I am currently running X-Wing in South Florida at a few stores here and will be making my 1st trip to GenCon in 2016! I plan to bring a few events to the Con as well.
Maybe someone from GenCon can do a search for me to see how many X-Wing Miniatures events were run last year and how many tickets were sold for them so I could get an expected number of interested players? That would be great if I could get access to that information so I can plan accordingly :)
Thanks, Arthur
This URL has what you seek:
http://gencon.highprogrammer.com/gencon-indy-2015.cgi/type/NMN/X-Wing_Miniatures_Game
The Fight in the Skies society plans to run X-Wing on Sunday of gen Con, more details later
Thanks for the link!
X-Wing Miniatures events were also prominent in the list of high unserved demand from 2015, so honestly you are more likely looking at a question of how many players do you think you can comfortable handle as opposed to how many will be interested.
- Derek Guder Event Manager Gen Con LLC
Derek, I was reading the GM/EO docs and did I read it right that I could only charge more for an event if I had an exhibitor booth?
The booth requirement is an old technicality that will be removed in the new EHP update, I believe, so you're fine to charge more.
With regards to event size, I'll just say that if you want to run a big tournament with all the players at once, be flexible on the time or run on off-peak times, like Thursday or Sunday.
Also, don't forget that plenty of people just want to play and don't need a tournament.
Generally, it's easier to find and dedicate space to a relatively small, consistetly running event than something that's big for just a few hours here and there.
I can be flexible on timing and I'll run some smaller 4-hour block 3-round Swiss events. Its a nice blend of competition and friendly play with a defined "winner".
My tentative goal is one larger event of 64 people sometime (so that would be 32 tables for about 6 hours), then I would be open to anytime on the any days to run a few more events in the 16-32 player range.
Possibly 5-6 events over the entire convention.
Are Wednesday nights generally harder to find players or just harder to get an event scheduled?
64 players on 32 tables? You would only be running 2 players per 8' table? That's going to be hard to find space for unless you are very willing to be flexible on time and squeeze in where I can fit you.
For context, all of the X-Wing events from last year were either the standard 4 players per table for miniatures events or were something special where all 12-16 players were gathered around a single special table.
16 tables is still a non-insignificant amount of space for a single event, but it's much more easily managed than 32.
Oh, and Wednesday is a pre-show night. It's not during the official run of the show, so it's really just folks who arrived early and want to get gaming right away. Space is somewhat limited there, and events are supposed to be by-fans, for-fans kind of stuff. I'm sure you could easily get enough people for a couple tables.
Thanks for that catch before it set into my mind when I prepare to submit the events.
Thanks for all of the info!
The Sparks group has in the past, also hosted some Xwing tables..
Amped is an under statement! I was bummed by FFG not have enough tournament Xwing going on. Glad to see some events being planned well ahead off time.