Monday, October 7, 2013

Much disappointment about nothing

This past Saturday I had a nerd games party at my place.  Wendy and Elli were up north at a Brownie camp for the weekend so it was time for some crazy non-kid-interrupted gaming.  I did my usual thing of inviting people in waves - how many people are in later waves depends on how many people say they are in from earlier waves.  In theory this allows me to make sure I have enough people attending but not too many people attending.  I seem to have something like a 30% acceptance rate to party invites but unfortunately that does mean that sometimes I invite ten people and get nine who show and sometimes I get one.  Neither is really what I am looking for!

After three waves of invites I ended up in the situation where I had two people confirmed showing up for a couple hours and one person probably showing up for a couple hours with no overlap between them.  Unfortunately very few people responded at all so I couldn't realistically reschedule since presumably some folks might be planning on coming without my knowledge.  This is not a recipe for a successful party!  I was pretty bummed out at that point because I only have so many weekends I can host these sorts of things and to have invited ~18 people and to have no real party come together was not so much fun.  I ended up being pretty maudlin and irrational internally, letting my brain wonder if I have done something to really offend a whole bunch of people.

Things worked out really well though.  I ended up with eight people staggered somewhat over the course of the day which worked out just fine.  I got to play my much beloved Puerto Rico and CRUSHED a world champion by a *massive* two point margin.  *Massive*  Winning a really tight game of Puerto Rico is one of the sure fire ways to pick up my mood and it has the advantage that no nudity is required.  What I want to avoid is the organization struggle of having a party where I really have no idea who is going to show up.  Obviously my strategy of waves of invites really doesn't work unless I get reasonably quick responses both Yes and No so I need to figure something else out.  I guess I need to default to 'invite a bunch of people and hope'.  This works better in a space where I can actually host a lot of people if that is what shows up - one more reason to buy a house someday I suppose.  That is, unless anybody out there has a good idea for how to get around this particular challenge.

4 comments:

  1. You might want to tank to Sara and Duncan about ways to solve this problem. They run a games night at 401 every week and had to shift to an attendance system where you got strikes for failing to show up if you said you would, and couldn't come if you didn't say you were going to because of the space issues there.

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  2. TANK THEM! Stand near them and aggravate them so you can soak up damage without offering meaningful damage in return! DO IT.


    Er... I suck at responding to such things. I generally don't know the answer when I first read the email, and then when I do know the answer I'm not at my computer, and then when I'm back at my computer I don't remember... and ya. If you want to increase your likelihood of a response from my world include my social secretary *cough* I mean wife; doesn't guarantee response but it increases the likelihood. I can't help you with everyone else, but that's what helps for me.

    Snuggles

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  3. I don't seem to have an issue with people saying they will come and not coming. I just have an issue with people not saying anything. (I got one cancellation last week but that is totally fine. People can change their minds and those that do so and give notice are aokay.) I don't do this regularly enough that a consistent system would really work I think. Basically I appreciate the ideas but I am not sure they help me, aside from knowing that I need to message both people in a couple.

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