GAMA 2025 - A Retrospective

GAMA 2025 was a wild and wonderful whirlwind for myself, Dan our COO and Matt our head of customer support!

We learned a lot, we met a lot of people and we drank a lot of bourbon. Southern hospitality is certainly a real thing and not necessarily for the faint of heart. Most importantly: we got to speak with current and potential operators and are flooded with ideas.

While the beautiful blur that was GAMA 2025 is still fresh in our minds, here’s our "TCG Machine's Guide to the GAMA Convention"

LESSON 1 - People Want to Hear Your Pitch

While this is our second time at GAMA, it was our first time presenting in front of a live audience. This was an excellent experience and very illuminating. We were then flooded with tips and tricks to improve the experience immediately after leaving the presentation room. Game on!

When we were designing our presentation, it was decided we didn’t want to do a hard-sell pitch - the thought process was that if people wanted us to pitch our product to them they would stop by our booth.

Instead, we opted for a more general focus: “How Automation Can Help Improve Your Business”. This meant having to couch all of our advice in hypotheticals and vague descriptions of general problems: “what to do with bulk”, “how to manage collection buying”, “effective practices to list cards online”, etc. However, we quickly learned that people come to your presentation because they want to hear about your area of expertise. Shocker!

It turns out that while we are experts in MAKING card-sorting robots, our customers are experts at USING card-sorting robots. As such, our operators in the audience took the lead in providing use-case answers to the questions about our robot. The result was a collaborative conversation between PhyzBatch-9000 designers and its users; past, present, and future.

Next year we will reach out to a few users ahead of the presentation so that they might join us to speak more about USING the machine in the context of their business. We’ll field the technical questions. When you want to learn about a game, it’s best to interview the players, not the crew that built the stadium.

LESSON 2 - Your Time is Very Valuable

Things that are better done before you leave:

• Printing brochures
• Designing and practicing your presentation
• Eating
• Sleeping

Things that your time at GAMA is better spent doing:

• “Networking” - which, in Kentucky, generally means drinking excellent bourbon with great company.
• Attending as many of the many excellent talks with industry leaders as possible.
• Checking out the beautiful and historic downtown Louisville.
• Absorbing the hundreds of booths and taking in ideas, new products, and potential partnerships. Everyone has something useful or interesting to say.

LESSON 3 - These Are Your People

To be frank: in addition to the colorful lanyards, you can generally spot a fellow attendee from a distance. We aren’t afraid to wear our dice and dragons on our sleeves (and everywhere else). This is doubly true if you’re at the Galt Hotel at the same time as the National Brick Manufacturers Convention - the audience of which could not have been a starker contrast with the GAMA crowd.

As Canadians - we’re often a bit reserved in our approach to co-existence. In short, we don’t want to bother anyone. Taking the time to turn around in a lineup and ask someone “So what do you guys do?” might not come as naturally to us as some of our fellow attendees. Doing exactly that yielded some of the most interesting conversations from the entire event!

You see, the table-top gaming industry is filled with people who are in effect, trying to maximize the potential of technology that hasn’t had a major change since 1920, i.e. boards, dice, and miniature figures. As a consequence, these people are all masters of IMAGINATION! They’re always asking “How can we leverage our miniatures and playmats into immersive and magical experiences?”. Consequently, this makes this crowd of people very fun to talk to.

These conversations yielded connections that went above and beyond the confines of mere passers-by into, dare I say, friendships. Luckily, our customers are some of the nicest and most positive people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.

LESSON 4 - Passion Abounds

The biggest takeaway for me is that the industry is no longer the 1980s stereotype of the social outcast: bereft and mistreated. I had never personally attended a GAMA convention before and was blown away by the prestige, polish, and poise possessed by the people involved. It was truly inspiring to see everyone in attendance firmly attuned to, and in pursuit of, their mission. For some, it is making products more fun, for others, more accessible or efficient. No matter the case everyone was excellent in their focus. The bar is set, it is set high, and business - from what I can tell - is booming.

So, if you’ve not had the opportunity or not seen it fit to become a member despite perhaps being an operator in the tabletop gaming world - I can only say that for myself personally it was a tremendously enjoyable and eye-opening experience as to the potential and passion of this industry of ours.