Thursday, September 14

The Power Of The Geek

Yesterday I thanked Andy for his nice write-up and session report on The Geek. I was more pleased with the write-up and rating, as they boosted my average rating by quite a lot, and they described the game nicely too. It turns out however that the session report was the more useful.

BGG has sections on the front page for recent reviews and session reports. The Geek has tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of users. Only a tiny fraction of those are aware that Border Reivers exists. Only a small fraction of those will want to own a copy, so what I need to do is increase the awareness. Andy's session report was on the front page of The Geek for nearly twenty-four hours. As a result, a bunch more people looked up the game and some of those are interested. I got another order, and a couple more enquiries from the States. I'm not expected anything from the American interest due to the exchange rate, but it's all good exposure, and I'm pleased with the number of people who want to buy a copy based on what they've read. Very encouraging.

In other news The Wife generously went shopping without me last night so I got a chance to get a load of construction done. I finished another copy, and did some prep for the next round of gluing. The tiles are definitely the construction bottleneck - I need to think of ways to streamline their construction.

Paul Morrison of Morrison Games has also published his own game, he's used a machine for both glue application and cutting out, but I don't think I can afford either of those machines - so until I think of a better way I'm going to have to continue doing it all by hand. You can read about his experiences here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

boardgamegeek is a strange animal... and it's hard to know what will get attention and what will fall flat.

The session report wasn't a brilliant piece of writing, nor was it particularly in-depth, but I think it served to flesh-out the game a bit and I'm really pleased if that led to new interest in your game...

From my own pov, if a game lacks reviews/sessions/pictures etc then I'm more likely to be put-off finding out more about it.. all these things add character and flavour to the game, and show me that people like it and want to play it.

It might be worth asking a few of the other BGGers who have played it or bought a copy to write a review or session or something... that may seem a bit cheeky, but I imagine that the people that have bought the game so far would be happy to add content to the geek for it... e.g. SteveK2 seemed like a nice bloke when I met him at "Cast are Dice" and he owns a copy and has played it... similarly I'm sure Ben (Aelf) would.. he's a top bloke and was proudly clutching his copy in the hotel bar on the Saturday evening of the con.

Jackson Pope said...

Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't feel comfortable asking people to contribute to my marketing campaign though - they've already coughed up for a copy of the game, marketing should be done at my expense. I'm hoping that as more copies get out there and get played sessions and reviews will start to accumulate of their own accord from people who want to do it for their own sake.

We shall see...