Hey!

This post will contain a personal report on the Spiel conference. If you’re here for the updates, skip the first part and scroll directly to the bottom.

Because I’ve been busy the last few weeks. Mainly with preparations for the Spiel conference, the largest board game fair in the world. It was the first time I had a stand there, or at least a part of a stand. Since it’s super expensive, I decided to share a stand with two other publishers, and my other company, Key Card Games.

Here, I’d like to take you along the journey of preparing for exhibiting at a con and my experience of the four days at Spiel.

Spiel preparations

Book a hotel

The very first thing you need to arrange is a hotel. Since Spiel has 200,000 visitors, all hotels in Essen (Germany) will quickly get fully booked. And the ones with availability have raised their prices 3x. So booking a hotel when there’s still plenty of availability and not all hotels have adjusted their prices is the first step to a successful conference.

Book a stand

You need to do this early, too. The stands get sold out quickly. I am not even sure when bookings open up. But early May I decided that I wanted to exhibit, and by then it was too late. I emailed the organisers, and they told me all stands were booked. Dang it.

I decided to search for a publisher looking to share their booth. Fortunately, there’s a lovely Facebook Group for this. This is where I found Burnout Games’ post. They were already registered for a 15 square meter booth, and were at the top of the waitlist.

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I messaged them, and they still had their spot available. I took it. Next to Burnout Game, the booth would be shares with indie publisher Nekomancy. Both publishers are from Singapore. We all went into a WhatsApp group for further coordination.

From waitlist to confirmed

We were on the waitlist for a few months. Only in July, we received confirmation for our booth.

Booth layout and decorations

From then on, we worked on the booth layout and decorations.

Both Nekomancy and Burnout Game needed one table, I wanted one for River Rats and one for Monsters of Loch Lomond, we needed some space for our bags and our stock, and a sales counter to present the games and their price lists.

Then we also needed to decide on banners and wall decorations. We divided up the walls between the publishers and both Burnout Game and River Rats got a roll up banner which also served as a wall to create a space for our coats, bags and stock.

The below is what we decided on in the end:

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Design booth signage

Now all I had to do was:

• Design two banners for the wall and then printed – fortunately my friends from Singapore offered to take care of the printing 🙂
• Design a roll up banner and get it produced
• Make A5 sheets with all the products and their prices
• Design and print decorations for the sales counter

So I did that.

I did make a mistake with the first roll up banner. The resolution of the illustrations wasn’t high enough. So it got pixelated. Not pretty. I aligned with Rixt (illustrator) and Florian (graphic designer) and printed a new one.

I also arranged t-shirts for everyone who helped to demo.

Help needed

To manage demos at the two tables and handling the sales counter, we’d need at least two people at the booth at all times.

I was planning on scheduling a lot of meetings with localisation publishers at the convention. Some together with Peter-Jan (who I published Monsters of Loch Lomond with). So that meant we needed some help.

ortunately, Mathijs (designer River Rats), Rixt and Bas (a friend) offered to help out for differed parts of different days. Still, we needed more help. So I asked my co-exhibitors if they knew any people who’d be willing to demo. And they did! That’s how I found Angel. She helped out every afternoon, a true llifesaver
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Book meetings for Stamp Showdown localisation and licensing

Spiel is the biggest board game event of the year. This means all publishers, even ones based outside of Europe, are there.

So it’s THE moment to meet everyone in person and discuss potential partnerships.

I wanted to talk about licensing Stamp Showdown for after the Kickstarter. It’d awesome if it were published in all different languages and all over the globe.

So I reached out to many localisation publishers and booked around 25 meets. If you’re interested how I approach this, let me know, and I’ll write it out on another blog post!

Figure out how to get paid

This was simple. With your phone, you can now enable “Tap to Pay”. Then people can use their debit or credit card or Apple/Google Pay to pay directly. I used Stripe and Mollie for this.

At Spiel

First day of Spiel

Unfortunately, Peter-Jan got sick. So he had to get some rest before joining at Spiel in Essen. Essen is a three-hour drive for us.

So I had to go by myself. Bas and Mathijs would be joining too, but had their own method of transport. And I had to be early to set things up. So the alarm went at 4am, and I drove off around 4:20. I arrived around 7am, and parked the car at P2. I had pre-booked the parking for the first and last days.

P2 is a 10 minutes walk from the convention center and I had to bring all my material and stock. So I had to go back and forth twice.

I set everything up and soon my co-exhibitors also arrived.

Well before 10am, the opening, we were all set up.

the booth and our friends from Burnout Game and Nekomancy

Convention days

The days at Spiel are all pretty similar and consist of attending the pre-booked meetings, demoing River Rats or Monsters of Loch Lomond, selling the games, and going by some booths of publishers who I hadn’t managed to get in touch with before the con.

It was a lot of fun! People were super excited while playing, resulting in good sales, and all publishers were incredibly impressed by Stamp Showdown.

River Rats demo

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almost the whole team

What’s next?

22 of the publishers I spoke with were interested in further evaluating Stamp Showdown. They usually get anywhere between 30 and 300 games for evaluation at Spiel. They have to play them in different settings and decide whether it fits their future catalogue.

This takes a little while. So now I am waiting for their feedback 🙂

Next convention: Het Spellenspektakel

The next convention is around the corner (the weekend of 8 and 9 November), so I had to prepare some more! This time I have a booth only for River Rats and Stamp Showdown. So I need more booth signage and people to help me.

If you’re there, come and find me in hall 10 booth 54:

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What makes game conventions fun?

That’s easy. It’s meeting all kind of cool people and connecting over a shared interest.

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At Spiel, I also met Florian – who did graphic design for River Rats and Stamp Showdown – for the first time in person! It was really awesome to meet him after having worked together virtually on two projects.

Florian is also a game designer, and he made a cool print and play game: Rook & Ruin – now with a campaign in its final hours on Gamefound.

Rook&Ruin

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Rook&Ruin is a chess rogue-like deck-builder that can be played as a roll & write by using a multi-column table.

As the lone King chess piece, you step into a crumbling dungeon, trying to survive a maze that thinks like a grandmaster. You draw your actions from an expanding arsenal of Echoes, a set of special abilities inspired by classic chess movements.

It’s currently on Gamefound, and the campaign is almost ending. Make sure you check it out!

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That’s all for now!

-Robin