
Minnesota Convention Started With A Car Ride Conversation
A board gaming convention started 10 years ago in Minnesota because of a conversation during a car ride between two friends. Minnesota Protospiel has been taking place in the Twin Cities for a decade.

The convention is a place for budding game designers to get their games play-tested and fine-tuned before publishing. It is also a place for gamers to try out new games before they are published and provide valuable feedback to the designers.
One of the conventions' original organizers Jeff King says the Minnesota Protospiel came about because of a conversation he had on a car ride home from one in another state with fellow organizer Matt Warden:
"It was basically a road trip back from one where we started talking about all the people we were actually running into out of state from Minnesota and we just said you know what how about we have one. We feel there's a enough interest, we've run into people local and so we can of went from there."
King says Warden did location scouting for the convention while he spearheaded the sponsorship side. Protospiel Minnesota does not make any money. All of the registration fees go toward covering its costs. King says they have a lot of great Minnesota-based game publishers as sponsors like Left Justified Studios & Prolific Games, Paverson Games, Floodgate Games, and Games By James.
Kings says one of his favorite stories was the designer who thought of their game in a strange place:
"I've been at a protospiel where somebody walked in waving cards in the air and said I just thought of this game in the shower and that particular one went until about one, two in the morning and by the end of the night we had a fully flushed out game."
King and fellow organizers of Minnesota Protospiel Trevor Kirchner and Nicole Fende joined WJON's Saturday morning show about board gaming Table Talk live from the convention to chat about it.
Game Designers Alisha Volkman and Leslie Kolke joined Table Talk for the 2nd half of the show. Kolke is in the process of fulfilling orders for the first game she published on Kickstarter, Symptomatic, and says Minnesota Protospiel was instrumental in helping her develop it:
"It's changed a lot throughout the whole process of going to protospiels, sometimes making changes like hour to hour or day to day until I ended up with something that didn't need to be changed anymore and felt really good."
Kolke says she teared up a little when she saw Symptomatic on a shelf at Games By James:
"It was really emotional for me because I've been working on this project for so long seeing it finally come to a conclusion is really really sweet."
Volkman says she has been going to Minnesota Protospiel since it started and it is a great place to test games but also to meet people:
"It's also an amazing community, you network amazingly, you get to meet all sorts of people, this is where I met one of my future bosses it's been great."
She says she used Protospiel to playtest her game Underlings of Underwing. The convention has continued to grow and seen some now popular games like Distilled, Stifling Dark, and Sagrada get play-tested there. Minnesota Protospiel wraps up on Sunday at the Double Tree Hilton in Bloomington.
You can catch Table Talk for more conversations on board gaming every other Saturday morning at 8:10 a.m. after the news on AM 1240/95.3 FM WJON opposite the Woods Garden Show.
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