Slow starts
It was two years ago that David Lewis created the Story Game Glendale meetup group, and probably a few hours later when I joined, excitedly bothering him! In fact, when I first saw the message from Meetup asking if I wanted to join “Story Games Glendale”, I misread it and thought it was Meetup asking if I wanted to finish creating the group, as I aborted a process of creating a similarly named group a few months earlier. Great minds…
We decided on Game Haus Cafe as the consistent meeting spot. Over 1000 board games on the shelf. Excellent food and coffee. Nice large gaming tables. They even became licensed over the last year and now serve beer and wine! Occasionally it gets a little noisy, but mostly during the school vacation periods, as we did choose the slower Tuesday night for our meetup.
The next year had many very small gathering with 1-2 people showing up other than David and myself. We very rarely had to cancel the event, but that did occur at least twice due to no takers. But we were persistent, and consistent, and over time built up a few small followings that would come and go.
Two years later
And here we sit, with 17 people (22 RSVPs, but you always have a few flakes and last-minute cancellations), and we ran 4 simultaneous tables… our largest gathering to date. We had David running a continuation of an Itras B game he started the week prior, and all the same players showing up excited to continue the story. We had Candace pitching and first-time-running for A Penny For Your Thoughts. We Spencer bringing a playtest of his Kids on Brooms (a Kids on Bikes hack for Harry Potter style game). And I ran a nice simple game of Dungeon World, where we made up the world and adventure on the fly.
Happy birthday us! We may eventually outgrow this space, or maybe it’ll perfectly serve for the forthcoming year. But either way, it’s exciting to create a little community of avid story gamers. And know that if you are in the vicinity and wanting to join us, we gladly welcome you!
I bought the last two slices of their delicious chocolate cake to share among the participants. Thanks David for those amazing candles!
David running Itras B
Spencer running Kids on Brooms
Candace running A Penny For Your Thoughts
Me running some Dungeon World