New Manaverse Podcast + EventForge Updates

Hey ,

Opening a game store is easy to romanticize. Running one is where the real lessons begin.

In the latest episode of the Manaverse Podcast, I talk with Trey MacCampbell, owner of Brass Dragon Games, about what he’s learned in the first seven months of running a tabletop game store. We cover why rent can’t be your biggest expense, how customers tell you what they want with their wallets, why going wide instead of deep matters early on, and what to do when inventory doesn’t move.

Trey also shares how Brass Dragon Games has built a welcoming culture around learn-to-play events, Dungeons & Dragons, Magic, Warhammer, Gundam, and a simple but powerful idea: focus on the customers, not just the stuff.

I actually got in touch with Trey after he posted on the tabletop game store owner FB group asking about “that event platform designed for game store owners”. I replied with maybe he should check out EventForge, and it turns out the advertising on Facebook actually works, because he responded with “yeah, that’s the one!”

Speaking of EventForge, we just passed a pretty sweet milestone. The platform has helped game stores sell over $55,000 worth of events and table reservations, with 80% of that in just the last 30 days!

EventForge is growing quickly and we're rapidly becoming the top tier event management and promotions calendar for game stores on the market! And frankly, it wouldn't be that way without the awesome feedback and feature suggestions we've been getting from store owners.

I especially want to shout Berry, Rose, Dianna and Daniel, Trey, Jim, John, and Joey for meeting with me (often multiple times) and helping shape a lot of the new features.

Speaking of new features, a lot has shipped in EventForge over the last two weeks. Here's what's new for your store.

Storefront & public experience

• Choose how event links open. A new store-wide setting lets you pick whether event clicks open in the current tab, a new tab, or a popup overlay on top of your calendar. Great if you want visitors to stay on your storefront instead of bouncing to a detail page.

• Hide "+ tax" on public listings. If you'd rather not display the tax subtext on prices, there's now a toggle in Tax Settings to suppress it across your public calendar.

• Collection covers can follow the next event. Turn this on and a collection's cover image will automatically swap to the artwork of its upcoming event, so your storefront always looks current.

• Multi-day events now span the calendar. Close-the-store weeks, conventions, and week-long tournaments render as a continuous bar across every day they cover, on both your dashboard calendar and your public calendar.

• Past events in collections are visually retired. On a collection's landing page, events that have already happened are greyed out with a "Past event" badge, and their Add / Register buttons are disabled so customers can't accidentally try to book them.

• New Spotlight Calendar. You can now embed specific events on any webpage you want inside an event's detail page. There is also a new Spotlight calendar in the Settings area that you can use to highlight specific events or a selection of Featured events with a bold ticket-stub or poster style.

Events & booking

• Multi-tier pricing for events and collections. Sell the same event at different price points (early bird, member, drop-in, etc.). Tiers sync to Shopify automatically if you have it connected.

• Per-seat tier selection in the collection cart. When a customer adds extra seats to a tiered event from the collection page, each seat gets its own tier picker and new seats inherit the previously chosen tier, so a parent can grab one "adult" and two "kid" tickets in a single transaction for example.

• Exclusive / room-rental bookings. Mark a room as exclusive and booking it will block every overlapping table reservation, perfect for birthday parties, private rentals, or tournaments that need the whole space.

• Track seats in EventForge, not Shopify. A new per-event toggle stops registrations from decrementing Shopify stock when you'd rather let EventForge own the capacity count. 

• Switch between Events and Table Bookings in the Events list. A new dropdown at the top of the Events area lets you view Table Bookings the same way you view events, with bulk publish, draft, and delete for table booking instances.

• Bulk check-in for registrations. The attendee list now has per-row checkboxes and a bulk action bar. Check in (or undo check-in) a whole table at once. The action buttons on each row are also more compact, with Check In, Edit, and Cancel sitting side-by-side.

• Manual Registrations now autofill known players' contact info, gaming IDs, and custom-field answers the moment you pick them from the directory.

• Link a manual registration as another player's guest. When you add a registration by hand, you can now mark it as a guest of an existing registration so groups, plus-ones, and family signups stay tied together in the roster and in player history.

• The Edit button is now near the title instead of hidden down at the bottom for easier access.

Players & customers

• Shopify customer profile inside Player History. If a player matches a Shopify customer, their order history and lifetime spend now appear inside the Player sheet, and store-credit transactions are pulled live from Shopify so the balance you see always matches what's in the POS. Shopify store credit is synced with EventForge, so players can apply their credit to ticket purchases on EventForge, and the credit will be updated in Shopify.

• The player login process is more streamlined. After a player registers for an event and they receive their confirmation email, they can request a Magic link for their email to login to their account.

Analytics

• New Trends tab with period-over-period comparison. Analytics now has a Trends view with KPI cards for Revenue, Attendance, Registrations, and Average Revenue per Event, each one compared against the same-length window immediately before your selected timeline (e.g. "Jun 1–25 vs May 7–Jun 1"). A 12-month chart shows revenue bars + attendance line side by side, and a category table breaks the change down by your primary event tags so you can see which formats are trending up or down.

Integrations

• Massive new Shopify integration. We've expanded the scope of the Shopify integration for EventForge. You can now choose to use your Shopify checkout instead of Stripe to process payments. This keeps ticket sales within your Shopify ecosystem and allows your customers to use/earn their loyalty points and Shopify store credit towards events.

• Per-venue Shopify location routing. If your store has multiple Shopify locations, you can now map each EventForge venue to its own Shopify location. New ticket products are stocked at the right location automatically, and there's a "Re-sync" button to fix any tickets that were previously dumped into the default location.

• Configurable tax on Shopify ticket products. A new "Tickets are taxable in Shopify" toggle in Shopify Settings controls whether newly created ticket products are flagged taxable. A companion "Sync to existing products" button walks every linked product and updates them in place, so you don't have to touch them by hand.

• Discord weekly resync, rebuilt. The Discord integration now pushes all your featured events out as posts and scheduled events in the Discord server calendar at event creation, while updating the Discord calendar weekly with regular events to keep things fresh.

• Custom Domains. Set up your custom domain and host your EventForge calendar on events.yourstore.com by adding a few DNS records to your domain host.

As always, reply to this email if anything's confusing or broken, I read every one. And if you want to schedule a walkthrough to get EventForge up and running for your store, you can grab a time right here https://calendly.com/manaverse/eventforge-demo

If you're ready to get EventForge working for your store, login and head to the Settings area to sign up for a Plus or Pro account!

I still have a long list of features to work on including built in membership, Square integration, badge customization and more so new updates are coming soon!

— Tom