Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] ICE Awards 2010 post-mortem: Thanks

  • From"Jeff Wolfe" <jwolfe@xxxxxxxx>
  • DateSun, 11 Jul 2010 15:25:56 -0400
> Feedback from the booth.
>
> It would be great if when teaching people fan created games that there
> were handouts for each game - with the name, rules, and equipment
> that the game needs. That way people can come to the booth with
> that handout and know exactly what they need to buy in order to play
> it. And we could have a copy of the handouts in the booth so we
> could look at them when trying to help someone figure out what game
> it is they are wanting to buy pyramids for.

It never occurred to me that people would want to buy product on the basis
of our little award nominees.  I had some vague notion in my head of
indirect benefits to the pyramid line, but that's just awesome.  Sorry we
didn't support the booth this year.  Clearly we need to do something next
year.

My first thought when I read about having handouts was that it could break
our budget, since we don't have one.  How many copies do you think we might
need if we made copies for everyone to take with them?  As I recall, all of
the rules were several pages long.  Since they come from icehousegames.org,
they're originally formatted for the web, and reformatting them to take up
minimal space could be tricky, especially since we're not the games'
authors.  I don't remember how much Bryan reformatted them before he printed
them.

Budgeting considerations aside, I liked having bound copies of the rules in
the Lab which could not be removed.  At the very least, we should make
another bound copy for the booth.  If we can afford it, it would be great to
have handouts.  I probably would've taken a set myself if they had been
available.  I still haven't managed to print all of them yet.

Would it make sense to require the designers to reformat their rules to a
printable format as a condition of receiving a nomination?  Or do we want to
take that job upon ourselves?  If we do make a take-with-you copy, I
wouldn't want it to simply be a reprinting of the web rules.  The quality of
what we hand out reflects upon the games and the awards (and indirectly,
Looney Labs), so I would like it to be as high quality as possible.
Trifolds or booklets that mimic the emerging Looney Labs standard would of
course be ideal.

One last thought: If we can't manage full-blown copies of the rules, maybe
we could have a single trifold handout that had blurbs and equipment
requirements for each game.  The front and back of the trifold would be all
about the ICE Awards, and the inside would be three panels with one panel
per game.  Alternatively, maybe we could format it such that it contains a
tear-out ballot, with all the information you would need to take to the
booth.  Okay, forget what I said above.  I want us to do this.  A trifold
with a tear-out ballot.  The back of the ballot would have a very brief
summary of everything, so it's still useful after it's detatched.  The front
and back of the trifold would be all about the ICE Awards, and the other two
inside pages would be all about the nominees (which you could take to the
booth even after you've voted).

Which brings us back to: how many would we need?

- Jeff