Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne gives us a report on Gen Con Trade Day.

Well, attendance at the educator/librarian track for GENCON Trade Day looked strong, from what I saw of it, though retailers in attendance looked light.  The retail track presentations were all good (I didn't get to attend Larry Oxenham's talk on lawsuit protection and estate planning but was told it was outstanding), but this year's organization certainly left much to be desired.

Let's start with the change in hotel.  For the past several years, Trade Day has been held at the Westin Hotel, across the street from the Convention Center.  This year, it moved to the Crowne Plaza, without contacting any of the attendees or posting info about the move on the Trade Day website.  At least, not any of the retailers, although the librarians and educators may have received some notice.  Let me repeat that.  The entire event moved to a new hotel this year and there no mention of it on the Trade Day website.  I spoke to one presenter who had no idea about the move until Monday and that was after I mentioned it to them.

Next, the website says registration is necessary for Mayfair Games' highly popular Demo to Demo program.  If you're not familiar with it, during the program Mayfair Games demos four of its games and participants get to take copies of the games back to their stores.  There was no indication on the site regarding how to register for the program.

Wizards of the Coast also ran demos of its new Lair Assault program.  The Trade Day website says you have to have a ticket in order to participate in one of the sessions, but neither the Wizards of the Coast representatives nor the people at the front desk knew anything about any tickets.  They wound up doing sign ups outside the room for each session of Lair Assault.

Speaking of Lair Assault, the events and presentations themselves were fine.  The Lair Assault sessions filled up, people seemed to have fun playing them, the session I played in got me enthused about running it in the store and we already have customers interested in participating in them once the program gets up and running.

Pat Fuge's discussion of how Gnome Games uses Constant Contact to handle his store's email program has got us planning on checking out either it or Mail Chimp for our store's email needs (not certain about how I feel regarding having the words "Mail Chimp" appearing on our email communications with our customers, though).  Phil Heather's presentation regarding how Saltire Games makes use of its proximity to GENCON (thought, to be fair, Saltire Games is located in Indianapolis and IS the local retail sponsor for the convention) go me thinking about how our store, even though we are 5 hours away from the convention, could make use of GENCON to drive some promotions and customer interest next year.

Finally it was good to see some signs of life from the apparently moribund Professional Game Store Association.  After an energetic debut last year, I hadn't seen much activity from the organization (of which our store is a charter member) aside from the "Deck Our Halls" promotion last Christmas.  At the PGSA meeting, the Board of Directors indicated they had spent significant amounts of time on operations, securing corporation status for the group, developing a retail store locator, and, in response to a member store's difficulty with a landlord, drafting a position paper on the necessity of a game store having gaming space in order to run a successful operation.

Overall, the presentations stores actually go to Trade Day for were good.  But operations needs some significant work for next year though.

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