ConCardia: For Conventions

Players at Steampunk Worlds Fair enjoy the ConCardia tournament.

For Convention Runners

ConCardia offers a wide variety of benefits for conventions. From bringing new awareness to your event to helping bring business to your vendors to creating a better experience for your attendees, ConCardia is an extremely versatile tool.

ConCardia is designed by an experienced convention runner. Michael Whitehouse has drawn on over 20 years of convention planning experience to develop a game which integrates seamlessly with its host conventions. ConCardia is designed never to complicate or hinder your efforts to run your convention, but to help you make your convention even better than it already is.

For an established convention, we will work with you to create a card set which is ideal for addressing any challenges which you face. For a newer convention, we are available to share our experience and knowledge of convention planning to help with any aspect of your convention that you would like our help on.

As a Promotion for Vendors

Vendors are at your event because they want attendees to come to their booth and buy their wares. At many events, there are more vendors than the attendees will have time to see. ConCardia gives vendors the opportunity to sponsor a card, which means that they will have a card exclusively available at their booth. This card will be on the list of cards that players are seeking out, and, since they will be some the easiest to find, most players will hit the vendors first, bringing them traffic and business at a very reasonable cost. More business means happier vendors, and happier vendors make your job as a convention organizer easier.

Many events have variations on the scavenger hunt, but too many end up being thrown together, haphazard affairs that don't really do much for the vendors. ConCardia has been tested and refined over five years at dozens of events to optimize our ability to push traffic to sponsoring vendors.

As a Marketing Tool

This card is given to all
players at Steampunk
Worlds Fair 2017 to
promote a future event.

ConCardia has been hugely popular among those who have played it. Players are eager to find out where it will be played again and to get into it. At each event, we take email addresses from players so we can let them know about other events. As a ConCardia hosting event, you will benefit from increased attendance. Some players will come just for ConCardia. Others may learn of your convention who might not know about it otherwise.

In addition to our email list, your event can be promoted by having special promo cards at other events. Unlike regular fliers, your ConCardia card is a real, playable card. It has game effects and it is needed to win some of the better prizes. People will be seeking out your promo card and keeping it even after the con.

As an Attraction for Attendees

Your event has lots of great things going on for attendees. But what does an attendee do between events? What do they do while waiting for an event to start? ConCardia is called an Augmented Reality Game because players play it while doing other things: waiting in line, shopping vendors, attending panels, etc. ConCardia gamifies the convention experience providing a fun, overarching experience to the whole convention for them.

The new C4 rules are playable by any number of people in about 15 minutes, so it's a perfect game to play while waiting for that next event to begin or even in line for a program item.

For Attendee Direction

Besides attending your event, there are probably things that you would like attendees to do. Perhaps you want them to see the new musical act or speaker that you brought in from the other coast. Maybe you's like them to attend some of the earlier panels in the day. Whatever it is that you would like to encourage attendees to do, ConCardia can help you with by providing incentives for attendees to do what you would like them to do.

A card from the Chester
Rotary deck.

Great For All Kinds of Events

While ConCardia got its start in fandom and entertainment events, ConCardia if effective at any event where the organizers would like to drive attendee behavior. While one might assume that ConCardia is only good in an environment with a lot of card gamers, ConCardia actually appeals to to a much broader audience. For example, a local Rotary club asked us to create a deck for them featuring local landmarks and people from around town. People love to see the familiar in print, and they want to collect it.

As a Tool to Facilitate Running the Con

Some of the sodas that players brought us.
(Not all 12 are pictured because I drank a
couple before we took the picture)

Conventions are run with that labor of many volunteers. Some jobs are easy to fill, but others may be more difficult to find people for. For example, if you need volunteers at 8 AM, there might be less volunteers than at 2 PM. ConCardia can help with this. We make a card that you can only get for volunteering at 8 AM. Players who are excited about the game will come and help out.

How do we know this will work? At Steampunk Worlds Fair, we sent out a text to 120 players offering a
special card to the first player to bring us a diet soda. Within 10 minutes, a dozen players dropped what they were doing a rushed to deliver a soda to the ConCardia table.

Sodas are one thing, but it takes real dedication to get players to have our logo air brushed onto their bodies. The pictures below are from another event, where we offered another special card if players would get our logo airbrushed on themselves. This event only had less than 400 attendees, and we had about 14 people get the logo applied: