Cancon Debrief

CanCon2020 is over, and with it, a time to decompress, to take a deep breath, and to recover. It’s also a weekend full of short stories.

Customer Feedback

We talk about our games a lot over the course of the weekend. Commonly, people buy games on day 1, take them home, play them, come back and talk about them, and in many cases, buy more, which excites me a lot. Several of our games have stood the test of time, in my opinion, and players are likely to talk about liking them. Now, I know that people are inclined to be kind in person, and I understand that, but it’s still easy to be and stay mad if you feel wronged.

Basically, I haven’t, it seems, pissed anyone off.

There are still ways our games can be improved, and there are some details on that front.

One weird thing that happened was we sold most of our copies of Cafe Romantica, a game we simply did not expect to sell well at this con and which I almost left most copies at home. It’s a great game and I’m a fan of it, but it’s surprising to me that this weekend, it did well. This is something about our current line up I have to grapple with: That a bunch of our games are doing their main job of being part of a selection for people to browse. I only sell one or two copies of some of our games, and I don’t need all of our games maximally available at all times, but success is a matter of rolling lots of dice, and so, more games is more dice.

What did I learn?

Access Issues

One thing I got to do a lot this weekend was explain my games to people in terms of things that make the game good for them. This meant being honest with people about player counts and game complexity – kid games have a whole range of design needs, and if you were looking for a dense, complex game, most of our games aren’t quite there. Social deduction, planning ahead, drafting games, all sorts of talk about people who may or may not be aware of the kind of things I’m talking about – there’s a lot to be done explaining and understanding games, then doing it again twenty times in the day.

Some holes in our collection though:

  • All our adult-targeted games are reading heavy. Our kid-aimed games are reading light, but if you have reading difficulties, our card games that are aimed at adults are hard to play.
  • We have one cooperative game. Still haven’t fixed this, despite it being Fox’s and my current favourite kind of game to play.
  • Lots of social deduction games, not as many ‘watch a system work’ games.

Handling The Heat

CanCon this year happened on a very hot weekend, but not the hottest; we’ve had worse days. The main thing that happened this time was we planned our day to minimise the amount of times we left the building; one trip to another building, at the start of the day, then minimal leaving afterwards. We had stocked up on water, we stayed in cool locations, and we made sure our transport was done in as few trips as possible. Even then, it was still awful dealing with things like getting into a car that was full of stuffy air and heated metal fittings.

That said: I need to get a hat. I felt the sun on the back of my neck and side of my face a lot, I should do something about that. Also also: I got a haircut before I went down and that was a really good idea.

The Haul

I did buy some games, including a ‘mystery box’ game box, which was a cool looking pile of games in a mystery booster. That means there are some games I got that I was planning on getting, some games I got I was not planning on getting.

First, when I was interested in the storage solution for Star Realms, the day after I wrote that, Star Realms held a kickstarter for a deluxe box. Then I looked at that and realised: No, I don’t want that. Instead I decided to buy a $12 Ultimate Guard deckbox, which will do fine for my base copy of Star Realms. I’m not here to all-in on it.

I did see some of those games, and in the light of having them, didn’t want them enough. That’s okay! I found something else instead, and that’s the glory of Ding-And-Dent and Bring-And-Buy. There’s stuff that just I wouldn’t have thought of.

What I did get however, is, just as a list:

  • Katamino
  • Purrlock Holmes Furriarty’s Trail
  • Ninja Taisen
  • 10′ To Kill
  • Among Thieves
  • Rox
  • Bang!
  • Aerion
  • Realm of Sand
  • Newfoundland Jam
  • and Sakura Arms

Maybe you’ll see some reviews of these!