2024 Year In Review

What a year we’ve had! With three different games across seven events, this is the biggest year for megagames in Sydney we’ve ever seen. We’ve done two runs of Infinite Horizons, two runs of So Say We All, and three runs – with one in Canberra, thanks to our friends at ACTMG – of The Generalissimo is Dead!

We’ve seen 188 different players attending this year, with 70 of them attending multiple events (and two of you played four times… you know who you are!), making this our biggest ever year.

We also want to highlight the amazing work done by Genji as he photographed and recorded nearly all of our events this year! He also recorded, edited and produced an incredible video of the April game of The Generalissimo is Dead!

Sydney Megagamers, originally conceived as Western Sydney Megagames, started in 2014 after the fated Shut Up & Sit Down launched megagames across the globe. Since November that year we have grown, incorporated and run 11 unique games across 17 events:

• The Third Kind (2014)
• Unrest in Idrinor (2015)
• Brave New World (2016)
• Chaos on the Iron Sea (2016)
• As the Fire Dies (2019)
• For the Crown (2019)
• So Say We All (2019, Wollongong)
• God Emperor (2023)
• The Ark (2023)
• The Generalissimo Is Dead (2024, Sydney and Canberra)
• Infinite Horizons (2024)
• So Say We All (2024).

Over those years we’ve learned a lot as a community about megagames – how to design, plan, run and enjoy them – and we’ve seen hundreds of people come through our doors.

Sydney Megagamers has never been as active as it is right now with a huge 2024 behind us, so stay tuned for what the future holds for our group and – as always – get in touch if you want to be part of the SM family.

We’ve had a big year, but let’s aim bigger! Our goal is to run even more events next year. With the target of four new games – and each one being run twice – we’re hoping to satiate your hunger for megagames.

This calendar is our target dates for running these games, but they do depend on venue availability so they may shift around during the year.We’re also hoping to get more Sydney Megagamers together for non-game day events and after the success of our first Community Day in 2024, we’re aiming to host 4 more of these throughout the year.

Keen to come along and talk megagames, maybe do some playtesting, and crack out some board/card games with other megagamers? Our Community Days are open to all, and they’re free! Keep an eye on our Discord for dates.

We’re now a year into our Sydney Megagamers Premium Membership trial, and we’ve found it to be successful! We currently have 26 Premium Members contributing to improving SM events and supporting this awesome community.

We have a great new PA system mostly paid for by our Members, that lets our announcements and audio cut through the noise and chaos of a megagame, which was rolled out for the first time at So Say We All.

The Memberships also lets us have some buffer cash in the account, which is important for booking venues and ordering components before ticket sales start coming in. It’s also a huge driver to getting our ticketless community days off the ground.

Membership is entirely optional, but it is a way to support us and keep us operating without the stress of solely balancing ticket sales with event costs. Members:

• Get early access to tickets for our games
• Get access to a members-only section of our discord
• Get some sweet SM merch
• Have our undying thanks

Sydney Megagamers runs on volunteers – from those keeping our books, designing our games, cutting out our tokens and running our committee meetings – and not a single dollar from membership or from our events goes to any one person.

Supporting us through memberships, or just buying a game ticket or a piece of merch, ensures your dollars go to one place only – running megagames!

As an incorporated association, we run by committee. We hope we’re reasonably more effective than the Generalissimo’s Central Committee (and much less cutthroat) as we bring joy and prosperity to our lovely SM community.

There’s been a reshuffling of the same faces running the committee in 2024:

James Archer, President, megagaming since 2014
David Little, Vice President, megagaming since 2016
Stephen Hughes, Treasurer, megagaming since 2015
Tony Martin, Secretary, megagaming since 2016
Patrick Doyle, Public Officer, megagaming since 2014
Phillip Hardy, Committee Member, megagaming since 2015
Jackson Edwards, Committee Member, megagaming since 2019

While you may be familiar with some of us, our goal is to stay behind the scenes and empower the SM community to plan and run megagames.

As a not-for-profit, our committee is governed by a constitution, spelling out how we operate, what we are responsible for and, most importantly, how we spend the money we collect from you to attend our games.

Specifically the SM Constitution ensures that our funds ‘are to be used solely in pursuance of the objectives of the association’, with our core objective being the running of megagame events.

The following breaks down the money we’ve collected, then spent in 2024. It helps articulate how self-funded our events are and hopefully gives you a good idea of why tickets to our events cost what they do.

The summary: $15,552.85 income, $12,628.57 expenses, $2,924.28 net revenue (and only one attempted fraudulent transaction!)

A quick breakdown of these categories:

Income

• Event Tickets – the main one, tickets for our megagame events.
• Merchandise – purchases of our lapel pins and tote bags.
• Memberships – contributions from our Premium Members.

Expenses

• Venue – the big expense, hiring the location for each game.
• Event expenses – liability insurance for our game days, printing and production costs for the game days, etc.
• Merchandise – procurement of our merch.
• Reusable equipment – everything we add to our inventory, from wooden meeples, tokens, stationary, and the new PA system.
• Admin – fees we pay around ticketing, as well as upkeep costs for our website and other digital services.
• Ticket refunds – tickets that were cancelled before the game and refunded to players.

The takeaway – we have a good amount of cash in the account, which lets us invest more production upfront in new games. It also allows us to keep investing in new equipment. Because the budgets were created to cover each event, when we run a game twice we build a surplus on the event as we can reuse a lot of components. As we are more confident that we can sell two events for each game, we can now budget for this and reduce ticket prices for upcoming games!

Thank you all for your support throughout 2024, and we look forward to seeing you in this coming year!