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Hello Everybody!

I hope this is the right section where to post this topic. If not, sorry!

I go quickly to the core: I'm struggling to develop my club in a proper community. I explain myself:

I'm the only English speaking member of the club as of now, therefore I'm the one translating the news, rumors, information coming from all around the word. And I'm fine with it, because I really want my club/friends to be up to date and I like them to feel part of a larger community.

Now the problem is: I have no feedback from their side... We have a small forum with few topics, mainly rumors discussion, painting progress and events. But I feel I'm the only one participating and trying to post contents.

Back to the question: have you ever had to start a community from scratch? how do you manage to get everyone interested and participating to the community itself?

We're trying to "catch" new members, but if I would be a new member and visit our forum for the first time, I would never be interested in the community... I'm almost the only one posting..

Hope I didn't make many mistakes, sorry if any :)

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1 hour ago, DamonRafael said:

I hadn't the time to listen to the show, but I read the article in the webpage. Some of those things are really tough to apply where I live, but those are really solid suggestions. 

 

Just being curious - Why are they tough? Is it finding a venue or getting people interested? Is there anything we as a community can do to help?

As for a venue, the club I go to meets in a pub every three to four weeks. This is great for me as this works out well for getting out to have a game. Would something like this be an option?

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Well, for me it is a bit hard to explain as I still can't master English, but let's try :)

First of all, the region where I live (Tessin, Switzerland) is a bit dead after, let's say, 19.00 (or 7.00 pm). All shops are closed, and people just stay at home. I know there are few pubs open until 22 (10.00 pm)during the week, while in the weekend everything's closed by midnight or so. None of those, anyway, allows people to play games: those are more bars than pubs..

As for rooms, or places to rent in general, I know quite a lot of them, but none will allow people to stay after 21.00. Now, most of the people here are leaving work at 18, and having dinner at 19, which means that they can't go out before let's say 20.00 (I'll let you do the math to AM/PM system :P ), and that's especially true for people with kids.

There are few spots which we could rent and allow us to stay until late (where late means 23! yay!), but those are quite far from most of the people and while it is not an issue for me - I'm used to drive a lot during the week - it actually is for most of them. Trains are not that powerful here, and after 19.00 most of the connection are suppressed, therefore is really hard to move from village to village. Again, this would not be an excuse, but 90% of the mate which are in the club are not wiling to drive that far.. don't ask me why!

So I'm not only struggling to find a place where to meet, but I'm headbanging against some "weird" behavior which I need to overcome, somehow... It's actually the first time I have to fight with something like this. I think and hope that I just have to tickle their interest to open their mind, but I still have to find the way!

I used to live in Italy, my mother country, and I never had such issues, as people there are used to have at least 1 "free" evening  from family to spend for their hobby, which is missing in Tessin instead.

--

while writing I just received a good news: there's a club meeting close to where I live, every Friday night, in a private place. I will try to contact them and try to arrange something, maybe even merge the clubs :)

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20 minutes ago, DamonRafael said:

while writing I just received a good news: there's a club meeting close to where I live, every Friday night, in a private place. I will try to contact them and try to arrange something, maybe even merge the clubs :)

That is good news.

Sounds a bit weird about the not wanting to go out after a certain time, but sounds very much like a cultural thing than anything. 

Hope it goes well with the club ;) 

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5 minutes ago, Gaz Taylor said:

That is good news.

Sounds a bit weird about the not wanting to go out after a certain time, but sounds very much like a cultural thing than anything. 

Hope it goes well with the club ;) 

Yep I think is definitely a cultural thing. I've been there since 3 years and I still can't get used to it :P I'll give you an example, with this I'm sure you will have a clearer idea on how weird things are here.

There was a festival in the city, called "bacchica". It was a wine fest, with music and lot of people. Quite interesting if you like the topic. This was a weekend event, going from friday to sunday, from 16.00 to almost 1 in the night.

In 2013 they reached the 20th anniversary. In 2014, the people from the city went to the city hall, protesting for the "noises coming from the event", and they decided to stop the manifestation..

 

 

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The way I've kept an AoS group going is solely through WhatsApp. Ben mentioned it on his podcast too. It's primitive but it works. Posting the odd photo of painting/terrain progress between meet ups is another way we encourage each other too.

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Quite interesting to see the various opinions and thoughts on this.  Over the past couple of years I've finally started to make an effort to fit in more games (not just AoS, but 40k, 30k and others) but without it becoming too much of a commitment on time or money - real life and work means that my evenings are only 3ish hours long and a portion of my weekend (and couple of evenings) has to be spent doing "stuff", I've a house, garden, tropical fish tank, etc that don't run themselves. To complicate matters further, I also don't drive and the public transport round here is poor, generally not running late enough to allow me to travel somewhere else to game and get home.  However this isn't a "woe is me" post ;)

There is a local gaming group (a fairly decent sized one), but they have a big focus on historical gaming rather than fantasy - for me though, the bigger issue is that they run on a Sunday afternoon and I can't really justify loosing precious afternoon time every weekend.

Now I'm not naive enough to expect games to appear out of the sky when I say "I fancy a game", but equally don't want the responsibility for running a full on club.  More than happy to "champion" the games I want to play and try and get naysayers to rethink things but I've enough responsibility at work without having it in my hobby life.

So I'm taking a slightly different approach..

  • Myself and some friends are running a 40k narrative campaign.  Twice a year (possibly three) we'll converge on Warhammer World in Nottingham, travelling up on the Friday immediately after work and booking ourselves into the local Premier Inn (it's only 15 minutes walk away from WHW).  We spend the day playing and then socialise in the evenings, heading back late Sunday afternoon.  This may in time flick to an AoS campaign and back again - it's up to us!
  • I'm travelling to more Games Workshop run events - HH Weekender, Open Days, Fest etc.  They're a great source to find out what's happening, plus I post any interesting bits onto Twitter, hashtagging as I go.  This has given me a decent Twitter following, plus following other people means you get to find out what's happening and where.
  • If two or three friends are free the same weekend, we'll try and get together for a few games round somebodies house.  This is generally a bit easier said than done, but even one weekend in a year is better than nothing.  What is quite cool is the lower model requirement for AoS means that transporting miniatures is slightly easier for those of us who have to use public transport.
  • I've joined more community forums such as this one - once you get your name on a players map who knows who's close by!

Finally, getting to Warhammer World if you live in the UK isn't actually as difficult or cost prohibitive as I'd convinced myself it was.  From Wiltshire, the train varies between £50 and £75 and the Premier Inn between £100 and £180.  In total I do between 4 and 5 hours travelling each way.  If you remind yourself that you're having a weekend away the cost actually is quite reasonable.  It's also quite easy to reduce, sharing your Premier Inn with your opponent immediately halves the price (you did book a Twin didn't you).  If you travel up with a friend (or in my case my brother) you can spend £30 on a "Two Together" railcard that gives you 30% off for a year.  You can actually use £15 of Tesco clubcard vouchers to buy this too.  On average my brother and I spend £125 each when we go to Nottingham - cheaper than a cottage in Devon!

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On 08/06/2016 at 11:57 AM, DamonRafael said:

Yep I think is definitely a cultural thing. I've been there since 3 years and I still can't get used to it :P I'll give you an example, with this I'm sure you will have a clearer idea on how weird things are here.

There was a festival in the city, called "bacchica". It was a wine fest, with music and lot of people. Quite interesting if you like the topic. This was a weekend event, going from friday to sunday, from 16.00 to almost 1 in the night.

In 2013 they reached the 20th anniversary. In 2014, the people from the city went to the city hall, protesting for the "noises coming from the event", and they decided to stop the manifestation..

 

 

Really interesting to hear about the cultural differences!

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So I'm back.

I had a chat with my club, and we decided to go large.

We will ask few small "clubs" to join us. We've found a place which can rent us a room for free from 20 to 23, which is enough for small to medium games. 

We will also became wider, "allowing" people to play whatever they want, not only GW games. We are aiming to build up a gaming community, to play boardgames, role-play and wargames.

First night will be this Friday, but I won't be able to join until early July due to work related stuff (loosing job, though I'm finally going back in the same house where my wife lives :) ) . Hopefully this will work, will keep you posted!

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9 hours ago, DamonRafael said:

So I'm back.

I had a chat with my club, and we decided to go large.

We will ask few small "clubs" to join us. We've found a place which can rent us a room for free from 20 to 23, which is enough for small to medium games. 

We will also became wider, "allowing" people to play whatever they want, not only GW games. We are aiming to build up a gaming community, to play boardgames, role-play and wargames.

First night will be this Friday, but I won't be able to join until early July due to work related stuff (loosing job, though I'm finally going back in the same house where my wife lives :) ) . Hopefully this will work, will keep you posted!

Just noticed the bit about losing the job - clearly the like is not about that aspect! Good luck in your endeavours.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I just thought I had to give you a feedback on this topic, not sure if anyone's interested though :) 

We ran 2 gaming evenings, third is scheduled for this Friday (1st July). First night was kind of a success, we managed to get the interested of 5 guys, but unluckily we haven't heard of them anymore.

Second night was a shame, I was not able to join due work (yeah, they're stressing me those last days... I have a 2 months contract now though, so not all evil comes to harm) but club told me they were 2, staring at each other playing a boring game.

Hopefully next night will be better, otherwise we'll have to change something, probably in the advertising.

I'm trying hard to get this club working, fighting against disappointment :)

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I'm also kind a lost. I tried to recruit friends to try Age Of Sigmar but so far reply has been mostly meh.

Local "friendly" games shop attitude towards the game is pretty much hostile from half of the staff.

I even tried asking strangers for a game in a local warhammer internet forum but so far no replies :( 

Any ideas how should I continue or what should I do differently to rise interest in AOS?

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Where are you BlueRaven?

Although the game seems to be doing well in the UK, in other countries it's dead. I'm in Germany and support is nearly zero.

I was born and raised in England, so I'm aware of the market penetration GW has in the uk, but in other non-english speaking countries it doesn't seem to be the same.

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I'm located in Finland. Seems the trend continues that fantasy is played in UK and 40k is played in USA.

Would be interesting to see some actual numbers what games are played and where, just by looking at Youtube and Twitter feed I'm getting whole different story...

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