Protospiel Bingo 2020
In partnership with Maxine and Randy Ekl and Clever Playing Cards, we’ll be hosting a metagame of Protospiel Bingo at Protospiel Denver this year!
For Attendees
Protospiel Bingo was first launched at Protospiel Chicago 2019. The attendees had a lot of fun with it -- and gave some good feedback for the next iteration. This will be the first time Maxine and Randy have partnered with another Protospiel to run it, so we can all have fun with the second playtest of a game about playtesting games!
We'll play this very meta metagame over all 3 days of Protospiel. Each attendee will get a Bingo card at registration with a unique combo of prototype aspects to look for. At the end of each playtest, the playtesters can find a square on their card that describes something about the playtest and ask the game’s designer to initial that square.
You can only fill in a square if you playtest another designer's game, so you'll now have a little extra incentive to share the playtesting love.
The things that might match the prototype are the player's relationship to the designer, characteristics of the designer (first letter of first name, local vs out-of-state, etc), or attributes of the game (mechanic, theme, style, components).
Although some things may be a little different on the final Bingo cards, this example can help you get the idea:
To make this metagame extra fun, we've gathered up some published games for prizes! Anyone who can complete a 5-in-a-row Bingo will be invited to come to the registration desk and pick a published game from our prize display table (while supplies last).
Several of our friends in the board game design community have genrously donated prize support (multiple copies in some cases). Donors include attending publishers Thunderworks Games, Toresh Games, Argyle Games, and Pangea Games along with some other supporters Pencil First Games, Laid Back Games, Cloven Fruit Games, McMeeple Games, Letiaman Games, Dice Hate Me Games, and Atlas Games. We’re still tallying our total donations, but, suffice it to say, you’ll have a good chance to win a prize if you can get your 5-in-a-row!
If you are a completionist and are wondering what you'll get for a full blackout Bingo, we've got you covered! We will include the name and profile link (with the player's permission, of course) for anyone who finishes a blackout Bingo on our public Protospiel Denver Bingo Hall of Fame list. We'll keep publishing this on our event website year over year, so you'll be able to go down in history as someone who got into our Hall of Fame in the very first year! Achieving a blackout will mean playing 25 prototypes in 3 days -- let's see if it's possible. ;)
For Donors
We’ll have a wide variety of types/sizes of games and means of publishing (Kickstarter, retail, Game Crafter, etc) on the prize table.
These prizes are both a way to reward attendees for getting lots of playtests in and a way to highlight the creatives in our community doing great things. As such, the prize table will be prominently visible at the front of the room, and we have a few ideas for extra things we may do to make the display more interesting if time allows.
We are expecting somewhere between 100-150 attendees at Protospiel Denver this year, though we can accommodate 200 if needed.
We’ll make sure any donated games find a good home as quickly as possible. It will be our goal to get all prizes donated this year distributed this year. If we do somehow end up with excess, we'll use those games to start off our prize support for Protospiel Bingo next year.
We will keep any multiple copies of the same game under the prize display table to give all available prizes the same shelf appeal. So, whether you donate one copy or multiples, your game will have the same prominence as all the other options.
We'll give all of our donors shoutouts on our website, social media, and attendee emails. We'll also encourage winners who claim a prize to post to their own social media about their chosen game.
We are still accepting more games for prize support, and we'd love to have you join the party. If interested in donating, please use the info under "Contact Us" on our homepage to request the address to ship to.
