Dice Tower Con 2017: After-Action Report

For Immediate Release
July 24, 2017

ORLANDO, FL -

First off, my apologies for the tardiness of this report. We were leveled with con crud upon returning from the show (the curse of the demo rep!) and between that, resetting from Dice Tower (and Origins, which we never fully got to recoup from before setting off for Dice Tower) and preparing for Gen Con, it’s been a zoo here!

IGA had its own room at DTC, in “Antigua 1”. The setup was ideal; we could sell, demo, and playtest all in one room, set the hours, and secure the room when we left for the night. That was awesome. The location… Less so. Our room was down a hall with no other exhibitors or attractions, so our foot traffic was pretty abysmal. If not for a sticker program DTC did (think the Cheese Weasel exhibitor scavenger hunt at Gen Con, but with stickers) I don’t know if we’d have seen 200 people in the room all five days. We did the best we could to haul in people from the hallway with banners and Minions, and the con staff tried to help us with call outs in the main gaming hall, but there’s only so much you can do to combat that.

Sales were slow at this show again — this was reported pretty universally among exhibitors. Cool Stuff has a massive ding and dent sale at Dice Tower and restocks it every two hours — the lines for it are usually out the door. The combination of Cool Stuff and a flea market that ran all morning Saturday seemed to vacuum up all the money at the con. I do not know if it will be financially viable for IGA to do a vendor presence at DTC next year if this structure continues, which I see no reason to indicate that it won’t.

Because slow sales mean leftover stock, several of our members (old and new) left us stock at the end of the show. Minions and retailers should definitely check out the IGA Store, as you’ll find a ton of new goodies from Tortured Earth, NSKN, Formal Ferret, Attack Dice, and others to choose from.

We did manage to do some pretty good demos and playtests throughout the week. We ran a ton of Roll Player (which won Indie Publisher Game of the Year from Dice Tower – congratulations!) and other favorites. At this point, I believe all demo reports from the show have been filed.

We had our first-ever dedicated Prototype Day on Thursday, featuring demos of Sparkle*Kitty and Rise of Tribes from Breaking Games, Superbeings from Alienplay Games, Objective: Vietnam from Recon Games, Maximum Apocalypse from Rock Manor Games,  Clockwork Renaissance from Blue Fool Games, and others. We pitched a few games to interested publishers — the publishers should have already been in contact with the designers of the affected games. Not every game got picked up, but we’ll keep trying!

We did recruit a few new members at the show, including new Pro members Gigamic and NSKN / Strawberry Studios. Welcome to the team, everybody! We’re now over 650 members, which is a huge achievement for us before our “official” 3-year anniversary. Even more impressive, we’ve now crossed 150 IGA Pro members! That’s fantastic news for us, because more Pro subscriptions means more cons we can attend, more features we can add, and more work we can do on your behalf. The bad news, however, is that our Pro members still account for only 26% of our total members. For the same reasons we mentioned above, if you’re still on the IGA Starter plan, we strongly encourage you to go Pro and help support our continued growth. If you haven’t looked at the list of Pro membership benefits in a while, do yourself a favor and check again — it’s more than doubled in the last year.

While we’re on the subject of recruiting, we’d also like to welcome the twelve new Minions that joined us at Dice Tower Con, and to congratulate Minion Aaron S. on his first IGA convention action. Aaron did a fantastic job helping us out Saturday and Sunday, and made his on-camera debut with an impromptu video demo of Superbeings Jumbo Card Game. Victoria and I would also like to thank Nathan, Andrew S., Andrew B. and Danny for your assistance as always. We couldn’t do what we do without you.

Remember, gang, we’re now less than 4 weeks away from Gen Con 50. Now is your final chance to book Gen Con demos in our booth or the event hall or send us stock to sell for you. We’re working on some cool new booth upgrades for Gen Con which we think are going to look great if we can get them done in time. Members wishing to book an appointment with Matt and Victoria at the show may do so at http://igamatt.youcanbook.me. We’ll be in booth 361 – a huge upgrade from our previous spots – in a 20×10 booth. Spread the word!