Organizing events -- ideas for sponsors, giveaways?

[Milo]

All,

I'm looking at organizing a Blood Bowl tournament in North Carolina sometime later this year. I'm looking for ideas for whom to hit up for donated prize support (i.e. sponsors), and also any ideas people have for giveaway items.

I do know that Impact will custom sculpt minis for events, but I think the price may be out of my range for a first time tournament (I'm expecting between 15-25 entrants), and I don't have any particular ideas for a mini that would be of wide-ranging interest at the moment. I'm also aware (and seriously considering) custom ordering some dice from Chessex. What other giveaways have people seen in the past? What went over the best, what fell flat?

I'm already working to try to get the NAF to sponsor the event, plus I plan to ask some of the local game stores to see if they would be willing to contribute some prize support. Does anyone know of any other groups who routinely support Blood Bowl tournaments? Online stores? Mini companies?

Any advice and/or contact information would be hugely appreciated. I've been out of Blood Bowl for a while and am very excited to be looking at hosting a tournament for the first time in years.

Milo

[Grumbledook]

blimey a blast from the past

don't think the NAF sponsor events usually, they just approve ranking submissions which can help anyway

the usual mini companies other than impact are gaspex, roll jordan, neomics, goblinforge so you could try and contact them

otherwise any local gaming store perhaps

personally being honest I'm not overly bothered by prizes at tournaments and I've not really kept the stuff I have got (others may beg to differ)

but I've got enough dice and sometimes custom dice can be hard to read and slows the game down (some put a picture on the 6 some on the 1 etc others get accused of being biased dice

painted teams tend to go down well if you can get a good painter to put the time up for you, though if you do that I prefer the idea of giving them away in a raffle to anyone who attends, it is much better than giving it to the overall winner imo

it sounds like you are looking to keep the price down, for me when factoring in having to travel and pay for accomodation, then food and drink on top of that as well, i'd rather the price was lower and I got nothing than more and I get something else I don't care for

other things i've seen, custom coins, custom dugouts, custom pitches, mugs, pint glasses (these are handy and a welcome exception), tshirts (though be wary due to ppl being different sizes)

I don't think I've seen stickers done and no idea how cheap custom ones are, but it is something someone could just put on their mini case, board, dugout, lunchbox, or whatever as a memento

I guess in the scheme of the overal cost some of these things can be done at a minimal cost increase per person compared to what they would be spending anyway. So if it is something worthwhile then I can't begrudge paying that, just most of the time I don't need yet another set of custom dice that I'll never use.

[Milo]

That's good advice, Grumble. Part of my motivation behind having a custom set of dice would be to ask all players to use them for the tournament -- it's one way to avoid the accusations of someone bringing in loaded dice with them. I certainly understand, though, about them being harder to read. I was planning to put a number on even the custom faces to ensure they stayed easy to read.

A custom mini would be nice but if it doesn't match the team you're playing, what's the point? Maybe a ref mini, I don't know.

One of my motivations, to be honest, is that a lot of our coaches don't have their own Blood Bowl set. A new copy of the game runs, what, almost $85 now, and one of the selling points of Blood Bowl is that it doesn't require the usual expenditure of Games Workshop's Warhammer varieties. I'm hoping that most of them will eventually decide that they want a copy of their own, but for most of them (starving college students and the like), just swallowing a $50 team is enough.

I was wanting to provide Blood Bowl bits that had some real value, like Block dice (although if I offer NAF registration at the event, that would do for that.) Another idea that I've seen is an acrylic range ruler, possibly with some additional common tables printed on it. I was also thinking about looking into how much it would cost to get a pitch printed onto a roll-up mat, similar in material to a floppy mouse pad.

Milo