Hello from Las Vegas: PLAAY Games at Dice Tower West

Sam Avallone readies the PLAAY Games booth at Dice Tower West just before the doors opened for business! It was a VERY exciting first day for PLAAY!

By Keith Avallone

(As it says on the t-shirt) “Greetings from Fabulous Las Vegas!” Day One of Dice Tower West is in the books, and it was a frantically fun experience!

This thing is HUGE. Both Sam and I were immediately overwhelmed with the scope of this event. I had been to some conventions before, most notably the World Board Game Championships in Lancaster, PA, but nothing like this. I was expecting smaller. DTW is pretty spectacular. The games library is amazing--thousands of board games, old and new, that you can check out for a few hours and experience. (There are even a couple of sports games in the collection!)

Our business card games have been a hit, I spent a good chunk of the day playing them with people. Mike Fitzgerald is here, he and Ian Bach developed one of the BCG, "MowMaster." As I said, there are literally THOUSANDS of board games here, but I'm pleased to say that ours is the ONLY Competitive Lawn Mowing in the house! We had Mike and Ian square off at the PLAAY Games booth, with Mike making a late clean-up and finish to earn the title of DTW MowMaster!

I also squeezed in a game of Rugby Six with Mike--who is equal parts sports board gamer and general/hobby board gamer--it was a great game, Mike pulled it out with a two-point try on his final possession to win 10-9.

By the end of the day, my voice was pretty hoarse. I was talking about our company and running demo sessions of our games most of the day. Most of the demo time was for the PLAAY Classic sports games. Which was unexpected, given that sports board games really don't have a high profile in the general/hobby board game segment. The game I demoed the most was bowling! Again, a surprise. We had the mat displayed on the table and it captured a lot of attention. I also spent time with hoops, football and baseball. Especially baseball.

Undoubtedly, the highlight of yesterday's activity was a History Maker Baseball demo session with the "big cheese" of the Dice Tower brand, Tom Vasel! Funny thing was, I didn't even realize it was him until AFTER the demo was finished! Maybe that was a good thing, though--we had a great discussion of the game's inner workings and I probably would have been "star struck" had babbled incoherently had I known who it was I was interacting with, haha! He seemed to enjoy the game, we played an inning with the '55 Yankee and Dodger teams that come with the game, and then spent some time with the Cooperstown Legends set, which he said brought back a lot of great baseball memories for him.

There are SO many great board games here. It is really inspiring. Sam and I were introduced to a cool card game called Trick Shot. It has a western theme (for which I always have an affinity!), great art, plays fast and is very clever. It's not available yet, I think they're going to Kickstarter with it soon. It's the kind of game that Sam's design instincts really align with. Point being, this is really an awesome place to be for anyone with an interest in board games.

The convention also features a series of panel discussions and seminars, I attended one yesterday on content creation, hosted by some movers and shakers in the board game social media arena. Got some great insights. One of the things they talked about was the value of "Hot Lists" and "Top Ten Countdown" content. Expect to see some of this type of content in upcoming PLAAY Games YouTube channel streams.

We are sandwiched between a board gamer re-seller who specialized in role playing and card games, and a 3-D printer company which creates game pieces and tokens. Everyone here is friendly and enthusiastic. Really invigorating!

We've run into a number of PLAAY Gamers here, including Doug Sun (who is a fellow exhibitor, he has an RPG publishing company called Ramen Sandwich Games) Chris Sauguisag, Keith Curtis, Grant Fines and Joshua Gottesman. I'm sure we'll encounter more as the weekend rolls on. And, of course, we're making many NEW friends as well!

That's all for now--I’ll try for another update before we leave!