I thought I would take a couple of minutes to talk to you about our biggest event planned to date, what we are hoping to offer and how it all came about. For those of you who are not following along on Facebook, Objective Secured is planning to run a three day, multigame system event, Southern Hemisphere Open (SHO for short) 23-25th of September 2017.
On the way down to Albany earlier this year M and I were chatting about ObSec and where we are going with it. We have been so excited with the attendance at the events and really putting stop to the rumours that ’40k is dead’ (you might have heard me rant about that on Facebook or in previous posts!) We have seen the 40k community come together and it has been amazing, however we are limited with the size of the events we run as there aren’t many venues big enough to take 50 tables let alone more than that. The conversation then turned to other table top games, wouldn’t it be awesome if we were able to run events across multiple gaming systems, to really build the gaming community and offer professionally organised events across a range of different games. We would of course need to enlist the help of experienced players from those games to TO.
We talked about running events over multiple weekends and then decided it would be really exciting if we could run something similar to ETC with multiple systems playing on the same weekend. So that was our plan. A long weekend next year we would hire one of the small pavilions at the Show Grounds (1800m2) and run a multigame system weekend. I hinted at the idea at our 1st birthday drinks and the support from those who came along was overwhelming, one players exact response was ‘I’m in, I don’t care what it is, I’m in’ (earning him one of the best eye rolls from his wife I have ever seen!).
From there I’m not really sure what happened. I know that I kept increasing the number of people I wanted to attract to the event, originally I started by saying it would be great to get 150 players, then it went to 150 players per day and now my goal is to get thousands of people to attend. Hey you’ve got to aim big right!
The core idea of running multiple gaming systems over the 3 day long weekend has stayed at the heart of SHO, we have just added to it. We decided that actually the 1800m2 pavilion at the Claremont Showgrounds was not going to be big enough and so we managed to find Ascott Racecourse, over 3000m2 of indoor, fully air-conditioned, beautifully presented space.
While M and I managed to draft plan to run 12 different gaming systems we wanted to open this out to the community. You don’t know what you don’t know right, we didn’t want our lack of knowledge about a gaming system to lead to us over looking a popular game. We opened up expressions of interest for TOs to submit to run an event (TO EOI close on the 15th November, we are interested in ANY gaming system YOU think we should offer so please don’t hesitate to put in an EOI. More info on TO EOI is currently available on Facebook and will be available on the SHO page of the website by tomorrow.)
Somehow, and I’m not sure how, we decided that it shouldn’t just be table top games and we would also include CCG, board games, roleplaying and hey, why stop there? Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was an expo component where people could try demo games, we could have drop in drop out apocalypse games, invite retailers to attend to showcase what is new and what they have on offer, invite the WA gaming clubs to hold space so celebrate what they offer to local gamers, advertise and have the opportunity to recruit some new members who perhaps didn’t know the club existed. All sounding good? Then we started to hear and see players who were interested in improving their painting skills, hobby skills, and some of the skills that go into getting models ready to actually play the games. Hobby skills workshops were clearly needed!
We now have two additional EOI open, one for volunteers to run demo games and one for skilled hobbyists to run Hobby Skills Workshops. Those EOI close on the 22nd of November.
More information about how to submit the EOI is available on Facebook (Hobby Skills) (Demo Games) and will be on our website tomorrow (3/11/16).
We have a few more exciting aspects of the weekend that we are still working on and as soon as we have them confirmed I will let you know.
I can guarantee this WILL be the biggest event of it’s kind in WA (which isn’t hard because it will be the only event of it’s kind in WA). We are working with some local hotels to try to offer discounted accommodation for local, interstate and international players and I am working with some tourist companies to offer some exciting activities for the wives, girl friends and significant others (‘Pairing wine with chocolate’ and a day tour to Caversham Wildlife Park to name just two).
There is so much happening with SHO I’m not sure I have covered it all. Highlights are: Southern Hemisphere Open, 23-25 September 2017, Ascott Racecourse. Minimum 10 gaming systems (potentially many more), CCG, board games, demo games, gaming expo, hobby skills workshops, painting competitions, diorama displays, display boards, free parking and sooo much more.
Also as a thank you for reading all the way down to this point of the blog post I’ll sneak out bit of info, while tickets for SHO wont go on sale until 2017 we will be releasing just 50 VIP ‘SideSHO alley’ passes to the event in time for Christmas. If you aren’t on our mailing list, sign up now to be one of the first to hear about the release of the VIP entry passes.
As always I look forward to your feedback around the event as it starts to take shape.