Designs and Publicity

Designs

So like I mentioned before, I went ahead and uploaded all my backlog of mostly cooked games up onto the 'geek.  I even went far enough to give them representative images and some PnP files for most of them.  If you haven't done this before it's not too rough of a process.  The actual game entry has to be approved by an admin though.  It appears they approve dang near any user created content; which is a good thing to me.  The rest of it is "geekmod" approved, meaning other BGG users do it for a paltry amount of GG.  I haven't had issues with this, but there have been a few glitches through the years.  The worst was probably the photo-artistic geeks who spent forever working on fantastic shots, only to have the run-of-the-mill BGG modder decline them for being "blurry" etc.  I think most of that has blown over since you can now include messages to the geekmodders when you upload images.

Anyway, if you're interested, you can see all the designs I uploaded under my designer page:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/person/12420



Publicity

So I made all the entries.  Great.  Why did I do that?  Because I wanted to share my games and hear what people thought of them.  Does making the entries do that?  No, not really at all.  A new entry doesn't pop up on the BGG front page anywhere, nor would most people want it to.  So... how do I get people to check it out?  Let me list my current methods:

1. Just go on making quality contributions to BGG.  Detailed reviews and content-rich geeklists are usually what I shoot for.  If people read these, then they notice the little "Game Designer" badge next to my avatar.  That serves as a jump to the games I've posted.

2. Post little announcements in each game's own forum.  This only works so-so.  It's shameless self-promotion, but it's done in a tasteful manner (not stealing space in some other geeklist).

3. Post session reports of playtests.  I've been trying this more lately.  I actually like this approach.  I'm honest with what happened, and don't turn it into an advertisement.  If someone likes the game style described, then they'll probably follow the game link back to it's page.

4. Keeping the game page interesting.  Have a representative image.  Have a link to the rules.  Have a file with the game content.  Just make it easy to use and not too sloppy.  Use some wiki-formatting in the description.

And if that starts getting a few players then you can go and post it on this list:
Print n Play Games That People Actually Play

But anyway, all of the above just goes about some publicity for a PnP game.



Offtopic

If you're a Joss Whedon fan, I'm sure you caught the new Dollhouse episode.  I was amazed it somehow got renewed; it was rather a questionable stinker last season.  The new episode made me glad they had it renewed.  I'm not sure how long he can keep it up, but Whiskey kicked a *lot* of ass.