I will be running a game on Sat May 5. Optimistically, there will be 7 players who are committed to the entire game. Since it is a convention though, I'm hoping that passersby will be enticed by the pretty gameboard & want to play for a few hours. These are mostly Eurogamers so they don't understand the idea of playing one game that takes all day. I'll probably use the old rules of having a midgame joiner duplicate someone's advances & any quitter leaving the pieces on the board like a barbarian invasion.

Does anyone have any ideas about working in partial game players?

I don't believe that so many of you have actually played in 18 player games. Do you pay them?

Years ago, in a Convention here in Italy, I played three Civilization games in a row for a total of 21 hours.
Nobody paid me, since two of these games were for a tournament and the third was to avoid sleeping in the night and being with friends playing.

This is my point of view about gaming.

We are not forced to play 2 games taking 2 hours each in an afternoon.

We are free to play a game that takes all 4 hours before dinner.

Same is for a 2 days long game.

Unfortunately all the potential time doesn't matter players have been turned off by the local lightweights . So I'm left with people who don't want to schedule anything & think a "long" game is 3 hours. And rules are complex if they are more than 2 pages & don't have pictures.

It's great that the new games are more accessible to mainstream people, but I wish some of them would try the good stuff. It's not like you'd only play short games or long games, but when you've dedicated the weekend to a convention, isn't that a great opportunity to do something you can't do at a regular session?

You could probably punch through to the 1000 mark on AdvCiv in less than three hours if you had help. That would be enough to give people a taste of what was to come...