Last week the Bee Lives crew made their way out to Indianapolis for Gen Con 2018. This was an exciting event for us as we had a booth for Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer in Entrepreneur’s Avenue this year. Though this may have been our first time as exhibitors, this was hardly our first time as Gen Con attendees. Our designer, Matt Shoemaker, for example, has been coming to Gen Con since 1992! That said, we knew this was going to be a special year as we made our last big public push for Bee Lives before we launch the kickstarter on September 10th. Less than a month away!
We arrived at Gen Con on Tuesday afternoon and immediately got to work setting up the booth. We wrapped up setup on Wednesday while Matt ran a workshop on game design for educational and general audiences as part of Gen Con’s Trade Day programming. With the booth all set up we just made ourselves comfortable with some of the Bee Pins we had brought as part of the Pin Bazaar and prepared ourselves as best we could for the unknown of Thursday.
Thursday morning came and none of us knew what to expect. Sure, Gen Con is busy and packed, but how many people would come and try the game? Was our showing at the largest game convention in the United States worth it?
Any doubts we had were quickly swept away. By about 10:15 am we were completely swamped! People just kept coming up to demo Bee Lives. We had six people with us to help with the booth and we certainly needed everyone to make sure some breaks could be taken. Overall we handed out well over 1,000 business cards, sold nearly 200 bee pins, and handed out dozens of honey sticks!
We were so happy to see so much interest in Bee Lives at the convention. Now its just time to see how that interest carries over to the Kickstarter, launching September 10, 2018:
Time Until Kickstarter Launch
[tminus t="10-09-2018 12:00:00" minutes="min" /]
To tide you over until then we have a few interviews we did at Gen Con:
Matt Shoemaker talks to the Board Game Kaptain