Chris has been running gaming events for almost a year now, and with two more planned for the upcoming months, alongside other bigger ambitions, it’s good to take some time to reflect on what we have learnt from the experience. Some mistakes have been made along the way, but as a team, we are learning from them and working together to look at ways to help running events easier for both of us.
Not To Overcomplicate Things
When you have an overactive brain, it’s really easy to overcomplicate things without even trying. But we’ve learnt that the special sauce to making sure we don’t overcomplicate things too much, is to stop trying to add too much to the event.
You don’t need it, it will stress you out and no one will think any more or less of you from it not being there.
We just need to lay out the bare minimum that we need to run the event and – so far at least – we’ve had no complaints. Each event, we will add a little more, without stretching ourselves thin, which also means our events will grow over time.
Feedback is King
The purpose of events, in our opinion, is to make sure attendees enjoy themselves. So, getting feedback (the good, the bad and the ugly) is crucial to ensure that your audience will come back time and time again. If there were problems, that we perhaps weren’t aware of, feedback helps us to pinpoint them and find ways to make sure they don’t happen again.
Not To Try To Do It Alone
It’s easy to think that we can do everything on our own, but one of our biggest lessons is that we definitely can’t. It is so important to ask people for help, whenever it is needed. Whether it’s help painting boards, preparing player sheets, organising tables, you cannot do it all by yourself so make sure you ask for help.
Prepare Speeches When Needed
We’re not all naturally gifted talkers, and sometimes it can be really easy to forget everything that needs to be said especially when it comes to Welcoming gamers at the beginning of the day.
Whilst we’re not really fans of planning out every thing that needs to be said, we definitely found it useful having a list of bullet points for everything that we needed to talk about, at various parts of the day.
Not To Leave Everything To Last Minute
As creatives, we are inherently procrastinators. The edge of seaters. The pantsers. We will always leave something to last minute; it is almost literally in our DNA. However, don’t leave everything to last minute, especially the stuff that is either hard, boring or is going to take a lot of time.
Obviously, our previous point of asking for help, is going to help make sure everything isn’t left to last minute, but it’s important to remember not to do everything that you delegate to yourself.
We Will Always Have Our Regulars
It goes without saying, how grateful we are, that there is a group of guys who comes to (almost) every event.
This says more to us, than anything else because it shows that we are getting something right and that each of those individuals has enjoyed themselves enough that they want to keep coming back.
So, Chris and I wanted to take a brief moment to acknowledge each of you, who definitely know who you (obviously, you’re the ones who keep coming back!). We appreciate your belief in us, and we look forward to seeing you again at our next event 🙂
Interested in coming along to one of our upcoming TableTop Gaming events? Here are the details for a couple of our next events:
