For the first time in our checkered history, tabletop gamers got a holiday. On Saturday, Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day's Geek & Sundry channel launched International TableTop Day, a worldwide celebration of board games, card games, and roleplaying games. Since you never know when such an opportunity will come around again, I wasn't about to let it go to waste.
Having received several invites to be a guest at events around Seattle, I decided I would (ulp) hit all of them. I invited my fellow board game designers James Ernest (designer of the games Kill Doctor Lucky and Button Men) and Paul Peterson (designer of the games SmashUp and Guillotine) to hop in a van with me and tour the Seattle area, including some of the strangest places we've gamed. Watch the video below and you'll see the sights we saw.
10:00 AM: The day begins in the south suburb of Renton, home to the game company Wizards of the Coast. Paul arrives at my house in the van we dub the "Playmobile." We then go to pick up my developer, Gaby Weidling. More importantly, we go to pick up donuts.
You know about the coffee thing, but Seattle also has a thing for donuts. We especially like our donuts to be palindromic. The company Top Pot Doughnuts hosts a regular board game gathering, and we're using that excuse to fill up on sugary goodness. We play Unspeakable Words, a game James and I wrote about Words Man Was Not Meant to Spell, with the all-female game group, surrounded by standees of Wil and Felicia. Paul keeps trying to end the world by saying Hastur the Unspeakable's name over and – whoops.
11:30 AM: Full of tasty baked goods, we scoot into Seattle to pick up James, his wife Carol, his yeti-capped daughter Nora, and his cameraman Rick Fish. At Card Kingdom, the city of Seattle's most ballyhooed game store, James sets up his new game Deadwood Studios USA, a tale of western movie actors vying for bit parts, while Gaby and I lay out our summer release, the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. Fans and fellow game designers show up en masse.
Meanwhile, around the world, people come to the realization that TableTop Day is a Real Thing™. Felicia hosts an online session of TableTop, playing games with her famous friends with occasional glimpses into game stores calling in to the broadcast. What originally was expected to be a few hundred events has ballooned into 3,000 events in 60 countries, in every state of the USA and every province of Canada, on every continent. Yes, they're playing board games at a research station in Antarctica.
1:30 PM: Gaby's keeping us to a schedule, meaning we have to abandon Card Kingdom midway through our Pathfinder game. We have greater heights to scale, though. Our next stop is the Top of the World, the 76th floor of the Columbia Tower in downtown Seattle. There is nowhere higher in the Pacific Northwest to play a game, unless you're atop Mount Rainier. This room is only used for fancy weddings and Fortune 500 executive meetings, but for one day people are playing Settlers of Catan in it. Event organizer Matt Winberry has gathered 200+ people for a sold-out soiree atop the Columbia, with a gorgeous sunlit view of Puget Sound in the background. Paul leads a gaggle of gamers through his game SmashUp, while I just stare out the window at an imaginary chessboard.
3:30 PM: From the heights of society, we descend to the Autobattery, a salaciously named bar hosting a gathering of burlesque dancers. In Seattle, burlesque dancers are almost uniformly gamer and pop culture geeks; their striptease routines are less likely to be based on Ravel's "Bolero" than on World of Warcraft. Dancer Scarlett O'Hairdye – whose most scandalous routine involved appearing in a beard while dressed (temporarily, anyway) as Wil Wheaton himself – has summoned Seattle's sparkliest people to play board games. A spangly fellow named Gandhi desires that I play chess with him, but I'm more interested in a game of Pirate Fluxx, where the dancers are already in the throes of the Talk Like a Pirate card. They occasionally seem confused that it said Talk Like a Drunken Sailor, though perhaps that isn't much confusion after all.
5:30 PM: The Playmobile takes us across the water to Uncle's Games in the eastern suburb of Redmond, home of Microsoft and Nintendo. It's at this stop that we find ourselves on the TableTop Day broadcast, as store manager Nick May unveils us to the gaming public. Thankfully, we have a small yeti with us to entertain folks.
7:30 PM: We hightail it to the other Uncle's Games in Bellevue, where we encounter a massive throng of gamers taking over nearly the entire Crossroads mall. Here, the tables turn a bit, as Seattle's top game designers hold an impromptu gathering of our own, playing each others' prototypes. My contribution is a hypothetical game about sausage making, designed during a Paul & Storm concert the Saturday before. Wil introduced me to Paul & Storm some years back, so it's a fitting TableTop Day capper for me.
9:30 PM: After a night of revelry, we load back into the Playmobile and head to the Cheapass Games HQ. James proposes that we play a game. I propose the "driving home" game, and so ends our TableTop Day. I wonder where we will go next year.
