In addition to running a booth at PAX East this year, we also managed to make an appearance at the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) during the very same weekend! As the winners of the video game portion of Logan Theatre’s Playtest Party last November, we were given the fantastic opportunity to present our game at this exciting venue. We shared also the booth space with Road to Infamy, the local tabletop game company who released a title with the same name and won the best tabletop game award at Logan’s Playtest Party.
While Ian and Erin were off in Boston presenting at PAX, I managed our shared booth space at C2E2, thankfully not by myself. Our good friend Michael helped me man the station, who of course was dressed in mandatory Quickstop attire as well.
The booth setup at this event was a little unorthodox since we were sharing the space with the Logan Theatre and Road to Infamy, but I think we made it work very well for all of us. The Logan Theatre set up on one side and featured a prize wheel that attendees could spin to win free movie tickets, popcorn, and other theater-related goodies. Road to Infamy utilized the other side of our tables with an awesome person-sized version of their crime syndicate-based card game. They also had a smaller table where they could demo their latest game Crypt, which is currently running a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. Check it out! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/roadtoinfamy/crypt-1
This put our section of the booth smack dab in the middle. Our booth came with two 8-foot long fold-out tables. Seeing as how neither of our boothmates really needed them, we were able to make good use of both tables by placing them side by side and facing them lengthwise out toward the show floor. This gave us plenty of space for our 2 demo stations behind an aisle-facing TV that displayed our gameplay video. This setup still left plenty of room on either side for Logan and R2I to present how they wanted. Here’s a crude graphic that probably explains it better than I can with words.
Being surrounded by the show floor on 3 sides was very fortunate. It allowed people to approach the booth from all angles and didn’t block access to either of our boothmates. Sharing the space was quite beneficial for all of us since people drawn to our booth by one attraction would be inclined to check out the other two while they were there.
Setting up our spot in the booth went very smoothly. Since neither Logan nor R2I needed electricity, we got to hog all 15 AMPS of power available to us and all of our cords were easily stowed under our vast table space. We left a small gap between the two tables to run our cables through, which kept our surface relatively neat and free of tangled-up cords. The tables also served to hold our numerous rackcards, controllers, speakers, monitors, mice and keyboards with plenty of additional room for any miscellaneous items we needed out of the way, but easily accessible. The underside of the tables gave us a place to hide our laptops that were running the game as well as all the extra utility items brought by us and our boothmates.
Despite C2E2 being more oriented towards nerd culture in general as opposed to just video games, we still received a lot of enthusiasm from those who stopped by. We had quite a few attendees return to play the game several times and a couple people who dominated the score boards were downright hooked! We also gave away lots of posters to players who managed to beat our challenge score. Speaking of high scores, someone actually set a new world record of $216,276 at our booth thanks to a bug they found. You better believe they got a poster for it!
Overall, the event went very well for us. It was another great opportunity to showcase our game to the public, get feedback, and a bunch of playtesting. We are very grateful to have had our booth sponsored by Logan Theatre and getting to share it with another very talented team of game designers!
-Bryan