Being a puzzlehuntist in the San Francisco Bay Area is great. You can announce something to the Bay Area Night Game and muster a coupla hundred nerds.
I had a halfway-brilliant idea: since this game wouldn't be a one-time event, since it would be this persistent thing, it would be a way to introduce new folks to puzzlehunts.
You know how it goes. You're talking to someone in November about BANG or DASH and they say it sounds like fun. And then you say, "Well... they tend to happen in the summer. So there's no way for you to follow up on your enthusiasm just at the moment, but if you just sign up for this mailing list a-and then wait,..." and you just watch the fire die in their eyes.
What if there was something that they could play right away?
I don't think I followed through well on this idea.
I tried some things. None of them worked great. Part of this is because of my introverted personality: if I were more outgoing, I'd could hand out flyers to people I see doing sudoku on the streetcar. But I'm not, so I don't. Publicity is tough if you're too shy to talk to most folks. (And this is another place where a multi-person GC would have helped: maybe some folks on the team would have been extroverts.) What did I try?
I don't know exactly how many people played. I can tell you how many accounts have played. If a few people play on a team, maybe they all use one player's account, or maybe everybody signs up individually. So, each account might represent one person, or a few.
As of August 14 2010, there were 215 accounts.
But most of those accounts are of people who didn't make it past the "example" puzzle. They saw the first "hard" puzzle and stopped.
Of those 215 accounts, 100 accounts had a score > 1000; that is,
more points than you'd get for just solving the "example" puzzle.
59 accounts had a score > 2000, the points for getting through
a few puzzles. (Playtesters might look at those scores with a sinking
feeling: I used a different scoring system for the playtesters, and their
scores are thus not so high. Don't worry folks, you did great.)
Most of these 59 folks are probably "the usual suspects": folks who already know about BANGs and such. If you look at when they started playing the 2-Tone Game, it was probably soon after the game started, before I tried publicizing it somewhere else. Consider this bar graph showing start-months for these accounts:
4444444444444444444444444444444444444444 55555555 66666666666
That's a strong April majority, nothing in July, nothing in August (as I write this on the 14th).
The BANG folks knew I was up to something when I sent out a plea for playtesters on the mailing list. Later on, I put up a puzzly announcement. They lit into it. But how to reach folks who weren't BANGers already?
I read a few San Francisco neighborhood blogs. They aren't puzzly, but some of them are interesting in weird crap that goes on around town. I figured that the 2-Tone Game qualified as weird crap going on around town. So I mailed some of these folks about the game. I received no responses. Caught in spam filters? Didn't sound like fun? I dunno.
You know how when you Google digital camera, you see a ton of ads off to the side of the search results? I tried buying some of those ads.
You buy these ads by picking search terms. So I had to guess at things these people would search for. If someone who's a good fit for puzzlehunts but doesn't know about puzzlehunts searches for something, what do they search for? "puzzle", maybe. "puzzle game", maybe.
So I bought adwords, targeting only folks in San Francisco searching for things like that. Many people visited the site! Maybe a couple of them actually signed up for the game—but didn't make it past the "example" puzzle.
Probably most people searching for "puzzle game" or "word puzzle" wanted something like Peggle or Bookworm.
(And while typing up this article, I realized I never tried running an ad on "treasure hunt", and there are ads there for corporate team-building treasure hunt games, so maybe that's worth a shot.)
If anyone found the game this way, there weren't many of them.
I spotted a couple of guys playing The Games of Nonchalance. I gave them a couple of flyers. Maybe they played. Maybe I could have kept hanging out around Nonchalant sites just to hand out flyers. But the games aren't that similar. And I didn't especially want to lurk around Nonchalant sites all the time.
I asked Aardvark "Where/how should I announce a San Francisco-based puzzle game? I told one group of puzzle enthusiasts about it, and they liked it. Now I want to tell more."
I got an answer from "Adam J."
Adam J. There are a number of social services like twitter and facebook for accessing local interest groups. Welcome to Aardvark!
Me Thank you! [but thinking: uhm, no]
Adam J. no problem ;-) you might also speak with local comic and game stores to see if they have regular groups that you could present your game to.
And that seemed like a much better idea. Unfortunately, I'm pretty shy, so the idea of talking to a shop proprietor was tough going. But eventually I walked past a game shop I didn't know and saw that they had a bulletin board. So I asked if I could post a flyer.
Looking at the Game Shop, it looked like they mostly sold to families. And the other flyers on their bulletin board were aimed at parents. Nothing wrong with parents, but maybe not quite the overlap with "boardgame geek" that I'd hoped for.
Still, that evening I noticed a couple of new folks had tried the game out, and actually making pretty good progress. There were two people working at that game store. Coincidence? Maybe, but I kind of doubt it.
OK, two people isn't many, but by this time, activity on the site had pretty much quieted down to a couple of new players per week, each only making it as far as the "example" puzzle.
Dang.
I work for a computer company. Many puzzly nerds work there. Many are summer interns. I figured Maybe some of the San Francisco interns would like this game. One of the interns put together a weekly newsletter. I asked him to post an announcement; he did.
This didn't seem to get any new people to sign up. The web site did get a few visits. I tried looking up the IP address of one visitor. Since I was at work, it turned out I got pretty darned specific information, since this was a co-worker's workstation. It wasn't an intern, though. It was... Jess Jenkins of the Cajun Pistols.
Jess is, as far as I know, awesome. And yet I was disappointed to see this visit from her workstation: this attempt to reach folks who weren't already in the BANG community hadn't worked.
Schools were closed for Summer Vacation. As I write this, summer is ending. I should try posting some flyers. The Shinteki folks mentioned having some good luck posting messages on school mailing lists.