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 reflects on what he saw at GAMA Trade Show 2012.

Before closing the books on this year's GAMA Trade show, I wanted to touch on a few more topics and things that caught my interest, in no particular order.

1)  Organization.  Aside from the very first day, when early arrives didn't realize the show check-in was at a different location in the Bally's from previous years, the show was very well organized.  Kudos to GAMA ED John Ward and the rest of the GAMA staff and volunteers.  I heard no complaints from retail attendees about lost registrations and people moved through lines pretty quickly.

2)  Donkey.  Once again, the Donkey game (which I have yet to try) attracted a loud and raucous crowd in both the exhibit hall and evening gaming with players climbing on top of the game table at one point.  There
always looked like a full table of players, but it was hard to tell how many of them were staffing the booth and how many were show attendees.  For all the enthusiasm shown for the game both this year and 2011, I have never had anyone come into the store asking for it and do not recall any of my distributors soliciting it.  As a side note, I see the manufacturer (Cleveland Kids) has signed up to participate in Walmart's "get on our shelves" program.

3)  Programming.  Once again, going to blocks of manufacturer programming appears to have worked as every slot of their programming I attended had a full house.  Unfortunately, it did relegate a lot of the programming provided by the GAMA Retail Division to the evenings and later in the week, when a lot of attendees had already left.  Still, most had standing room only, especially Dave Wallace's seminars on employee maintenance filled many seats and Lynn Potyen's education certification program.

4)  Punch Card Programming.  I'm not a big fan of the punch card program, i.e. attend a manufacturer seminar and get your card punched.  Get punches from all the sponsoring manufacturers in order to get your $1400 box of stuff.  Problem was, there are more publishers offering presentations than they are slots to accommodate them.  I skipped most of the Wizards of the Coast programming and the Mayfair Games Demo to Demo program this year in order to hit as many other publishers as possible.  Also, publisher programming only ran Tuesday and Thursday, so if you came in later in the week, you still got to hear fine GRD programming but nothing from the publishers, unless you caught them at the booth Thursday afternoon.  The GAMA staff was lenient about taking partially punched cards but I'd still rather see the box just shipped out to attending stores, as I figure that stores attending the show are serious enough about it that they WANT to attend the presentations, in the expectation the presentations will help the store run better.

5)  Tentacle Bento.  I mentioned this in last week's column and apparently there's quite a bit of interest in it as a post about the game on the store's blog has gotten 15 times the number of hits any other post has received in the past year.

6)  Vegetarian Meals.  There are enough vegetarians attending that a vegetarian option, more than just the tossed arugula and dressing , should be offered at every meal.  At least, allow people the opportunity to indicate they prefer vegetarian meals when they register for the show.  Alliance offers that option when you register for their Open House, GTS should too.

7)  Exhibit Hall.  Board games, especially family and party games, dominated the hall this year, as they have for the past several years.  I noticed a couple that had attracted lots of attention last year (Variant Media, Sandstorm, Green River Games) didn't show this year but their spots were filled with new hopefuls (Grandpa Beck's Games,  Buck Jitters), and we will probably see more new ones nest year.

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.