What are you giving to new players to get them started?

Brandon,

Do you want to remove the personal contact information (phone number) before I re-host your PDF?

I'll link to it from this page:
www.thelasombra.com/demoing.htm

after you reply.

Adonai wrote:

Brandon,

Do you want to remove the personal contact information (phone number) before I re-host your PDF?

I'll link to it from this page:
www.thelasombra.com/demoing.htm

after you reply.

Sure, here you go:

Dorrinal wrote:

Lonkka's script is very close to what I use when teaching the game. Then again I couldn't keep the Salt Lake City group alive so take that recommendation with a grain of salt...

Gentle pestering is my trick for keeping groups alive. Get people's numbers/Facebook/Email and just ask "How are you going? Haven't seen you playing VTES in a while..."

It can also be how you convert "Maybes" into "Yes".

The other trick I've found, and it has been easier to keep people playing since we changed venues (sure the group dropped off for a while but we've got a stable core of 6-12 now) is... Choose a venue with perks OTHER than VTES. Such as a nice club/bar where you can get drinks for sane prices, or food easily, or desserts, or even just having footy on a TV so you have something to do when you get knocked out a game early. Plus, even gamers appreciate nice furnishings... sometimes it even convinces them to stop thinking of hygiene as a greeting!

brandonsantacruz wrote:

I find that the games I like best have very short rules books (more like two double-sided pages) and have self-explanatory cards (i.e. Guillotine, Ticket to Ride). Anything I can do to break down VTES into this is a success in my book

Indeed so.
Good stuff-carry on!

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

Gentle pestering is my trick for keeping groups alive. Get people's numbers/Facebook/Email and just ask "How are you going? Haven't seen you playing VTES in a while..."

The London play group has a VTES Meetup page — I was sceptical at first, but it's attracted new players, has a built in reminders for existing players and seems to have helped built our play group back up.

www.meetup.com/London-VTES/

It may be useful for VTES groups to setup their own local version — also, if they use the VTES tag they'll also appear here: vtes.meetup.com/

Meetup page is good!

We've done that with Helsinki playgroup for years even if the dates for the weekly games are set:
vtes.orava.org/wiki/weeklygames

And ofr example Turku playgroups uses facebook to arrange their games.


Whatever way works is just fine.
Letting people know that enough players to form a table are gathering should help the indecisive minds to attend too.