BURN UNIT:
I helped organize the game. I purchased ribbons, the stamps (most of the inkpads were bought by MJ9), and did the printing. I laid out the course, and went and hung the secrets. The rest, well, that's up to the players! I fear ours will be the only proof submitted for this task, which would be sad.

I could see clearly the game would be adaptable to the environment of a convention. As someone who's spent an inordinate amount of time there, I have a fairly sound knowledge of the Sheraton hotel in Bloomington.

We tried to do recruitment by the usual at-con means—posters, and promotion while partying. Unlike our other big con experience in town (CONvergence), the party culture at Anime Detour is a little less well-established and people didn't quite know what to make of us. We'll tweak for future years I think. Anyway, once we realized that people weren't going to "sign up" for a game they didn't know anything about, we adjusted and started recruiting on the fly rather than going for an event-style "launch". This allows you to very easily stagger the starting, by the way. And it still enables people just passing by to jump into the game quickly. Some of our most enthusiastic players got into it at the last possible minute (like an hour and a half before the finish) and there were still opportunities for them to have a great time. We also used it as a promo for the next week's Journey to the End of the Night. I don't know if that netted any results or not, but we're slowly building a community here.

I also sent the "after action report" to our email list. Allow me a moment to plug the MNZero email list which you can sign up for any time. 

The Architect and the Urchin is really fun for people to play, clearly, and MNZero is going to execute it full scale somewhere in the city proper, later this year.


MJ9:
I assisted Burn Unit in organizing the game.

The game happened on Saturday night of the convention, which meant we had Friday evening and Saturday leading up to the game to recruit players. After Friday night I was really worried we would have no players at all -- no one seemed interested in what it was we were doing. This got me thinking about our tactics, so I came up with a new plan for Saturday.

I pulled them in with play-doh. Yes. It worked.

Once we got them into our space it was easy to get them excited about a scavenger hunt mixed with a three way game of tag. We sent them off with maps, and they came back with stamps!