The ticketing/event launch for NOVA Open is notorious at this point. It feels like it rarely goes smoothly and this year it completely broke down leaving attendees and the convention frustrated. NOVA Open is a popular tabletop gaming convention held in Washington, DC each year bringing thousands of gamers together for some pretty prestigious tournaments involving everything from Games Workshop to Infinity, Magic: The Gathering, Star Wars, and more.

With an intended launch at 8pm ET, the system, managed by Tabletop Events, opened soon after the official time and immediately ground to a halt. This has happened in the past with it easing up after a bit. This year however, that wasn’t the case.

Sales were halted leaving many wondering what happens next. NOVA Open is interesting in that there are two sought after tiers that cost more but also come with swag and each are limited. One tier seemed to be sold out and the second highest level’s status is unknown.

Our experience was a negative one, with errors being thrown and 504 timeouts. Eventually out cart showed 8 Super Dwarf tickets and no way to remove the excess, eventually erroring over and over.

NOVA Open sent out the following email in response to the meltdown and we’ll update when the next steps are revealed.

We are extremely sorry for the experience the community had during our sales launch. We rely on Tabletop.Events to support our sales, including launch night. Due to technical changes with their website, we were unable to provide the experience that we are committed to providing to all of our attendees. We are as frustrated with this experience as you all are.

So, what are we going to do to fix this? We are working with Tabletop.Events to pause all sales today and relaunch sales at a future date. Once we have a clear understanding of the root cause, we will communicate the re-launch date once we have confirmation from Tabletop.events that this issue is resolved.

We work hard year round to provide an event that is professional, organized, and most of all, fun. We did not live up to that tonight. For that, we apologize.

We will provide more information about the next steps as soon as we have them. Please pay attention to your email, our social media, or our website for all updates. We will cross-post across all of our media platforms as soon as we have an update.

Thank you for your continued support and we are so excited to see all of you on August 27!