GAMA Trade Show

Yep.

And even to a lesser extent, the GAMA Trade Show, not because of the usefulness of the show, but because it- the time of the year it is.

Right.

If there was a big show in March, the, um... that would probably be the biggest one of the year.

Send all the emails, you know, I hate cold calling, but you know what? If that's what your time is valuable for you to do that, do that.

But for me, if I go to a show and I can, you know, if I'm at Gamma Expo or even a consumer show and I can just walk by booths and get 30 second pitches, that's going to maybe make me see a game that otherwise I would have saw and not thought too much about.

So I think just it's that work, doing that work, doing that grunt work, getting out there, showing the game over and over again.

$2 million in marketing doesn't hurt.

If it's easy for me to place orders with you, that's going to make me feel really well disposed to you.

But beyond that, you know...

Do we occasionally check in with each other via email? Do we go out of our way to say hello to each other at a convention? Especially something like Gamma Expo.

Is yours a booth that I will stop and chat with you for a bit if I spot you? Because again, it's so much like our relationships with our customers.

First time we've had you guys together.

Usually we've got Cole and somebody else or we flag down Drew at Gamma Expo or something, but first time we've had everybody together.

You're

going to have to keep us from wrestling with each other or something.

Um, and so I, playing that I'm like, "Man, I, I think I really want something that does, like, this type of thing." Um, and then secondarily, uh, if you're familiar with Horrible Guild, one of my favorite publishers in the board game industry, uh, they had a game called Spotlight, uh, that came out, uh, a while ago.

And at GAMA Expo this year, uh, I saw that they had this really cool display where it was a page thing of Spotlight mounted, and it had a flashlight, and it was just on a swivel.

And it just had a thing that said, "Can you find nine goblins?" Or something like that.

And you just, you just took the flashlight and did-

So a little less of the advocacy and a little more of maybe the professional development side of things.

There may be some overlap, but I'm curious what, if anything, the association offers up to this point or has planned in the near future for that is substantially different, or if it is just a giant Venn diagram that's a circle, overlap with what is available to the creatives through something like the Gamma Expo.

Yeah, I think some of this is has been the missing piece, the contract stuff, the like, we had a webinar for on like tax stuff at one point, right? The things people never want to talk about, but that can actually get you in quite a bit of trouble if you don't, if you're not careful about them.

You know, lots of people do sessions on being a better game designer and we are happy to have people continue doing that.

We have a great Discord and there's a very active couple of channels where people are doing the game design advice, the layout advice, that kind of stuff too.

Yeah, and Gamma has purportedly a creative track for you guys, but also a game designer track.

track and and they have had at gamma expo i haven't made it the last couple years but um they have had sort of a game designer track for the seminars and things i'm hoping to make this make it this next year because it's in baltimore where i will really have no excuse

yeah

I mean, we definitely need allies.

That's why at GAMA Expo this year, we had an allyship panel and we talked about, like, how to be an authentic ally.

'Cause, like, anyone can slap a badge, but not everybody can invite someone onto, say, a podcast or try to push for having art that's more diverse.

Like, there's such...