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Spread The Word: Store Involvement

This is part 3 of my interview with Jim Dyson (The Other Coast) and Jesse Ellis (Boring Conversation), check out their podcasts! How do you go about getting a game store on board with hosting events and stocking product? James : For context, in Michigan (around 2nd edition) there was a popular game store with a weekly game night and leagues, but we’ve had trouble getting going with a new store. We had one store that tolerated us but never stocked Wyrd product.   Jim : It’s tough, and we’ve all struggled with it. If the store people are not interested in stocking product, are they ok with you playing? When you show up do you buy stuff?  James : That’s something I have encouraged, to at least buy a pop or some paint or something.   Jim : Showing up at a store, they’re businesses and need income. A lot of stores have concessions. Not shaming people who don’t, but try to make it a habit, that every time you show up, people in the group all get something. The store will eventually notice ev
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Spread The Word: Growing the Community

This is part 2 of my interview with Jim Dyson. Around the halfway mark, Jesse (from Boring Conversation pod) joined in with some of his thoughts. Theres a lot of people who reach out and say “nobody plays near me”. How can we improve communication to try and help people stuck between thriving metas to find a group? Jim : To those potential players: look for people on Facebook (“A Wyrd Place” group), or on Reddit. We have a regional discord, so if we meet them, we’ll invite them. We try to keep it fairly active, usually at least one conversation per day.   Host events: big tournaments, but also grow leagues, like our New Year, New Crew grow league. Each event is a series of weeks, with some nominal organization, but mostly they are regular opportunities to get games. Once people are in the physical space, we can figure out the regional hubs and meet there. After that, you can pick a person in the area’s Discord and play them, you don’t have to meet in a certain store. In the Discord, ad
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Spread The Word: Attracting New Players

Spread The Word will be a series of posts interviewing people who have had success growing a local gaming community. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Dyson (from The Other Coast pod) on this topic, and we had so much to talk about that I will be breaking it up into 3 parts to keep things digestible. We talked about Malifaux, but most of what we discuss could easily be translated to any miniatures game. What type of person is attracted to Malifaux? Jim : The folks who play Malifaux are not much different from people who play any tabletop skirmish game. There’s a degree of complexity that can turn off people. Malifaux does not appeal to a very casual crowd. If you show up to a board game night, Malifaux is too much for that kind of player. Malifaux is for the   kind of player who doesn’t mind having a little bit of homework before you play. Because you having to build and paint before you play, that’s the threshold.   Mechanically, it rewards players who enjoy non-linear p
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Dreamer: The Nightmare Keyword

This is the first crew I ever built and learned in Malifaux back in 2E, and its gone through a lot of iterations. Back in the day, you could swap Dreamer and Chompy back and forth. Earlier in 3E, Dreamer felt dirty to play: his Lucid Dreaming would add up to the point where in turn 3, you'd have most of your weaks pulled out, and you'd tend to win strictly off of your strong deck alone. The errata has brought the crew back to a normal level, and I'm overall happy with the changes. I have a personal connection with Dreamer as well. When I was a kid, I had terrible vivid nightmares for many years, mostly of hordes of giant rats coming out of the dark to eat me alive. After a long time, I eventually learned about lucid dreaming and slowly gained control over my nightmares, and now I have a semi-recurring dream world I visit every night where I have full-on anime protagonist powers. ANYWAY, onto the content. tldr: Strengths: Tarpit, healing, willpower attacks, ignore armor/inco
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