Who Does the Grail Serve – Organised Play and you

Why run organised play?

A lot of people seem confused by the concept of Organised play – why a store would do it, what they gain from it, what a brand gains from it, what a customer gains from it. Who does the grail serve and why should we care? Even before the global pandemic game store owners were increasingly starting not to care.

Now, Fan Boy Three was an early adopter of Organised play, so I’m kind of biased. Before us there had been one or two UK stores that had dabbled. We’d put on events for people to play in, because events allowed us to engage players and engage players spend more. Back then, in the dawn of time before Rolling Thunder, stores might bring in one box of starters and one box of boosters.

When Richard Garfield created magic the Gathering he had no idea it would take off the way it did. He’d imagined a world where a player might buy a starter and a handful of boosters, build a deck and travel around playing strangers – for ante – but everyone’s deck would be different. You would be surprised by your opponents power card and combo play because there was virtually no chance you’d ever seen it before. Because, well, THE INTERNET WAS NOT A THING.

Umm. Yeah. Not a thing.

It’s hard to remember a time before the internet. But if you moved into a new city back then you didn’t spam Facebook to find a D&D group. It was hard. I’ve seen people weep with joy when they walked into a game store back in the nineties because they’d thought that games were only sold in America.

No, really.

Organised play was a way of bringing these people together, for mostly selfless reasons. You see, engaged players buy more. It’s suddenly not a starter and a couple of boosters, but whole boxes and then whole cases. It’s a positive feedback loop – the more you are engaged the more you play, the more you play the more you are engaged. And the more cards – or HeroClix – you want.

Humans were hunter gatherers. We like collecting sets, we enjoy filing our cards, building our decks, talking about building our decks – hell, it starts as a pastime and becomes a hobby, then a lifestyle, then a culture and before long you have a community and that community is its own positive reinforcement loop.

Because to belong you must play, and to play you must buy.

The earliest Magic tournaments weren’t held in stores. Wizards actively discouraged it. At our first pre-release we had to cover up all the sealed product and take it off sale – it was an event, not an opportunity. But even then it was obvious that nerdvana was both. Buy as much as you like. Play as much as you like. You are among friends and equals.

This is because Organised Play – at its heart – is a sales and marketing exercise. It’s that simple.

Now, not everyone sees it that way. But they are wrong. Early Organised Play had prizes supplied by the companies that made the games, for free. This is because Organised Play stimulated sales. People bought stuff at events – boosters, sleeves, booster boxes, single cards and figures. It was an economic driver. Sales and marketing.

Events paid their way. This was because not everyone ran them. Or ran them well.

At its most basic level Organised Play is simply a night to play a cardgame or miniatures game. It doesn’t have to be competitive and doesn’t have to have a prize, but as humans we find the chance to gamble for a reward stimulating and the chance to test our skill to win a reward even more stimulating. We find it validating. We can walk out, head held high, as one of life’s winners. There doesn’t even need to be a prize – winning is its own reward. But it is even better – even more validating – when there is.

People tried every form of prize. Promo cards and figures, boosters, money, valuable single cards. Even a car. Winners can feel even more like winners. And of course, the more events you run the more winners you can have. The more engaged your players are.

Early on market leader Wizards of the Coast discovered there was a spike in sales and new player numbers for every new store that opened. Suddenly they had a universal panacea to stagnating sales – moah stores! Each new store gave a spike, each new store a new play opportunity and a new potential community.

But on the ground we saw rather the opposite effect. We saw communities start to fragment. In order to run successful Organised Play you need numbers. Two people are a game. Four are a round robin. By the time you get to eight you can play three rounds of swiss or single elimination. Three or four rounds equates to three or four hours, which for any given value of value is pretty good value.

Of course if you cap support, then your value proposition reduces for every additional player. When Friday Night Magic had 4 promos each week – regardless of attendance – if there were eight of you, there was a fifty percent chance of snagging one in any given week. Sixteen players, that number drops to 25%. So many Organised Play communities become self limiting in terms of size.

How big then is the perfect Organised Play community? Well, optimally? It fills your store and buys your allocation of product. But because there are many more game lines than nights of the week, there’s a certain amount of triage that you have to perform to maximise your engagement. At Fan Boy Three we have to try and fit in Warhammer, Yugioh, Pokemon, Dragonball, Digimon, Commander, Pioneer, Modern, Draft, Standard, HeroClix, X-Wing, Legion, Marvel Crisis Protocol, Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Starfinder, Vampire rivals, Final Fantasy, Age of Sigmar, Keyforge, Cardfight Vanguard, Flesh and Blood, Dust… the list goes on and on and the store isn’t some kind of Tardis.

Many stores triage by dint of the owner playing one game and wanting to support it, like the bar in the Blues Brothers that plays both types of music – country and western. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, but it’s a high stakes game. If Commander is the only game in town and you fall out of favour with it? Well, no game for you.

The more games you run, the more likely your customers will surf from one to the other. That table of Digimon players having fun looks a lot more enjoyable an evening than Bob crushing you with his mono-blue control deck. Again. Laughing.

And this is healthy. Most stores build a portfolio of events, just as they build a portfolio of games they stock. A healthy mix of casual and competitive events, ways to engage new players as well as reinvigorate jaded old ones. And we do this because we sell more. Engaged players buy more stuff.

The issue these days is that they don’t always buy it from us.

There are a lot of places that sell stuff cheaper than a FLGS that puts on events. Most of us have subsidised those events in the past – it’s a sensible strategy for engaging new players – but we could do that because we made a lot of money selling product. The internet again. Our own worst enemy.

Sadly most of us no longer sell in quite the quantities we once did.

Organised play space has a cost – it’s an opportunity cost, because by devoting space to tables and chairs we can’t also simultaneously devote it to selling stock. That sacrifice was supposed to repay us in terms of volume sales – engaged players buying more – but not everyone joins the dots.

Because Organised play is sales and marketing, the fewer people buy less we are engaged and the less the publishers are too. Hell, people will buy the stupidest shit without them having to print promo cards and put out events. We’ve literally just had a pandemic with hardly any events and people are still buying boosters for games they can’t play.

Stores began ripping out their tables and chairs and putting in jigsaws.

Now, I kind of believe in it still. Because my store is full every night with my communities, spread across multiple game lines and multiple nights and friendship groups, all of whom were desperate to reconnect in physical space. In my physical space. But it’s becoming an increasing challenge to persuade distribution of the wisdom of supporting stores like mine with – say – increased Pokemon allocation.

Organised play – supporting communities – used to be the gold standard in how stores operated, but with Wizards Premium it’s how nice your bins are, and everyone and anyone from the sub postmaster in County Wicklow to major high street chains wants as much allocation of Pokemon as they can get.

Now, I’m a believer that these things – these times – are a blip. That for two hundred thousand years of human evolution as a species we have craved the companionship of people ‘like us’ who care about the same stupid things we do.

Bringing those people together in one place, to play? I will never not think that it is important. And I will never not think that it is the key to selling more stuff. Being among your friends increases your happiness, and happy people buy more. That’s what they are engaged in. That’s the engagement that drove sales.

It really was the friends we made along the way all along.

And I hope we don’t lose that in our new world order of increasing isolation, because a decline in engagement means an even greater decline in sales. But not always. The one other thing I noticed when I opened Fan Boy Three was a decline in my roleplaying sales. I sold a lot in my previous store, but now hardly any – and it wasn’t because the people in Manchester didn’t play RPG’s.

It was because they played them too much.

Turns out the bumper sales I was making before was because people weren’t playing. They were buying, reading and dreaming. Dreaming of that time they would finally get enough players together to play that game they had always imagined, and of all the friends they’d make. Then suddenly I had delivered them.

Now they no longer needed to buy, because they could play.

This maybe was a flaw. But at the end of the day, as I tell my work experience students all the time, I sell happiness and community – it just comes in the form of boxes and books and boosters, on sprues and made of plastic and cardboard. And that has value.

I hope one day that the companies who have dialled back from support remember that one day. Organised Play was a vital component of the experiential retail model that I pioneered. Every store is a premium store to somebody. This pandemic will end, but the human desire to find a space where people like you gather, to play together?

I hope that never does.