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How do you manage the public/private space and how do you grow your communities in such a space?

How do you mean?

There is no decent gaming store in my town, so we run a semi-private gaming club. A member has a barn on his propery that we've spruced up, added heat/insulation and have about 6-7 tables. We usually have around 10 people coming out every gaming night.

We've posted adds around town and online and that's usually how we gain new members. Word of mouth helps as well as friends will occasionally bring new people into it.

I'm not too sure what the question is, either.

I used to game in a club back when the FLGS didn't have any gaming space. The club rented a large room (and later a classroom at a local high school) one evening per week, and charged either by visit or via yearly membership. Terrain was stored on the premises in a spare closet.

I am in the process of trying to set up a gaming club.

At the moment we have stalled on finding a venue that is cheap enough and has enough tables for us to actually play on!

We play at one member's house, but we don't really grow.

We play at one of the member's house, but it doesn't grow either. We've got the space for one table, the residents armies and some terrain.

As someone who has only ever played at clubs until recently I would say look for hiring:

The local:

Scout hut
Church Hall
School Hall
Community Centre

Some of these will have tables, others will allow storage of tables and scenery.

As for growing, start with a core group, and split the costs between you - might be expensive initially especially if you are pooling funds to obtain scenery etc.

Advertise online, in the local model shop/FLGS assuming they don't themselves have tables, etc or in the local paper. If your local rag is short of articles they may want to do a piece about wargaming and the local club starting up, and give out some contact details.

We used this method to advertise, tying in an advert for the clubc with the article on our annual charity event - a 24hr sponsored wargame. This will help sell the article and get you exposure.

If you were not on the wrong side of the state I'd be there!

I do.
Most of my gaming has been in privately held games clubs (in-store gaming is a blip and freak of nature for me. )
One of these clubs was a backyard shed type deal with mates (and we were callled DLYGA. - Don't like you, Go AWAY).

There is no gaming store in the town where the club is.
The nearest one is an hour's drive away (in either direction).

We hire the boardroom of a local sports club and charge a fee per head (half price for under 18s). We need 6 adults a meeting to cover costs (we normally get this). The room is otherwise unused on weekends (lack of easy-access for mobility impaired people) so we get it fairly cheap.

How do we grow the club?
We are on wargamerau, facebook and we run a few tourneys each year (fliers go into the nearest GW and other gaming stores). We have interclub meets (where we go to another club or they come to us. We've had a club come down from the far north coast (an 8 hour drive) just for a weekend of gaming with us.

The club started as a group of kids playing 40k run by the mother of one of them at the local Police-Citizens Youth Centre. Due to issues with civilian admin at the PCYC, we were forced to seek an alternate venue. Since then, we have gained more adult members and they now outnumber the kids (who have all but dropped out by the age of 17)

I've found that (at least IME), the gaming hobby loses many of the 17 year olds due to competing interests at that age. Maybe 20% come back around 24-25.

We use the college cafeteria, my very large garage, the garages of others and I have played a 500 point game of 40k in a Tacobell. So yes my club is spread out over our small town

For the first few years of my presence in the hobby I was a member of the GW_SoCal fantasy league which was "private" to some degree. It was based off of yahoo groups and all the fantasy games were hosted at the same house each week.

It was a major influence on me and I miss it dearly. Our last official game was a 15 hour 16,000 point game. Good times.

The point of a Private club is to have a more controlled environment, and part of this control is having more say over memebrs and who is around.

While the less public natue means slower growth usually through word of mouth and internet, it also has the benefit of reducing exposure to TFGs and smelly types.

With a club goal is usually quality over quantity, so this seems to work fine imho.

The club I am in has a Yahoogroup that we use for communication, and we give out the address/send invites to peopel we meet that we want to ask to join.

We have also given out buisness cards with the address at cons, posted them on LGS message boards, etc.

Just as an update, we have now found somewhere!

Found a community centre that only wants to charge us £20 for 6 hours hire of there dinning area!

I used to play in a local community centre. The facilities included 3 large rooms, 4 smaller rooms and a kitchen. The club's scenery was stored in the loft space. For £25 a year we could play almost every Sunday of the year from 2.30 - 7 pm.

The club would hold open days when anyone could come along to play and these would be advertised in local shops and free newspapers. Also the club was involved in Reveille which was run yearly in Bristol as a fairly large event for wargamers of all types. The club did also have a small website to keep an online presence.

Over the 20 odd years I went there membership went up and down but there were probably 25 members playing a number of different wargame systems.

I used to be in two clubs held at the same community centre on different days. One was tabletop wargames and the other was RPG. There was a core membership (slightly different between the two) of about six to 10 and a number of more casual members.

Most of the members were friends outside the club in one way or another so people also played round people's houses, and organised paintball games, trips to SF films, Christmas Club Dinner, the NFL Wembley game, and other non-club activities.

Since it was held in a community centre, there was a weekly fee of 50p.

There wasn't any particular drive to get new members. People were generally introduced by existing members. We had enough people to run the games we wanted to play. This was the late 80s to early 90s.

Publicity is a lot easier nowadays because of the Internet. Set up a blog or Facebook page and organise things through that. People searching for clubs in your area will be able to find it through Google.

If you want to run and grow a club you need a good constitution which will allow you to blackball people and eject people who make a nuisance of themselves. I would advise setting up a small committee of friends who know how they want things to go. It may sound a bit dictatorial, but why bother to run a club you aren't going to like?

Unlimited expansion is not a good thing as you will outgrow your premises.

We have a purpose built gaming area in one of our club members business premises.

We have all the terrain stored their and can have two 6 x 8 tables or a single 16 x 6 up to play on. Or lots of 6 x 4s.

We have 8 regular members and do no advertising at all to grow as we dont want to particuarly, no need for it and no desire to... If new players find us though, they are always assured of a warm welcome but as we play every Friday night from 8pm till 2am it tends to be gamers of a more mature age range. The youngest in our club is 36...

Since finding a local club I no longer game at any stores. It's a fair journey away but worth the trip to play in an independant location. It's a big club, we have over 100 people on our members list, with about 30 regulars. We hold the club at a community hall and since we have a large number of regulars the cost per peson is only £2.

We have a website (with a forum) and some of our members are also in large gaming organisations so we go to most of the major events in the UK where we often meet new people. Currently we aren't actively looking for more people because we can't fit many more in the hall, however we still get the occasional new member. We have a good relationship with local shops (gw and independants) so a lot of peple join after being suggested to pay us a visit.

My club meets in one of the member's basements, he's got a big basement with like 5 tables set up. We all donated a couple terrain pieces so there's a nice selection now. Everyone in the club is at least in their late 20's, some over 50. we meet up one saturday a month and a saturday could have 5 people or 20 depending on everyone's family schedules. Definitely a beer (sometimes scotch) and pretzels group.

We've tried playing in stores but either the stores don't last, or they don't have enough space, or they start scheduling tourneys on the days they invited us to come so there's no room for us old people to play, etc. So it'll probably be a basement club for a while now. I like it better that way personally.

Sounds pretty cool to me. Going renegade like that.

I just game with friends - we all have gaming tables but lately I've been hosting. Which is great. My group really isn't into adding members at all. Which I admit would be nice sometimes. Since adding members helps out when certain people can't show up.

Starting your own gaming club isn't hard as long as someone is willing to create a schedule and stick to it - then post fliers around town (esp gamer hangouts). You just need enough space for a table. Work with what you have. Churches will rent space if you ask. Colleges sometimes will provide space, too. Just take your stuff home when you leave.