Board Games & Community

 Board Games and What They Can Do for the Community

It's Saturday afternoon, and I'm getting my weekend blog post up early! Owing to the work I do with my theatre company, as well as the work so many of my friends and colleagues do, I often think about different hobbies and activities, and how they can be bent to serve our community.

Just cute critters. Definitely no relation whatsoever to this blog post...

Growing up, I was ignorant of what it meant to improve the community around me. The town in which I grew up was affluent, and I really didn't know of any other way of life except in the abstract. Like so many people, I thought that "just being a good person" was enough to ensure that my community would prosper. I just had to "not screw it up," not work to make it better. It took me too long to figure that out. Maybe that's part of why I feel such an urgency to find all the ways we can improve the places in which we live, work, and play.

What do games have to do with this? Well, we talk about all the benefits of games. What happens when those benefits are redirected to "the real world?" A big, world-changing example of what happens was covered in a Guardian article back in 2014, in which the following was written: "In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an AIDS-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks." Now, it's not as though these gamers came in completely fresh and just picked up the task as the scientists had been wrestling with it; the scientists framed the problem in a way that gamers could simply walk into it and start playing. But the gamers did the heavy lifting once the work had been framed for them. Pretty impressive, no? I know not every game is set up for such huge contributions, but there are other things we can do for our community through games! In St. Louis, we need look no further than Pieces Board Game Bar and Restaurant in Soulard. The folks there are incredibly devoted to improving our community! They hold fundraisers for local organizations every week (pre-Pandemic, anyway!). They make these opportunities extremely accessible - that is to say they don't set up 101 hoops for an organization to leap through before making this happen. I cannot even imagine how much money has been raised for a wide variety of organizations in the greater St. Louis area through the efforts of those at Pieces. I can say that my non-profit theatre company alone has been the beneficiary of several fundraisers at Pieces, raising several hundred dollars for the organization.

...Again: definitely no relation to my blog post.

All of that to say, I often think of how games can further serve the community in which they're being made or played. Lately, I've been fixated on the notion of putting together a tournament variant of the game Root. If you don't know Root, per the producing game company, Ledergames, "Root is a game of woodland might and right. Stalk the woods as one of the Vagabonds, seize the initiative with the Eyrie birds of prey, rule over your subjects as the Marquise de Cat, or command the Woodland Alliance to create a new order. With creatures and cunning, you'll rule a fantastic forest kingdom in the ultimate asymmetric board game of adventure and war." I'll be writing about the tournament format I have come up with (and how I got there) in a future piece.

You think that's cute, but you just wait until you invade its territory. You'll pay.

But I figure, since the game is about sending woodland critters to war against one another, it feels like the least we can do is raise money for some critters here in St. Louis. So the idea is this: we charge a fee to enter the tournament. I'm hoping for somewhere around 12 players at a minimum, but happy to accept more. We'll be soliciting prizes for winners of the event, as well as some other goodies, I hope! But the proceeds from the tournament entry fees will benefit an animal shelter of some sort here in St. Louis. That said, while I'm sure they'll appreciate anything we can offer, entry fees aren't quite as much of an impact as I'd like to make. So why not stream the whole thing? See if we can't raise some additional donations that way?

Hooray for helping cute critters!!

At the end of the day, it's a drop in the bucket. I know that. It's not going to be some sort of monster golf tournament that raises tens of thousands of dollars. But everything starts somewhere, and to boot, we're basically raising money for cuddly critters by playing games we love. This is the sort of thing that's interesting to me, so, here's hoping the first Root tournament is a success. More to come!