Hi Fellow-Gamers,
When you go to a game convention or your local game store, what sort of freebies do you consider good ones to get (and real incentives to buy from your retailer/visit a particular booth at a convention)? Some examples:
Any particularly memorable freebies you've gotten in the past?
Thanks!
[/]I particularly like to receive free "Con Special" items available at the booths... Little snippets of extra gaming goodness you can add to existing games but can only pick up from the publisher.
Examples could be a single special scoring tile for a tile placement game(maybe a neat crossroads tile for Carcassonne), a special action card for your CCG (say a new sorcery for Magic The Gathering), a new character for your boardgame (like Sir Bedivere for Shadows over Camelot) or new scenarios (like new puzzle cards for Looney Labs Zendo games).
These sorts of things have a nice, light collectable feel, and can generate some buzz after the convention on messageboards and forums like this.
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Well at FanimeCon 2005 this year (an Anime Convention), there were two books of Manga (sort of like priview books of upcoming stuff, had one episode of like 25 different mangas) from two separate companies (TokyoPop and Viz). That was a nice freeby. Also, a lot of vendors have raffle drawings for prizes, or had a t-shirt toss which was insane but entertaining. Some artists offered free samples at their booths, discounts, autographed copies, etc. It was pretty cool like that.
Personally, any sort of useful freeby is a good freeby. If I were to go to a game convention for boardgames, a neat thing to have for a freeby would be a small booklet of a dozen minigames that anyone can make at home out of homemade appliances. Like silly games and what not. (Have you ever played Magic: The Gathering Unglued? There are I think two sets now, and the cards are all goofy and such, one card actually has you get up to do the chicken dance before its effect will go off). That would be a cool freeby. Obviously catalogs of upcoming games and the like would be good to have, free dice, I dunno. Heck, if you were running a table for your games, you could have people walking by come play it (obviously have a quick game to play), that's a good way to get people interested.
Anywho...