG interest, you don't tend to see the likes of Dave Sisson, Bernie, bunch of people not well known to folks on this list anymore.  This level of playerbase is sufficient to get some games in, but I don't see it being all that sustainable.  DunDraCon had exactly one CCG event on its schedule.  ConQuest saw mostly Type P Magic players with just a touch of HeroClix, Axis and Allies Minis, Tomb Raider, and, of course, V:TES.  The CCG room wasn't even opened Monday.  Not one of the games being played was a major collectible game - HeroClix is past its heyday, Type P is an area specific Magic format.  There was no WoW, no Yu-Gi-Oh!, no Magic tournaments.  There's really very little reason for the cons, except maybe Kubla which still draws some of the old guard, such as the Shadowfist crowd, to bother with CCG events since the major CCGs have moved out of cons and with the lack of nostalgia CCGing.

 

The companies don't even care about supporting the cons.  Prereleases, storylines, etc. could all be worked out to fall on 3 day weekends, but if anything, the companies want to avoid such.  I don't blame them.  How many people take up a CCG because they saw it at a con?  Well, I did, by accident (fate) even.  Visibility is a huge thing to niche CCGs.  It's so much better, for instance, to have a game in a store than in someone's house.  Could be argued that con visibility would be just as helpful.  Though, I know it's hard to draw players into niche CCGs.  I pimped CCGs for 8 years or whatever and was constantly frustrated by how much effort went into finding 0-1 new players.

 

That has been ConQuest's philosophy the last two years - nostalgia.  People like me weren't there to pimp dead games but to give people who wanted to play the Babylon 5s, Tomb Raiders, Wheels of Time, Ultimate Combat!s, et al a chance to clean the dust off of the card boxes and try to remember how the games worked.  It's been a clear failure, not a total failure, but definitely a clear one.  The V:TES events have been far more productive than the dead CCG ones.

 

The only way to change things is to regain critical mass at the cons.  Kevin O'Hare threw out a couple of ideas.  One was a CCG library, a la the boardgame libraries at the cons.  I think that's a hard sell.  It's easy to move from one boardgame to another since there's only so much to a boardgame.  CCGs are quite distinct from each other with vast numbers of variables [cards] to keep track of to understand how to play the game adequately, even the familiarity can be misleading.  For instance, "ready" means something similar but significantly different in B5 and V:TES.  Another idea was to have mixed CCG events - Shadowfist against Dragon Dice, or whatever.  I thought this was an even less likely sell as, again, the sliver of the CCG playerbase that crossovers and would be into wacky is miniscule.  It might make more sense for dead games where there's no payoff to the game other than having fun anyway, but it cuts into the value of playing a living game.  Either of these ideas would probably need shills to create mass and buzz.  Gee, I could just play more RPGs rather than go to all this trouble.

 

Of course, the greatest need is marketing.  There's never any buzz to the CCGing at cons.  Everything seems to be word of mouth.  It's bizarre to me, but quite a few con goers seem to be convention program illiterate and don't even know what events are at a con, so there's no marketing in the program that's going to sell anyone and, by extension, no marketing on the web site that would matter either. 

 

Of course, for a dead game, where do you market?  You can't just go to the WoT CCG forums and post about the local con since, uh, I'm pretty sure such doesn't exist anymore.  If we write off dead games, then there's the primary outlets for the various living ones that can be spammed.  That's worked oh so wonderfully for V:TES where this list is people I already know, not the people that need to be discovered or recovered to hit the critical mass needed to get people to play pickup games.

 

Anyway, the goal of this post is to see if anybody has some ideas for better marketing or other ploys to get more CCGing going on at the cons.