This is the sixth and final part in a series breaking down our process as first-time exhibitors at PAX. This section addresses what we’d do differently next time, and our costs.

What we’d do differently next time

The answer to a lot of this is probably written farther up, but I’ll summarise here anyway.

Our preparation wasn’t bad. Next time around it’s possible that we’d arrange a different set of merchandise to reflect potential changes in the game, but I think we’d probably expect to bring merch again.

We might set the table up slightly differently. Ideally a merch board should be as near as possible to where people are going to wonder about it, rather than in the front where people are looking past it. The sheer lack of storage space is difficult, so ideally we’d figure out some organisational improvements.

Next time, I’d push harder to be included on the panel. And failing that, I’d turn up assuming I deserved to be there anyway. I don’t think I had the confidence a few days ago to demand to be included, so perhaps this was an experience I needed to have. It felt rubbish to be the only one of the winners not on the winners panel. PAX, get your act together and stop that.

We’d make sure our email subscription was prepared for our success. That was an oversight, but I am still very happy that overall we achieved said success.

I hope by next time we’d know which media people to reach out to in advance of the event. We don’t want to spam disinterested parties, but hopefully we can turn the next great opportunity into its biggest possible success.

In future we need to drink more water.

Costs breakdown

Outgoings (estimates, in AUD):

Showcase application – $40

Accommodation – $750

Travel/fuel – $110

Parking fees – $30

Merch (pins, tattoo sheets, collector cards) – $1500

Printing – $150

Flat-pack drawers – $50

Spin wheel – $75

Uniforms (t-shirts, hoodies) – $150

Staff costs – $180 flights, $50 food, $100 additional

Acrylic standees – $140

Custom magnets – $35

Custom tablecloth – $40

Tablet computer and keyboard – $125

Professionally printed copies of the full game – $200

Additional expenses – $150

Total outgoings (estimated) – $3875

Takings (AUD):

Merch sales – $1750

Total spend: ~$2125

It should be noted that we got very lucky in parts of our expenses – such as when we walked into Officeworks to buy packets of expensive photo paper and found that it was discounted almost 90%. It wasn’t the one we were planning to buy but we swapped our plans and took advantage of the price drop.

I have almost certainly missed out some of our expenses here, and our merch sales we do still have to pay tax on, so it’s not all going into our pockets.  Maybe that’s another $250 to account for. But this should give a rough idea.

If you happen to be from Melbourne, you could probably save more than $1000 on these costs – roughly, a week of accommodation, travel/fuel costs, and getting a friend there to help out. And of course, everyone’s set-up and expenses will be different – one of the other winners this year already had their game printed and could sell it at PAX, so their +/- would have been quite different from our own.

Final thoughts

Overall, PAX Aus 2022 was a really incredible experience. It’s amazing to see just how much enthusiasm there is for games – and on a personal level, just how much enthusiasm there is for our game. It’s one thing to have faith that that exists, it’s another to have proof.

If you think your game is ready for the Indie Showcase, I would very much encourage you to take the opportunity and submit. Being ready doesn’t have to mean printed or even print-ready. Be prepared that even with the prize it may be quite a costly weekend. If you have any questions, you are welcome to get in contact. I am no expert, but am happy to share what we have learnt. 

One of the big take-aways for me, rather nebulously, is that I belong here if I want to. I don’t know everything there is to know about games, or even a subset of them. It doesn’t matter. There is no reason that this industry ought to be exclusive. If you are a creator who feels similarly uncertain of your steps – keep going. Do your best. Learn what you can, from those who have already learnt it. And then – be different. If you want to be here, then you belong here. Just like me.

The PAX Aus Indie Showcase – tabletop – Class of ’22. From left to right: Sarah Whillier and Christopher Ng, Aethermon (Aethermon); Jono and Anderson Cheung, Yum Cha (Quokka Games); Lyndon Patrick Cullen, Pixel Star Frontier (Mauii Makes Games). Not pictured: Steve Dee, The Score (Tin Star Games).

This is part five in a series breaking down our process as first-time exhibitors at PAX. This section addresses what didn’t go so well.

What didn’t work

The demo took longer than expected:

We thought we could run a demo every 45 minutes – 20-30 minutes for the game, and 10 minutes for re-setting the table and debrief/feedback, plus a water break. Instead it was taking 20-40 minutes depending on the group, and resetting alone took almost 10 minutes, so we swapped to hourly demo games which worked better.

We ran a normal battle, a mini-boss battle, two story cards, and a boss battle. One option would be to take out the earlier battles and jump straight to the boss battle. This would work great for some players, but for others it would cause real confusion.

I don’t know what the solution is here, but I would advise that you test out your demo as much as possible beforehand to gauge your timeframe accurately.

Three staff members wasn’t enough:

I don’t think we could have known this in advance. If we hadn’t been very successful, three would have been plenty to have allowed shift rotation so that everyone could explore PAX and see something. As it was, we had almost non-stop playthroughs, and a line of visitors that was frequently eight people deep.

If we were in this situation again, we would probably find a last-minute promo group on Facebook and arrange an additional staff member. It would have cost a bit extra but we could probably have signed up a few extra emails, shifted a bit more of our merchandise, and taken the pressure off everyone including our visitors.

Improved organisation:

Our organisation wasn’t bad, but having done it once there are a few points that could have been improved. For one thing, our merch board should have been visible from the prize wheel. That way people could immediately see what they had won rather than asking us – especially as some of the prizes required a choice. Our prizes could also have been easier to search through. 

And finally, on the email sign-up sheet, next time I would write “USE CAPITAL LETTERS” halfway down the page. We had written it at the top but nobody read it, and it was a real struggle to read messy handwriting when inputting that data.

We didn’t drink enough water:

We had meant to supply our table with a few bottles of drinking water, above the reusable bottle we each brought in our backpacks daily. With such a crowd, it was really hard to find any time to take breaks (Chris didn’t take any over three days, and I only got about 35 minutes of break on Friday, then none), so refilling water bottles just didn’t happen. That said, with so many people, it was hard to find time even to drink the water, so that was a problem too.

Suffice to say, by the end of each day we were both badly dehydrated – and very hungry. This was stupid and I very much wouldn’t recommend doing it. Our patch solution was hydralite at our accommodation each evening – treat yourself like you’re about to have a hangover.

Vocal warm-ups would have been good:

I would estimate that over the course of the weekend, I alone spoke to about 3000 unique visitors. I was wearing a mask, and the room was loud, so by the end of Sunday I had completely lost my voice, and it stayed more-or-less lost for the next two days. It’s not a big deal, I’m not a professional singer or anything, but that is damage on the body. I don’t know if people do this at conventions, but next time I would be looking for some vocal warm-ups.

We got to see almost nothing:

Literally the only part of PAX I saw aside from bump-in and bump-out and our own booth was a comedy show on the Saturday night. That was great! (The Dark Room, if you get the chance.) 

But hey – victims of our own success on this one, and not really a complaint. This is just part of the thrill of a start-up company. As interesting as PAX seemed to be, the place I most wanted to be was right there at the Aethermon booth, building my own future.

Media??

When prepping for our PAX, we read a few other people’s experiences of running a booth at USA PAX events (very helpful, by the way, thank you to those writers). Most of these referenced reaching out to media in advance of PAX to start a conversation, get you on people’s radar, and possibly create some media coverage. PAX after all is only a few-days event – once it’s over your opportunity to make an impression is over with it. But if someone has written an interview or an article about you, potential customers might discover that days, weeks or months later.

I don’t know if this is a problem of the Australian game scene being smaller than the USA market, or that tabletop games just don’t command the same interest as video games, or whether we just didn’t do enough research, but one way or another, I had absolutely no idea who we could reach out to in advance of this event, and as a result, nobody came to talk to us during media hour, and very few during other hours too.

If there was a list of media attending the event we could have searched which of those people would be most interested for us to approach them, but we didn’t get anything like that. Now that PAX is over and we have some more time to think, we realised that we could have reached out to a Facebook group like “Board games reviewers & media” – next time, I suppose.

Emails:

In anticipation of growing our mailing list, we had recently switched from the services of MailChimp to SendInBlue. The subscription we have allows for a certain number of emails to be sent out in any given hour. Under normal circumstances this would be no problem for us, but we had forgotten to factor in PAX and should have temporarily upped our subscription fee to SendInBlue during the convention days, because after about 11am each day, people weren’t receiving a confirmation email when they signed up to our mailing list – there was too much backlog. Oops.

PAX panels:

When we won our place on the Indie Showcase, the fine people of PAX also asked whether we would like to speak on a panel with the other indie designers. Or rather, they asked if Chris would like to speak. There was no offer extended to me as co-creator.

As the hour of the panel drew near, Chris headed off and I ‘closed up’ our booth for the evening. Having done, I went to hear the panel, arriving a few minutes late. I walk in to see Chris and our fellow winners at the panel – including both co-creators of the booth diagonal to us!

Turns out, they too didn’t get more than one offer to speak, and sent numerous emails requesting this with no response (thanks PAX?!), but they made the wise decision just to try it anyway, and so both of them walked right up there and were not turned away.

In the grand scheme, it’s not a big deal, but I can’t help wishing I had done the same, and just turned up as if I belonged there. Lesson learned, but at the same time, in future I hope PAX reconsiders the way it makes these offers – especially if they’re serious about increasing diversity in the gamesphere. When you’re already wondering whether you belong in this industry, and then this happens, it’s hard to summon the confidence to push back.

Things to note:

• Double-check the timing of your demo.
• Maximum organisation, adapt to staffing needs if possible.
• Take care of your needs – water, food, breaks.
• Make yourself known to media in advance if you can.
• Panel? Yes.

This is part four in a series breaking down our process as first-time exhibitors at PAX. This section addresses what worked really well for us.

What worked

The response was amazing!

We have been working on Aethermon for two and a half years, most of that time in our bedrooms. Being able to show off all that hard work to such an appreciative audience was deeply satisfying, and really reinforces my desire to make this to the best possible standard that we can.

We got more than 500 new email subscribers:

As I mentioned above, our two intentions going into PAX were to get our game in front of players, and to grow our reach. We started with about 100 subscribers to our email newsletters. We now have about 600!

These are premium email addresses – our subscribers are interested in tabletop games, willing to spend money on games, like our visuals, and want to hear from us. These are exactly the kind of people we want to reach.

Of course the big test of the success of our email subscriptions can’t be known until we go to crowdfund and see how many of our subscribers are willing to back us. It is possible that some people only subscribed because they wanted to win some of our merch. But even for those email addresses – they are gamers, willing to spend money on games or they wouldn’t have been at PAX, interested in tabletop games or they wouldn’t have wandered through the tabletop hall, like our visuals or they wouldn’t have wanted merch, and now we have six months to convince them that they want to hear from us. At this stage, we’re feeling pretty good.

Having a sign-up sheet for demos:

Our mechanism here was a pen, a clipboard and a sheet of paper. It worked perfectly. We allowed up to five minutes to wait and then we’d accept whomever was available to fill the seats. Almost everyone remembered their designated time and was really punctual. Thanks, friends!

Having a sign-up sheet meant we could respect our players’ time. We understood they had plans and they could factor us into those. It also meant they respected our time because they could see how busy we were.

In fact, an interesting power dynamic occurred here. Sometimes a small exhibitor at a large convention is in the position of trying to gain the attention of passers-by. Because we were never short of players, we never had to convince anyone to join us (this applied to our merch set-up too), so visitors never got the hard sell from us. As a result, players behaved as though they were fortunate to be able to join us and were all really friendly, patient and polite.

If you were one of our lovely visitors – thank you so much for treating us with such courtesy. It was a long, hectic weekend and you made it so much easier and more fun.

PAX staff at the event:

Trying to get info from PAX’s staff in advance of this year’s event was not the best experience. I’m going to assume that they were very busy. By contrast, all the staff members I had any dealings with at the event were both helpful and lovely. Not sure how this will benefit future exhibitors but there it is anyway.

Acrylic standees:

We had 29 acrylic standees lined up against our poster at the back of our table. This was one of the most commented-on parts of our set-up. They were bright, colourful, and looked fantastic! We had these made at a larger size than we plan to have for our actual game, to make them more noticeable. Many people commented that they would be more willing to buy this game because of the acrylic standees than if it had regular minis or cardboard standees, so this was clearly a win.

Our poster:

Although we didn’t really plan for this, the lower half of our poster was directly behind our acrylic standees and featured a landscape, which gave a surprisingly epic feel to photos of the standees. I would definitely look into designing the poster to interact with whatever will be set in front of it in future.

That said, one other indie’s poster included not only their art but also how-to-play instructions, and another indie’s poster included a QR code to direct people to his mailing list sign-up. Both of these seem like great ideas.

Having giveaways and a prize wheel:

Because our playthroughs were booked out, we had to turn away a lot of interested visitors who would have liked to try our game. This felt really rubbish, and so it was nice to be able to offer people something else instead: “Unfortunately all our demo times are taken, but if you sign up for our mailing list you can spin our prize wheel and win some prizes.”

Furthermore, if a visitor to our stall was only moderately interested, we couldn’t convince them to care about us if all we had to offer was booked-out demo times, whereas now we have the chance to win them over.

The prize wheel itself was quite the attraction. We had plenty of visitors ask how they could spin the wheel, even if they hadn’t seen our merch board. It was just under half a metre in diameter, which meant it was large enough to be seen from far away, and even from a distance most people knew what to expect when they saw it.

The temporary tattoos were a total miss for some people, but a huge hit with others, and as mentioned earlier, they allowed us to extend beyond our section of the convention because people were wearing our designs as they went about the place.

The collector cards unexpectedly gave us some data about which of our characters were the most popular, and based on that information we’ve already made some changes. It also helped with our discount voucher (one of the spin wheel prizes) – by having a discount it encouraged some people to spend money with us who might not have, but by being able to buy an item for the full price of the voucher and not spend money, we weren’t forcing that onto anyone.

The pins were our most admired merchandise, and our best seller…

Getting our pins made in China:

We had two different designs for our pins, which are our two final boss characters (a sun dragon and a moon dragon). We offered them at the price of one for $10 or two for $15. By far the preference was to buy both pins. Of those who bought one, I would estimate half had already won the other design (on the spin wheel, or by daily high score in our tournament).

In terms of manufacturing, both were 4cms long, made from hard enamel, one design featuring gold-coloured metal and the other featuring silver-coloured. We reached out to a number of manufacturers on AliBaba, found a price we liked and a company we felt comfortable with, and they ended up being quite affordable. This was important because we weren’t at all sure in advance that people would want to buy them.

I know AliBaba is sometimes avoided by English-speaking buyers for fear of scams or communication difficulties, but we have found it an excellent tool – vastly more useful than Amazon or Ebay. Regrettably, neither of us has even remotely fluent Chinese language skills, but every company we have interacted with on AliBaba has an English-language staff member. The quality of merchandise delivered to us is generally excellent, and this was no exception – particularly at the price, and AliBaba offers an escrow service so you don’t have to worry about shady dealers. It’s really worth looking into, especially if your alternative is to employ an English-speaking middleman who is just going to do this anyway.

Packing a box-cutter:

As we were packing up and chatting with our fellow showcase winners, we all stared with longing at our giant posters. PAX would just throw them away, but they were far too big to take with us. Then we remembered I had packed a box-cutter in the fix kit, so we pulled all our posters off their frames and got to slicing them into portable chunks. This is a tiny thing, and my PAX experience would still have been amazing without it, but it also counts as one of my favourite moments from the whole weekend – coming together with erstwhile-strangers to mildly deface some property and have a great time. If this is you next year, consider packing a knife.

Things to note:

• Give people a reason to give you their email address.
• Respect your visitors’ time.
• Make your table set-up visually appealing.
• Your poster is a resource you can use, not just a poster.
• Don’t be afraid to try direct communication with manufacturers.

This is part three in a series breaking down our process as first-time exhibitors. This section addresses set-up, pack-down, and overview of each day.

The Convention itself

We arrived on Thursday morning, and started setting up at midday, the appointed time that PAX had assured us our space would be available for us. It was…but we were lucky. If our table had been on the other side of the poster, we would have had to wait another three hours before those tables were provided.

Setting up took way longer than we expected. If like our booth buddies you are only bringing your game, this probably won’t be the case, but we had anticipated an hour or two and took closer to five. That was fine though, we had all afternoon. By the end of the day, our booth was ready for its close-up.

Friday opens at 9am for media, and then 10am for general visitors. As an exhibitor, you are expected to be there when the hall opens, so we had an early start on Friday, but as a small creator we weren’t on anyone’s media radar and basically had that first hour to ourselves.

The rest of Friday was a whirlwind of activity, and we were snowed under with very welcome attention. By 6pm we were in dire need of a break/clock off. This occurred again on Saturday, and then once again on Sunday.

One thing to note here is that the tabletop hall stays open until 11pm. As much as it would have been nice to have run a few more playtests in those hours, we really needed some time off by that point – which means our booth needed to be ‘closed down’. We did this by buying a second tablecloth (plain, thick black cotton) to drape over everything, and used our tablecloth clips to fasten it in place. Then we left our flyers and a ‘vote for us’ competition QR code on top, collected all our tech in our backpacks, and could walk away.

Finally Sunday evening came around, and at 6pm all visitors are invited to leave the hall as PAX is over. Bring your high-vis clothing this day or you too will be invited to leave. There was a general sigh of happy relief around the indie showcase tables at this moment, I think we all felt deeply grateful for the experience and also totally exhausted. This was almost our first chance to socialise with our booth buddies as we all packed up our various booths. What lovely people! We got on great!

Packing up took much less time than setting up. All our items were in boxes within less than an hour, we headed off for dinner, then brought the car around to the loading bays and about ten minutes later everything had been stuffed higgledy-piggledy into the car. Success! 

Things to note:

• Give yourself enough time to set up.
• Make sure you know what hours you need to be there, and how to secure your property while you’re away.
• Be prepared that a successful convention might mean not getting to see the convention.
• High-vis on the first and last day.

Now to the interesting stuff…

This is part two in a series breaking down our process as first-time exhibitors at PAX. This section addresses what we brought to the convention.

What we brought

Our demo game, plus an entire demo backup kit. Each included:

• More than 350 cards
• Spinner
• Neoprene game board
• Character standees
• Dice

29 acrylic standees, ranging from 6cms to 15cms in height.

Two full copies of Aethermon professionally printed, arriving just days before we left.

• Unfortunately this was a big let-down. Although they were beautifully printed and looked really good, in the few weeks since we had ordered them, the game had already gone through some big adjustments and they were no longer representative of the game and mechanics we wanted to show off, so we effectively couldn’t use them. There’s not really a way around this, except not to be iterating or be at the point that you only need tiny adjustments – but hey, that’s what our self-made demo game was for.

A tablecloth with our name Aethermon printed on it.

• We made it black and only had details on the part of the cloth that isn’t on the table, so that the game itself and all the game pieces would stand out in photos.
• Also tablecloth clips to keep it in place.

 Two extra chairs, foldable.

• Our game fits up to 5 players, PAX provided us with 4 chairs, and hiring extras for three days was going to cost eight times as much as buying them ourselves.

Two magnetic whiteboards, twenty magnets, and a canvas.

• The whiteboards were for our tournament – each day’s highest scoring team won enamel pins. The magnets showed who played which character. They came with a marker and an eraser.
• The canvas displayed our merchandise. The merch could be won or purchased, and we had prices and examples pinned to the canvas. It worked okay, but half the time people ignored it in favour of asking us to repeat the same information to them for the thousandth time.

A flatpack set of drawers, on caster wheels.

• The top provided just enough space for a tablet/laptop to sign up visitors to our email list.
• Inside the drawers we kept our merch, our point of sale gadgets (no cash sales), and our staff/fix kit.
• Also damnit K-Mart, if your furniture says it comes with all necessary tools, it really should come with all necessary tools. We fortunately managed to source a philips head screwdriver.

A spin-the-wheel prize wheel on a tripod.

• This was for our giveaways. To spin the wheel visitors had to join our mailing list, or share our social media post, or join our discord server. People really seemed attracted to the interactive element of this, and it worked great to help draw a crowd.

About three boxes of merch.

• Enamel pins, collector cards, tattoos, as mentioned above.
• Three printed ‘field guides’ so people could decide which collector card they’d like.
• Two boxes of baby wipes, to apply the tattoos. This didn’t work nearly as well as a spray bottle of water that we packed just in case the baby wipes weren’t quite damp enough, and we entirely swapped to the water spray method within three visitors.

An assortment of tech, cables, and importantly – battery packs.

• A tablet and keyboard, to sign people to our mailing list. We had bought a super-cheap tablet so we wouldn’t have to be overly concerned about thefts, but on day two that stopped working so we had to swap it out for one of our laptops. Thankfully everyone was very respectful of our things while we were there.
• A phone to run a wifi hotspot, and to act as our point of sale.
• A square payments …thing, which allows you to scan credit cards and take payments, and interacts with the phone.
• USB-A and USB-C cables.
• Two hefty power bricks to charge the above devices.
• Getting approved for mains power at PAX is very expensive, it requires all electronics you want to plug in to be checked/approved, plus you buy the electricity itself at a big cost. Since we are a tabletop game, all our tech needs could be run from batteries so we brought some power banks and only used electronics that could charge from them.

Flyers, media kits, organisation, and other printed items.

• One clipboard for our email sign-up sheet in case the tablet/laptop didn’t work.
• One clipboard for our demo sign-up sheet, which worked great.
• 750 flyers on A5 paper. We probably gave away more than 600 of these.
• 50 printed media kits on A4 paper. We probably gave away 5 of these.
• Feedback forms on A5 paper. We printed about 150 and used about 30, but we didn’t push these hard, and many people were happy to share their feedback just by talking.
• Extra pens/pencils.

PPE.

• We brought a few bottles of hand sanitiser, and left one on the table. Almost nobody used this unprompted. Lesson learned.
• We brought two boxes of face masks, but had nowhere to put them, so only staff ended up using these. Still good.
• Quantity here was hard to estimate ahead of time and we way overcatered. People are weary of the pandemic and they don’t like masks, but on the other hand, one of our staff is immunocompromised.

A rubbish bin, 7L.

A staff survival/fix-it kit.

• For the staff kit, we brought throat lozenges, paracetamol, ibuprofen, tissues, antihistamines, sticky plasters, antiseptic ointment, hair ties, safety pins, hand lotion, breath mints, and muesli bars. This stayed at the convention the entire time. We also each brought our own backpack each day, with water bottles and mandarins, among other things.
• For the fix-it kit, we brought blue-tack, sticky-tape, cloth tape, scissors, a box-cutter knife, wire, wire-cutters, a cleaning cloth, rubbing alcohol, split pins, the aforementioned spray bottle, and extra pens and whiteboard markers. Basically if it could break we brought a backup, and we threw some extra stuff in there just in case. I should have added string.

Things to note:

• We were close enough to Melbourne that we could drive, and therefore could pack boxes of set-up gear. If we had been flying to Melbourne, our whole strategy would have had to change.
• Mains power is expensive at PAX. See if you can work around having to need it.
• Assume the free wifi isn’t going to work and plan accordingly, because once the place is buzzing, the wifi gets very slow.
• We really should have brought extra bottles of water.

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.