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Hello

I am looking to increase the player base of 40k in my small community. We have Roughly 6-8 players that I can get to meet at our board game store. Sadly we are having scheduling issues (some live 45 minute drive away and full time jobs during store hours).

I have been finding it difficult to get players wanting to get started with the game. Our small community prefers to play Magic, Yu-gi-oh and Pokemon TCGs and when I ask them if they would be interested in getting into 40k the answer is almost always that 40k costs too much and after explaining the cost similarities/differences versus the card games and 40k, I'm usually still turned down.

Lore and the background to the game has been the few times I've grabbed the interest of players. Except I have to meet those would-be-players in person and have that talk.

What I am wondering is if anyone has ideas I can utilize to grow a larger player base in my area?

Other information to note:
-Population of area: Roughly 10.5k
-I work for the game store
-Ages go from high school students, then people around 30+ (local college only has 1-2 yr programs).

The single best way to grow any community is to play games. People see you playing and they get curious. Since you work for the FLGS, talk to the owner about having a couple "house armies" that players can use. After they play a few games with those, they may decide they're ready to start their own collections. I'd recommend some that are fairly well-balanced against each other (Tyranids and BA?)

be glad with those 6-8 players thats all I am going to say.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Wait you work for the game store. This changes things.
The best way would be to look at what you sell. If you have more customers of 40k stuff then you have "players" then there is a potential to grow your player base.

What helps is organising game events for them and supplying a general nice gaming experience good room, nice terrain etc. . But don't expect it to work wonders, this isn't a sane hobby really.

If you work for the store start a escalation league and offer a discount to the people who sign up.

Start a demo night and expose people to the game.....

Offer DISCOUNTS!

yeah escalation ( not the book!) generally works.

as do friendly tournament like things. Just offer them more then they might have at their friends basement or give casual painters a low threshold intensive to start gaming again.

Escalation league or just keep it very very small

like a single starter box kinda thing.

lots of in house terrain make it look suuuper cool and people should come.

especially if its playable under 100$

then after you hook them with that they will eventually want to expand slowly and not realize how much they are spending muhhahahahhahahha

And yeah you can compare the price to the TCG's, but the major difference is that for 40k almost all the price is up front, TCG's you can start for much less initially. And if they're already invested in a TCG, they only need to get cards as things rotate in and out of formats. For 40k, if you want what's considered a full size army for most tournaments now, it's several hundred dollars up front. Not a lot of people are gonna go for that unless they KNOW they're interested and DEFINITELY want to play/hobby it up.

So to mitigate that, escalation league is a great idea. Maybe a start collecting box league. Definitely demos, definitely try to get that 6-8 person group playing as much as possible. Do some free events at like 1k points on weekends, put an ongoing story to it. That might draw interest from people doing other things in the store.

Thank you for all the quick replies! I will definitely look into escalation type games, also like the in store armies idea.

Over the last few months I have been getting Terrain for the store, (some my own as well), we even have had two hobbyists volunteer to paint some of them last month. We also had a retired Fantasy/40k/bloodbowl player donate a 4'x4' table he had for his games.

Back when I was only a player we had played 1000-1500pt games. Now though our core group usually can barely get a full day to play those including travel times so we've on occasion reduced to 750-1000pt games.
I ran a demo two weeks back to cover the basics to the game, except we had a low turn out. Co-worker and Owners think it is due it being summer reading, camping and just outside season atm. We also do paint nights on occasion but also has a small turn out.

Sales: We have been discovering that our customers mostly have been purchasing paints more than anything (Surprising amount of DnD groups in this area now).
Discounts: We have an over abundance of space marine product that sometimes I feel we are unable to even 'give away.'

What kind of discount ideas would you recommend? Would something like 'Play at our store and we will give you a (% here) discount on any gamesworkshop product,' be decent?
Should I talk with our Core players and see if they can help out by trying to play here more often and if so how could I get them excited to play?

Information update:
Core players are
- 3x ork
- 1x CSM
- 1x Imperial Guard or Grey knights (here for summers)
- 1x Tyranids (hasn't been around in months though)
- 1x Necron, DA, CSM or small amount of Tyranids (myself).

Entry games like Deathwatch and Silver tower are great ways to draw people into the hobbie, much quicker to be able to play, and games dont last near as long so.

DnD players don't have that many reason to buy 40k stuff really. You can't use a space marine in your game of 40k. What you can use in your DND game is fantasy stuff. The Silver Tower works perfectly since it already contains a dnd party worth of mini's. If it is just to sell more stuff DND players might also like then you might also consider selling mantic dungeon saga, old second hands single WFB miniatures, and reaper miniatures.

If you want more RPG'ers into 40k you might want to host a few games of 40k RPG's to draw them more into the universe and give them a reason to buy 40k stuff.. Don't bulk up on the stuff since its quite obscure and doesn't really sell itself but they might actually like it if you show it to them. And the starting adventures are quite good.. Dark herecy and Rogue trader are both decent FFG games you might want to take a look at.










Automatically Appended Next Post:
The other thing you can do is to start up a Gorka Morka or Necromunda campaign ( there are even some rules for combining them ). It is much more fun then kill team has a low threshold to enter and you can use 40k models for it making it the start of a small army.

I feel like a good stepping point instead would be to do kill teams.

they would only need a box or two to play at the start, it could be closer to a board game kinda game.

also probably should have store copy of rules available for people to (try it out)

Agreed - Kill Teams sounds perfect!

If you go kill team use these rules most of the official ones are kinda ehm... lets say in the same state of balance as the 7th edition ;_)

http://heralds-of-ruin.blogspot.nl/p/kill-team-rules.html