Pyrkon 2023 my internal thoughts

It's been a few days weeks after Pyrkon so it's time for some summaries.

I've been trying to publish this note for quite some time but it's always something ... 
This time I'm going to keep it short and simple!

It's 2023 and after a three-year break I'm back, as always doing two events to spread the small-scale love

There are three two one things that I want to talk about and that is events made by me!

Sure, there were quite a few events available throughout the entirety of the convention. From Sci-Fi through modern/historical all the way to fantasy! There were tourneys and casual gaming.
Big company shows (Warlord and all their systems) and indie guys (like me)!

However, because of the fact that I was running events, I was actually unable to attend most of them ...

Don't get me wrong, I knew that running two events 4 hours each meant that I would be unavailable for some (most?) of the events but I did not expect what I got this year!

I'm not sure if it's the pandemic or the war in Ukraine that opened tactical interests in people but in my quite long history of doing events on conventions never have I seen so much interest in my "work" (why in quotes? I'll explain later).

My Epic Armageddon events usually gather some attention but this year was something different.
Instead of the expected 4 hours I talked and made demo games for five, maybe five and a half. There were a lot of interested people asking questions about the rules and/or models and quite a handful of players who wanted to try the game out!

It was the first day and after that event my throat was sore! That was something new and invigorating! However, that meant that on that day I did not have the strength to actually see anything else (it was the day of my arrival).

On the second day, I ran a Full Spectrum Dominance event. Again planned event time was for hours. I was not my first time running a promotional event for an indie game so I thought I knew what to expect. Boy was I wrong! The magic of The Lazy Forger models and small-scale skirmish appeal ended up in me doing an over six hours event (maybe six and a half) which ended only because I desperately needed to eat/drink something!

Lots of questions lots of interest in the game and models! It was really nice to see and experience it!

It also meant that after doing the event, and grabbing some food I was almost entirely spent and had no energy to grab a different game :( 

By Saturday afternoon I did not feel that I was participating in a convention I felt like I was at work, hard work. On the one hand, it was really exciting, interesting, and fun on the other it was soo tiresome that it sucked all of my energy to try out other games (and I did want to try a few!).

Lessons learned

• I printed some promotional banners (big word for an a4 graphic with QR codes) which pointed people to my Facebook and specific interest groups/discord. That was a 10/10 need  better versions in the future
• For Epic I decided to go with Minigeddon and two iconic armies (Imperial Guard vs Orks) that was a very good call! Will continue in the future
• For Epic I dropped deployment by players entirely. I just set the board up and set the units in a more or less tactical deployment. That saved time and allowed the players to jump into the game. Good call
• Also for Epic, I focused on explaining the "what orders can you give to your units" and almost completely did not explain the stats of the units (usually I go through those quite thoroughly). It was not planned but it ended up being a superb setup. People focused on the game, not on the stats and quite liked it (too bad I did not record what did I do exactly so I can't write it down and repeat it easily :D)
• For Full Spectrum Dominance, I started off with the Scavenger hunt scenario. It was a good start for me and for a player who already bought the rules but did not understand everything (I also simplified the scenario a bit to make it shorter) but quickly rolled back to one of the introductory scenarios which was ... ok, but not as exciting. I'll post some notes to the creator maybe he can spice it up a bit!
  
• And last but not least. If the interest is going so high in the future then this is a two-man job. It seems that gone are the days when I was able to do this alone and still enjoy other games at the convention. It looks like I need to find a wingman! (I talked with some friends running wargaming eventsthis year and they confirmed my observations. It's a trend, mot a one man observation.

Pyrkon has changed and it was clearly visible to me. 

Hope you found this post at least partially interesting as I understand this is a very internal thing :)