International Tabletop Day

Let's forego Music Monday this week in search of more interesting conversation. Namely -what I did this weekend.

More like, what a shit ton of people all over the world did this weekend. See, Saturday was International Tabletop Day. Which is a fancy way of saying everyone should play boardgames at the same time! Because board games are awesome! And the community that plays them is awesome!

If we're being honest, I took some convincing to go to Dice Dojo to play board games with a ton of strangers. I was having a very high social anxiety weekend and the idea of conversing with strangers was a little too high. But John convinced me the best way he could, with beer.

So, we headed to the store at 6PM to see what it was all about. And OMG. This place has 2 rooms, one for selling and one with 800+ games you can just play. For free.

We didn't know anyone, so we opted for a game that could be played with 2 players - Zombicide. Now, the gist of the game (apparently) is that you play cooperatively with your teammate(s) and try to capture objectives while fighting off zombies. Sounds fun!

One of my characters was a waitress on rollerskates with a chainsaw.

What wasn't fun was reading the rules (and promptly forgetting half of them). But we played for like 2 hours (1 hour was reading the rules) and it was a good time. But then a table near us was done with their game, and I was drunk enough to be social so I invited us into their next round in hopes that they'd pick a fun game that they knew the rules of.

Let me just tell you right now, that is NOT what happened. There were 2 awesome ladies, and one dude named Cameron. And he picked what our next game would be - Mansions of Madness - an intensely over-complicated game with TWO huge rule books. Oh - and he'd never played it before.

This is the game board. It was overwhelming.

But we trudged along, taking an hour and a half to read the rules and set everything up and then started playing. It was fun until it wasn't. See, there are cooperative characters (us and our new lady friends) and an antagonist (the dick with all the power). Which means a game that should be a grown up version of Clue ended up being a vindictive game of power struggles and insults. Meh. Whatever. I still had fun getting to know my teammates and vowing to play a less complicated game next time (next time! woah!).

Did any of you participate in Tabletop Day? Do any of you want to play less complicated games with us? Please say yes - and then elaborate. :)

Amanda