Any advice on creating a group of like minded people for these types of games? I'm in Chicago, and we do have http://www.chicag0.org/ here, but they don't seem to be super active.
BARG came into being about 18 months ago after it seemed like there was enough of a critical mass to make stuff happen.
I would probably say just get out there and do stuff whilst making yourself visible and approachable as much as possible. By visible I mean documenting the stuff you do and circulating it online and by approachable I mean taking the time to have conversations, both on and offline.
We've had someone stop to take photos of us playing ping-pong on the market stalls go on to stay/play for a couple of hours, join us at the pub afterwards and then be spotted a month or two later at a bigger pervasive games event!
Hmm, so perhaps it would be a good idea to scout out venues FIRST. Did you do this all via the internet or did you get "word out on the street" somehow?
Make life easy for yourself: sort a date you and some mates can do, choose a place to meet, then announce the details and make it happen!
You might find that things like the venue, your budget and/or your experience/comfort with hosting events may naturally put an upper limit on the number of people you can cope with and you can adjust your marketing to suit that.
We did it all online (zero budget), making sure we had a page that other people could link to so it went out a bit further than our own personal networks.
The other thing we did was consider it meeting #0 rather than #1. A strategy might be to use it to gather a team who will then help out with flyering and running games etc for the next meeting.
Do you have any future plans to create something like a hackerspace? I grew up playing all sorts of games (roleplaying, board games, card games, etc) at a local game store, and think the concept scales quite well with the hackerspace concept. If I had an end goal, it would be that...
I am going to spend the next week scouting venues and getting a plan together for meetup #0. If you have any additional advice, feel free to add it.
I discovered this site back in March while surfing on Kevan's site, and while looking in my bookmarks I rediscovered it. I surfed the game pages in the last few days, and I am really interested in a lot of them. =)
I am living in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), and I'm wondering if anyone knows of a group in the area. Otherwise, I think I'll try to organize my own with some of my friends. =)