Gobstyk's Gaming Club

Where do you begin if you want to start a gaming club? What things do you do first? Well, we are not experts at starting clubs, since we've only done it once, but we are still here three years later and this is what we learned.

Contents

Step 1 : Purpose, members and premises

Purpose
Members
Premises

Step 2 : Feasibility Assessment

Step 3 : Gathering support and detailed planning

Finances
Equipping the Club
Notifying authorities and the law
Club rules
Publicity

Step 4 : Preparations for your opening night

Building terrain
Allocating roles
Handling the cash

Step 5 : Running your meetings

Step 6 : Keeping your club alive

Membership and recruitment
Rules and constitutions
Finances and facilities
Fun and friendliness

Step 1 : Purpose, members and premises

You don't have a club at all unless you have some members and a suitable place to meet. These require you to do a bit of surveying and feasibility work, because unless you have sufficient demand (potential members) and somewhere to meet, you won't get off the starting blocks. Before you do begin any planning work, though, you need to be clear about the purpose of your club.

Purpose

What sort of club do you want? Will it be a generic gaming club catering for board games, card games, miniatures based games and so on. Or will it be a wargaming club? Fantasy/sci-fi only, or all settings? This is an important balance to get right. Having too many things that you are trying to support may spread you too thinly with the result that you do none of them very well. Focusing on one type of activity may mean that you are relying on a small group of enthusiasts. This is down to you and what you know about the local gaming community. The best approach may be to concentrate primarily on one type of gaming, presumably miniatures based games since you are reading this site, but to avoid being too restrictive if people want to do other things. More on this later.

Premises

Researching possible premises is your first real must-do. Perhaps you know of meeting halls already, but even so there are probably more that you don't know about. Local libraries tend to have lists of rooms for hire and contact details, and so do local councils and authorities. Draw up a list and then visit them, testing them against a list of suitability criteria. You may be able to rule out some of them over the 'phone, if they clearly don't have the facilities you need. Here is a list of things to consider when choosing premises:

• Location. Can people get to it easily? By public transport? Is it in a safe area of town?

• Size. Can it hold enough people, and do the facilities reflect the number you expect to have? Is it accredited by the local council or fire service for a certain number of people, and if so what is that amount?

• Equipment provided. Does it have its own trestle tables? A kettle? A sink? Cups and saucers/mugs?

• Facilities. Does it have toilets? A kitchen/clean-up area (at least a sink). Acceptable access for the disabled? Is there storage for your equipment, and is it big enough to take your gaming boards? Is the storage at extra cost?

• Are there any extra fees? For example, do you have to pay for heating, lighting, gas, power, over and above the hire fee?

• Does it have (or require) public liability insurance? What if their faulty electrics injures a member? What if a member burns down the building? If they require you to have insurance you'll need to ask how much cover they require and get an estimate of cost.

• Do they have any periods where they will insist on exclusive use of the room themselves - for example Christmas? Is it available over a weekend if you want to run an event (some church halls are not available on Sundays, for example)

• Do the owners of the hall have any views or restrictions on what they will permit? (for example moral or religious reasons in the case of church or society halls). Do they mind you playing wargames? Is smoking and drinking alcohol permitted, if you are going to want to do it?

• Cost! How much is it, does it have to be paid in advance, are the terms weekly, monthly etc, and is a damage deposit required? Can you have half an hour free at the start and end of each meeting for setting up and packing away?

Of these, the most important is probably cost, storage, and location.  You must have reasonable storage facilities or you can't run a decent gaming club.

Members

You can't run or pay for a club unless you have a reasonable regular membership. What support is there in your local area for a club? If you have a local focus for gamers, like a store that is used regularly, ask if you can run a survey. Go along with your clip-board and ask people if they would be interested in a gaming club. What would they want to play? What night would be best, or are weekends during the day better? How much would they be prepared to pay per meeting? Are they interested in hearing about it if it gets off the ground - if so, can you have an address to write to them?

Step 2 : Feasibility assessment

If you have premises in mind and a feel for the demand then you can get an idea of the feasibility of running a club. The first step is to work out a break-even point. How many members do you need to cover your costs each week, and what would the ticket price need to be. For example, our hall costs us £44 per meeting (about $60 US), so our break-even table looked like this:

We settled for a £2.00 entry ticket, which meant we needed 22 people per week to break even. A club can't really thrive on breaking even, so you need to be confident that eventually you will cover your costs and make a bit of extra money too so you can replace terrain and materials. We now get about 35 people per night on average, so we have £26 per night income over and above what we need to break even. You'll have to balance these three factors - size of venue, cost, and likely interest. There is no point in going for a huge venue and then finding you can't fill it and therefore can't afford it.

So, if you think it is a feasible proposition on paper the next step is to gather some support.

Step 3 : Gathering support and detailed planning

If you set up a club that depends entirely upon the relentless, dedicated input of yours truly then eventually it will fail. You'll get tired, or move away, or go on holiday, and everything will fall apart around you. You need some faithful assistants to help you get it off the ground and keep it going. 

You may have some friends who are fellow gamers and will pitch in to help set up and run the club. If not, or you don't have enough, go to some of the names from your survey (hopefully you collected some!) and see if they are interested in having a planning meeting.

At your planning meeting you will need to discuss:

• The opening and running of the club - who will open up and lock up, set up and pack away?

• Club finances - who will look after the cash and keep records? Eventually you will probably want to open a club bank account, of which more later.

• What tasks need completing before the opening - for example, terrain building.

• How will you publicise the club?

• Do you need some capital funding to get started?

• Do you need to notify anyone about your proposal (for example the tax authorities, or your day-to-day employer)?

• Are there any legal considerations - for example liability insurance and child care legislation.

Finances

You will obviously need some equipment to get started with - some gaming boards and terrain. How are you going to get these? At least some investment will be required, and you'll want to keep it to a minimum. It is worth approaching local shops and businesses to see if they will sponsor you. If it comes down to putting some of your own money in then don't get carried away - it might all fall flat on you. Keep careful records of what funds you contribute and get someone else to witness them and hold receipts. When the club is up and running you may want to get your investment back and, if so, you need to discuss this with your planning group.

Some people may be willing to let you have accommodation at discount or even for free for a few weeks to see if you can get your club up and running. They are loss-leading, of course, in the hope that you become a regular source of income for them. Charities, churches and other philanthropic organisations are more likely to respond in this way than commercial and public sector organisations. Our hall managers, a church organisation, let us have the hall for free for one day a year to hold a non-profit making open day. They also help us out by not charging for set-up and packing-away time at the beginning and end of each meeting.

As for managing the week-to-week finances once you are running you can probably get by initially with a cash tin and a cash book to record receipts and expenditure. Keep all of your receipts and have a second member check them and the balance book. 

Equipping the club

You will need enough gaming boards to meet the needs of the membership you are catering for (see feasibility, above) and some terrain for each. At first you should go for simple, cheap terrain that is fairly generic and can be used with most systems. Styrofoam hills, foamcore ruins, and pipecleaner trees can all be made very cheaply. The most important thing is to get tables that look unified, rather than a smattering of random pieces. As you make terrain buy or beg storage boxes for it, or your work will soon be ruined. We started up with 6 by 4 foot boards painted green on one side and sand on the other, styrofoam hills, clumps of trees and cardboard ruins. We had about 2 clumps of trees, two hills, and two ruins per table. We now have a large collection of hand made and commercial terrain, but this has come over time. You can get advice on terrain building at TerraGenesis.

You may also need some other bits and pieces. A ticket book of some kind. Name badges. A cash tin. A first aid kit (this may be included as part of your lease). Whether you supply gaming equipment other than terrain - dice, templates, rulebooks, rulers - is up to you. We tried this out and now do not - they disappear and players come to depend on them being there so when they are not there is a major problem. Make it clear what people will have to bring for themselves and what the club will provide.

Do you want people to be able to paint and model at the club - either the members, or you the organisers? If so a simple toolkit might be useful. 

Do you want to have snacks and drinks? A snack bar can be a good source of income for a club but you will need a starting stock and a cash float - as well as someone to staff it.

Notifying authorities and the law

You will need to do a bit of homework on the tax and legal situation. In the UK, provided tax on interest on money at the bank is deducted at source (by the bank) there are no onerous tax implications for a not-for-profit club such as ours. The main legal considerations relate to health and safety and child care regulations if you will be admitting younger gamers.

It is possible that you or the club may be held culpable if someone injures themselves whilst at the club. Some premises will have liability insurance to cover themselves (for example, if one of their tables collapses and injures someone), some don't. You need to know. Liability insurance can be expensive and you may want to take some advice before spending any money. As for child care regulations, in the UK any organisation taking children of below 8 years old must have someone present with a child minding qualification. We don't take people that young, but these regulations may vary in other countries and again, you need to know. Try your local council or town hall. Social workers, health workers and teachers are also good sources of advice on things like this.

Club rules

We at Gobstyk's hate bureaucracy and shy away from having endless committees, constitutions, quorums, and the like. However, you will want a few ground rules to be clear from the outset. Eventually you will probably need an agreed constitution or set of club rules. More on this later. For the time being, decide upon some guidelines for acceptable behaviour and safety. Will you allow smoking and alcohol on club premises? What about modelling knives? Superglue? Use of the kitchen (if you have one).

Publicity

The first few weeks of your club are crucial - you'll want to begin covering your costs, and starting with as many people attending as possible is better than beginning with a few and hoping to build it up. You might consider making the first night free if you can afford it.

Shops, stores and companies supplying the hobby are a major source of publicity for you. Ask if they will put up a poster. Even better, ask if they will stuff flyers into bags at point of sale or let you spend some time in the store handing out fliers. After all, a thriving local club can only be good for their business. Games Workshop run a gaming club database and if you plan to be using their systems you might consider registering with them at http://www.gcnm.org.uk.

You need to have your publicity angle thought through in advance. Why should people come to your club? Be clear about what it can offer gamers. But also be clear about what it can offer parents and the community. Some people and organisations are twitchy about war games. You need to think this through without being evangelical about it. Stress the positive aspects of the hobby - it is creative, educational, social, fun and harmless. As activities which appeal to the young in this day and age go, that's quite a remarkable checklist. Capitalise on it. For one night a week we have 35 to 45 people who are socialising, talking, getting to know each other, and having harmless fun. We are lucky in that our hall managers are well aware of these positive aspects of our hobby and encourage us.

Two of our members have even said that their experience at the club has helped them to get a job - they helped out in the club snack bar and as a result knew how to use a till (cash register) when they were asked about it at job interviews. And other members have used their modelling skills in school and college technology projects.

Step 4 : Preparations for your opening night

There will be a lot of work to do before you can open for the first time, but hopefully by now you have some trusted people to help you. If you haven't, then forget it. You cannot do this all on your own.

Building terrain

Make your gaming boards and terrain. Keep it cheap and simple, and non-specific. The fancy centre-piece sci-fi building can come later. At the moment concentrate on the things every table needs - contours and cover. That means hills, trees, and buildings. Non-specific ruins are the best type of building. You might consider, though, one table with more gee-whizz terrain on it, just to show people what can be done.

Allocating roles

Guess who's going to end up doing all the work if you are not careful? You need to agree between you to share the workload. Who is going to open the club up and set up? Stay to the end to pack away? Take ticket money? Cash up at the end of the night? Give out membership cards? Organise the new gamers so they know where the terrain is, what to do, what not to do? We have a number of agreed roles in Gobstyk's. These are Club Secretary, Treasurer, Membership Secretary, and Caretaker. You might not want to dish out jobs like this just yet, but you probably need about four people who can take care of general organisation, finances, members, and equipment.

Handling the cash

You have no room for mistakes when it comes to handling cash. Without a firm grasp of the club finances your club with fail, and any whiff of financial impropriety is very damaging. So, who will collect the entry fee? How will you know if people have paid? What will you do with the cash?

After some experimentation with tickets and so on we now have a system that seems to work. When someone pays their entry fee they get a sticky label and we write their name on it. They are expected to wear it like a badge. This kills two birds with one stone - you know who has paid at a glance, and everyone is wearing a name badge so they know each other's names. People buy their ticket/badge as they enter, but there is always someone who doesn't get around to it. So, halfway through the night someone goes around the club checking tickets/badges and collecting in any unpaid entry fees. You have to be very strict about this. Some  people will want an IOU, or claim they are not paying because they are not gaming. Control this very carefully. You can't afford to have too many people getting a free ride. In Gobstyk's if you come to the club you pay, gaming or not. Yes, the club is a cool place to hang out, chat and meet people. And that's worth your entry fee. It isn't fair if other members subsidise the socialising of freebooters. Insisting on this is a whole lot easier if you have paid yourself, even if you are the Club Secretary or Treasurer...

Club accounts needn't be complicated. Basically you need to see what cash you have taken, what you have spent (and have evidence that it was spent on that) and what your balance is. Our accounts entry for a couple of weeks will look something like this:

Step 5 : Running your meetings

If your preparation has gone well then running the meetings will be a lot easier. You will have a small group of people to help you keep things running smoothly, and everyone will know their part.

The running of your meetings will evolve over time, and we do things differently now then when we first started. Gobstyk's gets 35 to 45 people attending a meeting so we have to be reasonably organised. If you are going to have ten or fifteen people then you are probably thinking that our advice so far is overkill.

Richard, our Club Caretaker, opens up and gets the hall ready with trestle tables. Terrain that is in boxes is brought out of storage, larger items live on a shelf until someone wants them. The gaming boards are put out on top of trestle tables but no terrain is placed on them.

Our meetings are fairly free and easy. Some people buy tickets when they arrive, others wait until someone prompts them. We have a raffle every week and sell tickets at the snack bar and on the floor when going around checking entry tickets. The raffle is just a bit of fun and so long as it pays for itself we are happy. A raffle serves a secondary purpose in that it gives you a reason to stop the meeting, shut everyone up and draw the raffle. At the same time you can make any announcements.

At the end of the meeting everything is packed away and the hall swept up and left clean and tidy. Members can be very lax in their habits and we usually have to clear up drinks cans and other rubbish. A group of regular helpers has naturally developed. Try as we might some people just never help out with the tidying up and we have more or less learned to just live with this.

Step 6 : Keeping your club alive

Getting a thriving first meeting is a great achievement and you should congratulate yourselves! However, this is just the beginning and your club will need regular care and attention if it is going to thrive.

Membership and recruitment

Hopefully you got a decent turn out for your first meeting. Now you have to keep them coming back and recruit more members to increase the size of the club and replace people who, for one reason and another, stop attending.  You will probably find that there are seasonal trends in your club. Holiday periods, school and college exam times, the seasons (people like being outside if it's nice!), people moving away to college (or coming in to college) will all cause your attendance to fluctuate. You also need to keep a balance in your club of different types and ages of people. There is no doubt that in many ways older people (as in mature adults with a bit of life experience) are extremely valuable to you. These are the people who have skills to offer (experience in handling money, craft skills - they can put a set of shelves up, that sort of thing). Retaining these people means promoting an atmosphere that they like. This is probably means creating a reasonably mature atmosphere. The age of your youngest permissible members is therefore an important consideration. That's not to say younger members are less important - they are valuable too, and the future of the hobby. But they need to be able to contribute properly to the club. Taking young members is also not fair if you are not prepared to provide the guidance and help that they need.

Will you have 'members' as such, or will just anyone be able to walk in to the club? Gobstyk's is a public club that anyone can come along to. We do not have a membership fee. However, we do need to know who the 'members' are. This is because all of the assets in the club - equipment, cash at the bank and so on - belong to the members. Simply recording everyone who ever came to the club would not work. Some people don't come back again, or don't come regularly and therefore do not have such a 'stake' in the club. After some deliberation we decided that the current membership should be those people who have attended at least half the meetings in the previous three months. We keep a register just like a school classroom. To encourage people to attend regularly, and to remember to get their tick in the register, we have occasional 'members raffles' for a decent prize. This is a free raffle with one ticket given out for each meeting a person has attended in the last three months. The more they attend, therefore, the more chance they have of winning.

The best sources of new recruits are your current members and the local shops and stores that support the hobby. We ran a 'bounty hunter' scheme once that was quite successful. If a member brought a new person along we gave the recruiting member a 'bounty hunter' raffle ticket and put the new member's entry fee in a jar. After a while we spent the jar on a prize and drew the winner out of the bounty hunter tickets.

Rules and constitutions

You may have started off with a clear purpose for your club and a few do's and don'ts. As the club develops you will probably need a more formal constitution or set of club rules. This will come about because the assets in the club (hopefully) grow, and you'll want to clarify how they are managed and to whom they belong. You may also decide to open a bank account for your club and if you do the bank may well want to see the constitution of the club, and have a number of named officers.

We have a set of Club Rules which are agreed by the members and pinned up on the notice board for everyone to see. Changes to club rules have to be agreed by majority vote of the members. We do not work through committee except for decisions on day-to-day things (like whether to hold an open day or not). We prefer to have a show of hands at a meeting. In fact we still do not have a committee as such, but we do have four nominated officers (Club Secretary, Treasurer, Membership Secretary and Caretaker).

Finances and facilities

Hopefully your club resources will grow and you will find yourself with some money to spend to expand the club. As we've said before, financial probity is important and your club accounts should be open records for any member to inspect. It is also a very good idea to have someone check over the accounts once per year and sign them off as being in good order. Usually a member can find a colleague who is an accountant or similar who will do this for free or for a minimal cost.

You should spend your money on things which promote your purpose and bring as much benefit to the members as possible. The obvious thing to buy at first is more terrain. If you do, you must bear in mind its suitability for club use (it has to be tough!) and its storage requirements. In addition to terrain we have also bought a computer and printer (for army lists, newsletters, campaigns etc), extra shelving for terrain, club tee-shirts, hired a till (cash register), and bought angle-poise lamps for the painting table. We also use club funds to promote the club and the hobby by running free open days, subsidising members who want to enter tournaments, building displays and attending hobby events, and introducing a  Silver Membership scheme to promote painted armies.

Fun and friendliness

We're taking cliques, campaigns, and tolerance.  One of the worst aspects of an established club can be the tendency to fall into cliques, exclusive little groups of people who are 'in', and others who are 'out'. This is very intimidating to new members who will probably decide that it is a stand-offish place that they don't want to come back to. There are a number of things you can do to make your club a friendly place.

First impressions are important. You should always be on the lookout for new people and make sure they enjoy their first visit. Welcome them, find out a bit about their interest in the hobby. Introduce them to some kindred spirits that you can trust to look after them. We let people come for free on their first visit. Name badges are important here and should be mandatory! As we said, we combine a name badge (well, name sticker) with an entry ticket.

One of the best ways to break down cliques is to run some form of joint game or campaign. A campaign gets people together with members that they might not otherwise meet. It's human nature to fall into groups of people that you know and feel comfortable with and a campaign snaps people out of this for a while. That said, you have to organise your campaign carefully and make sure everyone who enters can play properly and at the right level.

Finally, the whole thing is supposed to be fun. Beware of sad, empty people who want to dominate your club or its committee because in the rest of their lives they are empty and powerless (this hasn't happened at Gobstyk's, but we have seen it happen elsewhere). These are the stereotypical committee junkies and must be avoided like the plague.

Make the club a fun place to be and people will come back to it. Be tolerant. If members want to have a go at something different, let them (but if it requires club resources, consult the members first). Don't impose anyone's preconceptions on the members (just because you don't like collectable card games, why should that mean the members can't play them?). Go with the flow and usually things will turn out alright. And make sure you, the organisers, have fun along the way too.