{"id":342,"date":"2010-03-03T23:48:06","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T04:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blog\/?p=342"},"modified":"2010-03-03T23:48:06","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T04:48:06","slug":"gaming-clubs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/2010\/03\/gaming-clubs\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaming Clubs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"page-top-logo\"<\/a>This is a re-post of a long note on a DakkaDakka thread<\/a> about gaming stores that spawned some discussion about gaming clubs. It talks about some things I’ve been meaning to write about regarding PAGE<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Chiming in on the clubs sub-thread: I help run a club (PAGE CC<\/span><\/a>) in Philadelphia (east coast US). For those sort of clued in about the area but not quite, it’s about 40 minutes from Mikhaila’s store. Just close enough that a couple guys go there from time to time, but probably just far enough to be slightly different “markets,” particularly when you figure many in our club are true downtowners who rely on public transit, walking, etc.<\/p>\n

The club meets once a week (Sunday evenings) in a building downtown owned by a long standing philosophy\/activism organization (Philadelphia Ethical Society). The traditional club focus is on boardgaming, but miniatures and particularly 40k<\/span> are a large and increasing aspect, and definitely currently the most energized.<\/p>\n

Although small by many standards, I think the club’s actually fairly successful. The big thing is that almost everyone can find people to game with. On any given week, you will find a variety of boardgames to hop into. On the monthly 40k<\/span> convergence, you’ll find a bunch of different armies and a good number of players (generally 12–17 players), and the club members work together to provide and transport terrain and so on, which many people don’t have or can’t get there.<\/p>\n

In many ways it fills many of the roles of a good gaming store, which I see as including at least:<\/p>\n

– Providing space to play. I think most people will happily play games with a larger set of people than those they would like to have traipsing all over their house. On top of that, public space can often run a lot more games. Especially in a dense urban area like ours, space at home to run more than a table or two is rare, let alone space to run the 12 or so we routinely run at the club (e.g., our recent pattern of 7–8 40k<\/span>, 1 or 2 Warmachine, and 2–4 boardgames). Having that kind of space to all get together is great because it helps you meet new people, catch up with guys you may not be playing on a given night, suck in new players (“Wow, what are you guys playing?!?!”), and build an event atmosphere.<\/p>\n

– Expose people to new games, systems, armies. Despite loving and following the fluff, I might never have gotten into actually playing 40k<\/span> if I hadn’t kept seeing a couple guys playing it at the club. Having a large pool of people bringing in games, armies, etc., really increases your level of exposure to the hobby, letting you find that next great thing you really love.<\/p>\n

– Teaching and recruiting new players. A lot of our guys are happy to lend out armies for people to try playing, and a lot are super supportive of new players. Part of the reason I started playing 40k<\/span> a lot is basically a couple of the guys gave me a lot of their unused models once they saw the gleam in my eye… Having that large group also keeps new perspectives coming in, so people learn a lot more about rules and tactics then they would playing the same couple people all the time. Ditto on painting and modeling skills and ideas.<\/p>\n

– Providing terrain and other support. Myself and a couple other guys love building terrain, have space to store it, and can transport it to the meetings. Other people don’t. Playing at the club provides a lot of our guys much better options in this regard then they would have on their own.<\/p>\n

– Giving a community in which to geek out. Even though the club only meets once a week and 40k<\/span> basically once a month plus the odd game here and there, there’s a lot of chatter about games and specifically 40k<\/span> on our listserve. A lot of people get that from great forums like Dakka as well, but it’s cool to then actually see those people and get in a game with those people.<\/p>\n

– Run special events. Especially for 40k<\/span>, we have a pretty reasonable stream of stuff going on, whether it’s the club outing to ‘Ard Boyz or other external tournaments, our own relaxed tournaments, themed narrative nights, Apocalypse games, or whatever, people really get into that and having the club provides a larger pool of players and, critically, potential organizers.<\/p>\n

In any event, such clubs definitely exist in America and I think have an important position in the gaming community.<\/p>\n

Another point is that people are totally willing to pay for all of those features I list above (we basically charge $4\/night to cover rent), so it makes no sense for anyone to argue that people playing at a store shouldn’t be supporting that store in some way. Whether it’s memberships to use store features or buying merchandise, I think that’s a completely reasonable expectation. Even within our club, which runs a pretty decent periodic bulk discount purchase, all of the core 40k<\/span> guys definitely put out and evangelize the perspective that if you’re playing in a store, you should buy something. I admit that I hesitate to buy big stuff at full price, but myself and a bunch of the guys are all too happy to buy codexes, small boxes like Command Squads, etc., at local stores.<\/p>\n

On that note, I think clubs and stores can definitely exist together. We’ve been unfortunate that there haven’t been gaming stores right in downtown Philly in a while, but recently we’ve been slowly building up a relationship with a new store on the western edge of Center City (Redcap’s<\/a>). For an example of how they complement each other, one thing I think we’re finding is that it’s obviously easier for them to host small groups at weird times. They’re a store, they’re open basically all the time, and they have pretty good gaming space. You can reliably count on popping in with a friend to play a match and finding a table. Our kind of gaming would have to get a whole lot more popular for the club to justify paying that kind of rent (it’s worth noting though that Philadelphia and most cities have many bridge, poker, and other full time gaming clubs). On the other hand, in some ways it’s easier for the club to host less regular big events. We don’t have to worry about things like crowding out all the cash-money Magic players with a large crowd of comparatively space-required-per-$$$ inefficient 40k<\/span> players. So, I’m hoping we can work together with symbiotic events and efforts to continue growing 40k<\/span> in Center City.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a re-post of a long note on a DakkaDakka thread about gaming stores that spawned some discussion about gaming clubs. It talks about some things I’ve been meaning to write about regarding PAGE: Chiming in on the clubs sub-thread: I help run a club (PAGE CC) in Philadelphia (east coast US). For those … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[397],"tags":[272,29,45],"class_list":["post-342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop","tag-40k","tag-page","tag-redcaps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}