Today was the first Go Play Nation event I held and it went awesomely! My goal is to host 4 mini cons a year which start off with a large group activity to create more of a community. My hope is that by drawing people together for a shared activity at the beginning it creates more of a open group of folks not fragments as much by schedules.
Todays event involved a group 5k to kick the day off and then transitioned to a cook out and gaming. Things went off smashingly with the 8 folks we had in attendance. The rough sketch up for how many events I will be hosting and what they will involve is basically as follows:
- Early Fall/Late Summer: physical early morning event.
- Mid Fall: physical early morning event.
- Mid Winter: Social indoor event to start.
- Early Spring: Social indoor event to start.
Now here are some things I learned from running the event:
- Be careful to provide good directions: This caused many people to not end up in the right locations and lose out on the day.
- Provide a phone contact number incase of emergency direction needs: This enhanced the problem of not finding the right place.
- Skip pre-buying food: Due to the shortage of people I spent waaayyyy to much on food and if I waited till folks arrived and did a quick mini shopping trip with folks I could have saved money.
In the end this event was a minor success in a few ways:
- It solidified to the almost 100 members of our regional online club that an effort to build a community is real.
- It sets a president of success to help continue community growth.
- It gave me more experience in running events.
Overall this event was to small to really gain to much info to give to much more analysis, but I am hoping to log all the ups and downs of trying to build a local game scene as well as running semi regular mini cons. If anyone has any tips and tricks for running mini cons and building a local gaming scene I’d love to hear!
