Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois.  This week, Thorne shares his impressions of the Gama Trade Show.

Sitting in the Las Vegas airport an extra two hours (arriving flight delayed on account of fog) gave me some time to reflect on the GAMA Trade Show.  As always, there were some problems at the show.  The staff at the pre-registration window couldn’t find some pre-registered stores’ information on Monday, Mayfair Games couldn’t get into their room early to set up for their Demo to Demo presentation so the first one started about half an hour late and, if the announced cocktail hours on Tuesday and Wednesday too place, I sure didn’t see them.  Things seem to smooth out by late Tuesday and GAMA Executive Director John Ward did a pretty good job of putting out fires; the man seemed everywhere.  I swear I even opened my tote bag once and saw him staring up at me.

As I’ve noted in previous columns, this year offered a number of manufacturer presentations to complement the traditional retailer-to-retailer presentations and retailer packed them on Tuesday.  Attendance dropped off slightly at the manufacturer presentations on Wednesday and significantly at the retailer presentations on Thursday.  A couple especially stood out.

John Zinser of AEG offered the most interesting of the publisher presentations, and not just because every attending retailer received a copy of the new Nightfall deck building game.  Instead of telling retailers about the upcoming new releases and opening the floor for questions, Zinser spent about 45 minutes talking about the history of the company, how it started with Shadis magazine and the L5R CCG, nearly collapsed a couple of times, got big enough to almost buy TSR, then facilitating TSR’s purchase by Wizards of the Coast, almost losing the company’s flagship product and making a grand pitch to buy it back, almost losing the company again, retrenching for over a year and hitting pay dirt again with Thunderstone and, the company hopes, Nightfall.

The other presentation that stood out was from Dave Wallace of St. Louis’ Fantasy Shop, who has given a number of presentations in the past and had a new one on the importance of internal controls in running a successful business.  As Wallace pointed out during his talk, he used to have nine stores in the Fantasy Shop chain, but now, due to the lack of internal controls, he only has four.  That’s a pretty powerful reason to pay attention to what Wallace has to say on the topic.

The exhibit hall reflected the decline, yet again, of importance of the RPG to the industry as only Green Ronin and Sandstorm featured them prominently in their booths.  Party and family games dominated the exhibit floor.  The booth demoing the Donkey game was full most of the time and those playing the game seemed to enjoy it, as indicated by the noise, but I wasn’t quite sure if the players were booth staff or conventions attendees.  Though I don’t expect to stock it, since it doesn’t fit the store’s target market, CampAntics was interesting, just from the discussion with the designer regarding the board design.  Since boys and girls exit the board at different spaces (girls cabin and boys cabin), placement of scoring spaces near the exit spaces is important.  The original board layout caused girls to win 70% of the time.  After tweaking the spaces and running night long computer simulations, he reduced the odds to 51% in favor of female players inning.

The sleeper product of the show, and one that most stores overlooked until later in the convention due to its location at the rear of the booth featuring The Spoils CCG, was IronDice from Green Lake Games.  IronDice are metal six-sided dice, sculpted in nine different styles and in eight different colors.  Though sold as a collectable dice game, every retailer to whom I spoke planned to sell them as individual dice and had immediately put in an order for a starter display and restocks for it.  Customers have asked for metal dice for years and I expect these to sell quite well, even at a $6 price point, as long as Green Tree manages to keep them available.   The company even made mention of a possible metal 20-sided dice in the future.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.