Gen Con 2022

Hey folks, this is going to be a bit of a long, down, post about Gen Con 2022, so in case you don’t want to slog through it all, here’s the TLDR:

• We will NOT have a booth or sales at Gen Con 2022
• A couple of our scheduled events are cancelled but most are still happening (be sure to thank Logan Boese if you see him!)
• I’ll still be at Gen Con personally (and will be on at least one panel)

I want to start by saying that I’d originally planned to do this as a short video on our YouTube channel as part of my Crow’s Nest series, but my brain is feeling a little scrambled over all of this and I started to worry that I’d have to do so many take and edits to get down what I wanted to say in an accurate way, I figured it was better to write it out here.

I’m really sorry to have to bring you all this news with such short notice. Our first convention, Origins, was a sloppy mess but we got through it and my hope was that it would pave the road to Gen Con as a good warm up. But as things have played out, that’s not going to happen. At least this year.

The explanation for all of this news is this: I had to let my Event & Outreach Coordinator go. They were someone I brought on back in March of this year and I handed over control of quite a few important things to them, including, convention and appearance management, book donations, social media, and organized play.

I won’t get into details in this post but here’s what really matters. I was in a spot where I had to decide whether I wanted to keep them on through Gen Con and risk the con becoming messy or letting them go beforehand and handling the convention myself. I chose the latter. However, they are also sitting on a large amount of information, equipment and inventory. As of this writing, I do not know the whereabouts or fate of those things. Because of that, I had another choice to make: hope everything would come together in time for a successful convention (sometimes the best work is done at the last minute), or pull the plug and cut our losses. Again, I chose the latter.

My reasoning is that while going forward might have worked out, it was going to cost quite a bit to make happen and there were numerous ways it could fail outright and cost more money, other people’s time and a lot of stress. On the other hand, pulling the plug meant losing the money we’d already put into this. I decided that I’d rather take the hit and not risk more money.

The situation with this convention is indicative of larger staffing issues I’ve had making the transition from an RPG designer to a game publisher, but I’ll get into that another time when I have a little more clarity. There are also larger repercussions for the failures of the Event and Outreach Coordinator regarding our book donations. But again, I’ll address that in the future when the dust has settled and I have a clearer picture of where things are at.

In the meantime, Logan Boese is still running quite a few Coyote & Crow events, which I’m thrilled about. And I’ll still be there, taking meetings, doing some play testing, walking the floor, and doing at least one panel. So, if you see me there, please do stop me and say hi. I’ll be bringing a limited number of our “Pro-Choice or No-Dice” pins with me, so if you do stop me, feel free to ask for one and I’ll gladly share.

I hope you all have a lovely, safe, Gen Con.