From the 7th to 9th of October 2022 Aethermon attended the PAX Aus game convention in Melbourne, Australia, as one of the winners of the Indie Showcase. This is a breakdown of how that went, designed to help future first-time exhibitors.
The Application
Rewinding a bit – we applied for a place in the PAX Aus Indie Showcase (Tabletop) at the beginning of July. We basically left it to the last minute to apply, which I wouldn’t hugely recommend, but thankfully it worked anyway.
The Indie Showcase is a competition. There are ten spots total, four of which were available to tabletop games, and this was only the second year that they were accepting tabletop applications (but the first to be in-person, as PAX Aus was an online-only event in 2021 due to the pandemic). I have no idea how this affected our chances, or what the competition looked like who didn’t win, but what I do know is that our fellow indie showcase winners had some pretty slick games at their tables, so I assume there must have been some great contenders who missed out.
A PAX booth is expensive stuff, and the Indie Showcase prize is a free booth, giant poster at your booth, plus some promotion on the PAX website and social channels. It’s a big deal. It’s also amazing as a small company who honestly couldn’t afford to attend otherwise. Even with this prize, attending was expensive and I’ll do a cost breakdown farther down.
The application involves a written component (you can download the questions before applying) and a video. It doesn’t have to be fancy, if you’re not a video person, the general advice seems to be: you can get away with the visuals not being mindblowing but make sure the audio quality is good.
Things to note:
- You can change/adjust/iterate on your game after applying.
- You can change your game’s name after applying.
This was our original PAX application video, made at the beginning of July. By the time of PAX at the beginning of October, our game has evolved considerably and this is no longer current.
Planning and Merch
Ultimately we wanted two outcomes from our attendance at PAX.
- Get our game in front of players, and get that feedback
- Grow our reach, and especially our mailing list, as much as possible
At this stage we are still in development, so we don’t have a game to sell, and those email addresses are super valuable for us for when we go to crowdfunding next year. To assist these two goals, we planned to have both our demo game and some merch at our booth. This decision worked well for us, but some of our fellow booth buddies had a much more streamlined setup of game only and that seemed to work really well for them too.
Pins:
Enamel pins are a big part of the PAX cultural experience, so we decided that we would get some of our own made. We did this via manufacturers on AliBaba, the Chinese online megamarket. They turned out fantastically, and were a big hit!
Temporary tattoos:
We also decided to get temporary tattoos made, likewise via AliBaba. Stickers are not recommended at PAX (if our visitors stick them onto the venue there would be a hefty removal fee for us). Tattoos seemed fun, and also meant that our designs would be highly visible to attendees because other attendees would be wearing them.
When they arrived there was a slight problem – testing revealed that our tattoos worked not only on skin but also even better than stickers on hard surfaces! At least it was suddenly super easy to brand all our stuff…
We did still use these at our booth quite successfully, but they needed to be applied to visitors’ skin, not just handed out.
Collectable cards:
Our final merch item was collector cards, which we designed and printed ourselves, at quite a lot of personal effort. Each card features one of our Aethermon characters, every Aethermon is represented on only ten cards, and each card is numbered out of ten. This was financially economical, but in terms of hours, maybe not the decision we would make in the future. These also were a decent success for us.
For a cost breakdown of all these items, see farther down.
Things to note:
- Be aware of lead times especially if buying or manufacturing overseas.
- Be aware of how much space you will have at your booth and how you’re storing items.
- Be aware of the impact of your merchandise on others.
Aethermon enamel pins
