33 – First Convention Booths

A big decision has been made! I’ve booked convention booths for Magical Friends at both BerlinCon and SPIEL in Essen this year. Together with my two wonderful illustrators, Nessi and Hannah, we won’t just be attending the conventions — you’ll actually be able to meet us there!

17. - 19. September
Station Berlin
https://berlin-con.de/

The decision wasn’t an easy one. As I’ve mentioned before, convention booths are very expensive when you don’t yet have anything to sell at the booth. The most interesting aspect of conventions, however, is the long‑term connections you can build. Back in 2019, I was able to connect with 19 board‑game manufacturers. That helped me tremendously in understanding how factories operate and what to expect in contracts.

The plan is for the Kickstarter campaign to launch at the beginning of October. That means at BerlinCon (mid‑September), the campaign will be prepared and announced. We’ll also use the event to test the booth decorations for SPIEL. During SPIEL, our campaign will already be running — in fact, it will be right around the halfway point, which is usually a quieter phase in a Kickstarter. I’m very curious to see what impact SPIEL will have on the campaign!

https://www.spiel-messe.com/de/

I might be able to build interesting connections with publishers we could work with after the Kickstarter campaign. There will certainly be reviewers there as well who may want to promote the game on-site or before the campaign ends. And hopefully we’ll meet lots of wonderful fans at the conventions who will accompany us a bit on our journey. For Hannah and Nessi, there may even be new clients for future projects.

We’re definitely already super excited and really looking forward to the conventions. We also have a few exciting ideas for how we can make our booth interesting. It’s sure to be a lot of fun!

Will we see you at the convention? Is there anything—besides the current prototype—that we should definitely show at our booth?