[CJAS Otakon] Aim for the CJAS!

[Gregory Marques]

Hey team! Let's do something really cool to promote CJAS as one of the
best anime clubs around. Plus have a lot of fun meeting cool anime fans
and making Otakon a cooler con than it is!

Here's the idea:
We can set up and run a little Win Lose or Draw game during Otakon. We'll
get the other congoers to play against each other for prizes. CJAS will
get fame, we'll have fun and people will love us!

It won't be hard at all if we all participate. I've set it up for 10
people all by myself in less than 24hrs, it's super easy.

(This is a bit long but you won't need to read it all, the last part will
be "extra", I'll mark it.)

There are some variations we might want to do with it but here's the basic
plan and what we'd need to do.

I've numbered the stuff we need to get and then I'll talk about each one
later on.

We set up (either in a room or hopefully in one of the larger common areas
of the con where everyone passes by) a couple of easels (1) and hang out
attracting guest to play. We can get teams to compete against each other.
The game is very simple: we show one member of a team an anime title(2)
and they draw it for the rest of their team to guess (pictionary). If
their team fails in one minute the otehr team gets one guess to steal.
Then the second team goes. Repeat for 10-20 clues and then declare the
winner. Hand out prizes(3). Get the next team to play. We may want to run
a championship at the end, or run the entire thing tournament style. (more
on that at the end)


(1) Easels, paper and pens. A 50 sheet thing of newsprint is $10 at
Staples. At one per page, 20 per game it's 2 pads = 5games. 30 minute
games means a max of say 20 games (were we to go for 10hrs! more about
that later) it's only 8 pads. $80-90. Pens are dirt cheap, and we'd need 4
say, in case we use them heavily. $5max (what are those; elite markers?)
The easels are much more expensive. If anyone has access to an easel
please let me know. I will ask Otakon if they can provide any but They
also cost to rent.
We've found them on the net for $50. we need 2. Were CJAS to buy them:
$100 but at least they could keep them. If anyone wants to buy themselves
an easel and let us use it at Otakon, let us know.

So the total cost if we bought it all is around $200. If just 1/2 the
people on this list want to pay it'd be $10 each. However I'm not yet
suggesting we take that course at all. If anyone has ideas on what to do
about the cost speak up. =)

(2) We need a list of "answers". This is fantastically easy to generate, I
have done it around 8 times without more than 5% overlap. (around 600
clues total) However one person makes it a little biased. Also we'd want
to have specific categories so as to make it easier and more
straightforward for "random" congoers to play.
I suggest 2 or 3 categories:
	Anime Titles
	Character Names
	Places and Things

These would be written on 3X5 cards (which are very cheap of course, I
forget how much for 500) we'd need both the Japanese and English versions
and we'd take both as correct. I will get the Japanese for all of them
that we don't know.
It's simple to come up with them, I'll just take submissions in batches of
20 later on. Let's see at 20/game and 20 games we'd need 400, plus a lot
of extras so 500 total. Seems like a lot but it's really easy for a group.
There are many anime out there all of which have characters and
places/things in the worth using for WLoD.

(3) Prizes. I will be asking Otakon to provide these. However It will be
great to supplement them with stuff we have too. If you have anything
that'd make a good prize (anime-related and worth more than $10, pref
around $20) Let me know.

Then there's advertisemnt. I hope to get into the schedule and booket but
in addition we should make flyers and put them on bulliten boards all over
the place. I figure 100 is fine, no need to go crazy, just that extra ad
boost to remind people when they're not doing anything else. These are
cheap but we'll need a design. Ideas?


Finally the staffing: It takes only one person to run the thing, but no
one wants to be alone, plus we really would like to have someone guarding
prizes and someone dedicated to listening to the guessers so that we have
no mistakes. 3 at a time. even at 10 hours if we take 1 hour shifts...
there are more than 30 of us. I would like to run it all day Saturday, or
most of the evening saturday. We could plan on Friday (once we see the
schedule) who will take what shift. I've often found I have an hour block
where there's just not much I want to do, and it'd be cool to promote CJAS
(and my personal fame too) during that time.

So please tell (gmarques@cjas.org) me if you're interested in helping out.
James Kao and I will do all the organizing and planning, but you're
welcome to help in that too if you want.


Okay that's all you need to read. If you're interested in some more on
what kind of stuff we could do keep readin.

When:
I like the idea of all day Saturday, say from 12am to 10pm. This will
conflict with cosplay, however. We might decide it best to close during
cosplay and resume afterwards (like a 11-7 and them 12-2 thing of 10 total
hours) one advantage of that is often Sat night lots of people want to do
cool stuff after 12 but all they have is poop going on.

Still other plans could include splitting it up to Friday night and sat
night. Or a shorter timeframe sat, like 6hrs total.

Type:
I like tournament style best and I think we should do this at least once.
There are TWO BIG advantages to this. First we only need give out prizes
once or for top two. This lets the prizes be cooler and makes it easier to
get enough prizes from Otakon. The second is that we can advertise for the
tournament, take team signups... this lets congoes get their friends
together and should make it a lot more fun.

Oh this is also where the second easel comes in. It'd be best to do 2
games at once in order to get in in faster. That means 6 people running
it, but for less time, the more of us there at once the better we look and
the more fun we'd have.

If you have another idea or want to talk about it contact me.

Otakon:
	I'm going to ask Otakon for several things:
first the prizes
second they might be able to get us easels or pay for other things as well
the space: I'll ask if we can do it in a common area so we can grab
passersby. If they put us into a room we're more likely to do well with a
scheduled tournament than on the fly games. A little of each would be
best.
advertisement - being listed on the schedule and booklet.

Okay it's late so if you have anthing to add let me know!