Elfball demoing tips?

Tarota · Elfball demoing tips?

I just got done with a convention, where amongst my myriad activities, I did some demoing of Elfball. Or tried to: scheduling overlaps and other difficulties actually meant that I only demoed to one person. So, I'm trying to prepare to do better next time.

The first and most obvious problem: I didn't have a five minute demo set up. While the booth that was selling the minis had a nice display, they couldn't really demo the game effectively. It takes too long to go through all the rules, and the need for a quick line of patter just never occurred to me for some reason. I was thinking that a quick set-play might be the thing: a two-on-two goal drive, for instance. Set up a striker (with ball) and hunter against defender and midfielder, and just play three turns each or something. Has anyone tried this? Does it work?

Cephalopod

I haven't tried it yet but I'm doing a small demo this weekend for interested friends. I'll give it a shot and see how it goes.

Cephalopod

Tarota,

I tried it out yesterday and had good results. Since I didn't know the rules as well as I should, it took longer than it might have, but after three runs of two-on-two everyone had the rules down.

I recommend setting up with the striker holding the ball a few hexes on their side of the half-way line. The hunter should be in the center hex (yellow dot). The Defender should be in the goalie circle and the midfielder should be placed within hitting distance of the hunter.

This setup gave some tactical options from the get go. Explaining that the hunter will want to take out the midfielder by shoving first, than tackling is quite easy and teaches all about the momentum mechanics. Overall, the first demo run took about 15 minutes, the second and third took less than 10 and the group I was demoing to was ready to jump in and play a game right then, so I whipped out my (still unpainted, damn it) Pharaoh and Valkyrie teams and they had a blast while I acted as the ref. The experience range varied from complete newbie (who had the most fun) to former Fantasy Football players with 10 years of experience, but the match ups looked pretty even in spite of that.

Edit: Typos.

GalakStarscraper

Hmmm ... some great ideas there. If MJ gets online ... I'll have to discuss if that would not be a better way to demo the game at GenCon.

The face-off mechanics always seem to bog the game down if I have to go through them in a demo match. Starting off with them having the ball ... seems better.

Almost wonder if 2 on 2 doesn't give enough players though to assist. Wonder how fast 3 on 3 would play out.

So for set up. Striker with the ball just outside the middle yellow ... opposing Hunter in the middle dot hex. Then each player gets a player on the Guardian hex and each player sets up one player in a yellow circle in their opponent's half.

Galak

Cephalopod

3 on 3 is the next style I plan on trying. In my 2 on 2 demo they did get to assist, but not enough to make it appear to be an important part of the game.

Tarota

Good to hear. I was just looking for something that I could run in 1-5 minutes, to catch dealer room traffic at a con. Enough to roll the dice a few times, see how the challenge tables work, and maybe score for the home team. If someone's really interested, I'm willing to set up the full game, but I think a teaser for someone who doesn't have 15-90 minutes to kill (

) would be a good tool to have too.

Mad Jackal