Every trade show I have attended in the last three years has had a spin-the-wheel. Not one of them asked me a qualifying question before I played.
Event marketing guides call this booth gamification. The advice appears everywhere: add a game to increase engagement, create a reason for attendees to stop, make the booth memorable. Some attach metrics - dwell time goes up, scan numbers improve. The logic sounds reasonable. It is also wrong in the way that most straightforward advice is wrong - it measures the thing that is easy to measure and ignores the thing that matters.
A game that does not qualify the player is not a marketing activity. It is entertainment. You paid for the stand space, the hardware rental, the staff time, and the prize budget to entertain strangers who will walk away with a tote bag and no recollection of what you sell.
The booths with the longest spin-to-win queues are almost never the booths with the best lead lists. The queue is a selection mechanism. It selects for people who want to spin the wheel.
The game is only worth running if it earns you the conversation. If it does not, you paid to be the most popular attraction on the floor for people who will never buy from you.
There is a version of the booth game that works. It asks something before it gives something. A question about the visitor's role, their current setup, their timeline for a decision. Not a survey that blocks them at the entrance - a question that starts the conversation the game was supposed to create. The prize becomes the reason they stayed long enough to answer it. I ran that version at a booth last year using Scaniam - the survey and the spin were one flow, and the list was clean before we left the floor. The game earns the data. The data earns the follow-up.
I have watched two booths run games at the same event, same floor, same crowd. One had a wheel you could spin by scanning a badge. No questions. Scan, spin, collect, leave. The other had a game you could only start after answering two questions on a tablet. The first had the longer line. The second had the better list. Three weeks later the first team was still cleaning their export.
The line is not the metric. It never was.