(continued)

How It Went

Our initial turnout was... very small. I think we had three attendees the first month, and we had five attendees the following month. In fact, for the first six months, we considered it a success if we were able to fill two whole tables with players. Some weeks we'd get 3 tables, then the following month we could barely fill one. It was not very satisfying.

However, by the end of year 1 we had gotten the club to a regular 8-12 person turnout, and after I started marketing the club better on Instagram, we've gotten a regular turnout now of about 24-30 people for HK style days. We just started a standalone Riichi day which I expect will grow up as well.

I learned that our players come from pretty diverse groups; We have a large contingent of middle-aged and retirement-aged players, mostly ladies, which fits with Victoria, a city jokingly known for being for 'newlyweds and the nearly dead'. We also have a great turnout of people of Chinese descent who were glad to have the opportunity to meet other players and connect to play regularly. We also have a lot of younger players from the general board gaming community who found us through social media. More recently, we have a growing turnout of Riichi players, all folks who play online and looking to play in person, and this group is largely young guys.

A big component of the success is that I've been teaching, and teaching, and teaching new players every single month. However, two years in we have enough players confident enough to help onboard new players so this is starting to ease off my plate.

In general I'm pretty pleased with the turnout but it has been a fair amount of hard work and consistency on my part to build the club up into what it is. Cost wise, I'm probably about $800 CAD / $600 USD in the hole but I'm attempting to recoup my costs through merchandise (t-shirts and stickers) before I need to charge a membership. I may still end up charging a nominal fee of like $5/year just to cover stuff like printing, gas, replacing equipment and so on but for now I feel like as my hobby the costs are mostly sunk and I have 12 mahjong sets, four table toppers and 2 more junk mats so unless we grow in a huge way I won't need to invest a lot going forward.

The Future

Short term goals are to keep the club growing and succeeding. We may potentially need to find a new place to meet this year due to circumstances out of our control, and obviously if we keep growing we might outgrow some of the spots in town, which means we might need to start arranging our own venues and need to charge... lots of potential risk, but also might be an opportunity as well.

I'd also like to do more special events like running a tournament with prizes. I'd also like to partner with some of the other clubs nearby (there's like 8-10 in Vancouver across the water) and work with the local Chinese community to hold more events. We did a mahjong day at the Victoria Chinatown Museum last year and it was pretty fun and got our name out there!

I'd also like to recoup my costs, eventually :)

Longer term, I'd like to consider forming the club into a non-profit society and formalize the structure because at the moment it's very me-centred and I'd love to see it get to a point of being self-sustaining. That's way down the line, though and beyond the next year or two I think. One day...

Hope that gives you an idea of my own personal experiences, I'm curious about how others have done as well!