Day 1 was only open for mainly press and trade visitors but it showed us that 3 people are not enough for one booth, especially if you have a show running simultaneously and want to share stuff on social media.

We needed people for the following tasks:

somebody has to be talking on stage (Teamspeak booth)

one person supporting the players on stage, playing our game (you can't support more than 10 players at once)

somebody permanently taking pictures and videos for your social media channels, maybe periscoping (is this a word?) or even twitching

somebody at the booth supporting the players, that are testing your game

somebody at the booth, who is still available for visitors (e.g. players, streamers, press, potential publishers etc.) and who is asking people if they want to join the contest or play our game. A lot of gamers watch the booth and would like to play, but are too shy to ask, if you ask them, they are immediately show interest in playing

you need to have breaks (yeah, it's listed in "tasks", I know, but it is kind of a task :))

Lesson learned:

Have min. 2 people on your booth, in my opinion 1 is not enough. If you have some kind of stage show, it's awesome to have somebody in the audience who films the event and promotes it on your social media channels

4) Buy cheap food and drinks BEFORE the first exhibition day starts

Sounds obvious, but we didn't think about that one. You'll be at your booth from 9am to 8pm and might go to a party afterwards. No supermarket is open (in Cologne or Germany in general) at the times you are not at your booth (they already close at 8pm in Germany). If you want to buy something to drink, you'll have to buy something at the exhibition. That means a coke for 4 euros vs. a sixpack of cokes for 4 euros in the next supermarket which will take you some time to go. That's valuable time you could otherwise use to meet other interesting people and do some networking.

Lesson learned:

Fill your car with cheap stuff from a supermarket for each day of your stay at the exhibition. That will save you the "this coke costs 4 euros but I'm thirsty"-money. I've done that today and bought tons of cheap ice cream. It was gone in about 3 minutes and brought a lot of gamers to our booth.

5) Plan at least a day off after the exhibition

I'm was going to work the day after our exhibition, which was a bad idea. You're going to work all day long for several days and might be going to parties at night (for networking!). Even if you don't drink much and don't party hard you definitely need a day off after such an intense week.

6) Partys

We planned to go to every party we can catch, but the regular evening was dictated by KFC (which was quite cool actually, from a non-financial point of view).