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The most powerful form of marketing ever is word-of-mouth, and we wouldn’t be the successful game company we are if it weren’t for our fans, who love our games so much they can’t help but jabber enthusiastically about them whenever the subject comes up.
Over the years, we’ve looked for ways to reward our biggest fans for helping promote us. In fact, we’ve redefined and relaunched these demo team efforts multiple times over the last 20 years. At first we called our fans “Mad Lab Rabbits,” then we tried rebranding the group as the “Looney Labs Game Techs.” We’ve also used a series of different software tools to help us keep in touch, first with a custom-built application we called SuperFRED, then with mailing lists, and most recently with a NING-based collection of forums. But trends and technology are always changing, and right now we’re finding that the best way to stay connected with our people is through one or more of the best-known social media platforms.
To get to the point, our NING fan club site has been shut down. We archived as much as we could, and have more raw data so if there is something you wish you could get back, please ask. Our Facebook groups have also been adjusted and some new ones added. Although we are active on many different social platforms, most of the conversations are happening on Facebook. It's where everyone is hanging out right now, so that's where we are talking with you!
We are moving away from the idea of a Demo Team entirely, and letting our Fan Club simply be a fan club. We will no longer be asking our fans to run demos for us at events we aren’t attending; as for events we will attend, we will be recruiting a smaller set of volunteers that we can ask to assist us in person. If you were part of our previous demo team, and want to stay involved, we have created a Volunteer Survey. Whether you are new to our games or you’ve been a fan since before Fluxx, we’d love to hear from you!
Please follow us on the social media outlet of your choice to hear what we are doing next, and please use social media to tell us about the fun you are having playing our games. Don’t mistake this shift in thinking for a lack of interest in what our fans are doing. Far from it - we love our fans! Thanks for playing our games!
Please join the conversation in our fan groups on Facebook!
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APRIL
28
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Tabletop Day @ Third Eye Games
Looney Labs has a new card game - Get the MacGuffin - and we are running a tournament for it at Third Eye Games to celebrate Tabletop Day! 11 finalists will win a small prize and one winner will walk away with $50 cash. We will also be playtesting Star Trek Fluxxes! So come out and play with us!
International Tabletop Day (ITTD) is a worldwide celebration of tabletop gaming for all members of our incredible community. In its seventh year, the day-long event is filled with gaming, charity fundraising, and collaborative online entertainment. This is a great opportunity to nerd out and scratch your tabletop itch, to introduce your non-gamer friends to an incredibly enriching and rewarding hobby, or to come see what all of this board game fuss is about in the first place.
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JUNE
22-25
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ALA Annual Conference
Kristin & Andy will be guests of the Games and Gaming Roundtable and will be available to answer questions and show off what they can offer libraries. They will also be demoing games nearby and at ALA Play the night before, so come out and play!
The American Library Association's yearly conference is a huge celebration of all things library. In addition to book signings, there is a maker space, a gaming area, a live performance stage, and much more!
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AUGUST
2-5
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Gen Con
Looney Labs will again have a tiny booth where they will be taking meetings, demoing their latest games, and selling a few Looney things!
Gen Con is known as "the best four days in gaming," and with good reason! With over 500 exhibitors and 19,000 events, it's no wonder that over 60,000 people flock to this event to play and see their friends! There's nothing quite like it... one of those bucket list kind of events for gamers.
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Q: Was it difficult narrowing down the characters and objects to use in the upcoming Star Trek Fluxxes since the Star Trek universe is so expansive?
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A: It wasn’t as difficult as you might think. First, we narrowed the scope by committing to making two versions at the same time, one focusing on the original show and one on The Next Generation. This also meant I didn’t have to think about DS-9, Voyager, etc. (Assuming the first two sell well, we can consider other decks featuring those shows in future years.) With the focus narrowed to a specific show, the individual elements become easy to identify, and the game practically invents itself. Each show has a core crew of characters who each become a Keeper, so that’s 8 no-brainer cards right there. Also, each show has a bunch of memorable hardware and gadgets, some unique to their shows, others appearing in both, such as the Phaser, the Computer, the Transporter, and the Enterprise itself. So that’s another 6 or 7 cards. Then come the bad guys, i.e. the Creepers:
Klingons, Tribbles, and Doomsday Machines (for TOS), Cardassians, Q, and the Borg (for TNG), and Romulans and Malfunctions (for both). That’s 6 more cards, which gives us roughly 21 Keepers & Creepers, which is pretty much the limit for a 100 card deck and provides more than enough options for combining into Goals. Of course, there’s a long list of secondary characters and plot elements that I have to leave out, and some of those are painful to omit… but there’s always the possibility of a promo card!
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