I finally got a chance to play Attika at the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup last night. This game was already on my Christmas list because it seemed like “my kind of game”. Now that I’ve actually played it, I think it’s something my whole family would enjoy. Many thanks to Kevin for bringing Attika to our game night!
Speaking of which… Our group, the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup, gets together every Tuesday night at Crepeville at 18th & L in downtown Sacramento. Our event is scheduled to start at 6:00 pm, but lots of folks arrive earlier (or later). I usually leave at about 9:00 pm, and I’m one of the early departures. I have no idea how late the die-hard gamers stay. We have a great group of gamers, so if you like boardgames come on out and join us some Tuesday evening!
We had a great turnout at the December boardgames meetup, especially since our numbers usually plummet during the holiday season. There were about 28 people (+1 baby) gaming at the Fox & Goose Public House on Tuesday night. All together we played about 10 different games — we would have played more, but about ¼ of our players left early to go to a karaoke (sp?) bar. I took a bunch of pictures, but I didn’t want to blind anybody with the flash, and I didn’t bring my tripod. As a result, only one picture was even marginally viewable.
We’ve been trying to keep track of all the games we play whenever we get together. There is a thread on the meetup message board with a list of nearly all our events since May 2005. Each event has an associated “geek list” which shows the games we played that night, usually including the players and their scores. Many thanks to Kevin for coming up with this idea and doing nearly all the work to make it happen!!!
We get together every Tuesday night at the Fox & Goose, but the first Tuesday of each month is usually our best attended. There are also several other events every month at other venues. See the full schedule on the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup site. If you’d like to join us, feel free to drop in during a scheduled event or you can join the Meetup group (free) and RSVP. You can use the RSVP comments to request a particular game or to pre-arrange players for a game.
Many of our members have listed their games collections on BoardGameGeek, also known as “BGG” or “the ‘Geek.” You can find our members’ BGG usernames by checking their Boardgame Meetup profiles for an answer to “If you have a profile on BoardGameGeek.com, what is it?” (Take a look at my Sacramento Boardgames Meetup profile for an example. About halfway down my profile you’ll see my BGG username and URL:
“I’m jimv on the ‘Geek, http://www.boardgamegeek.com/user/jimv“
Unfortunately, Meetup doesn’t convert all URL’s into clickable links, so you’ll have to copy-and-paste the URL into your browser.)
One of my numerous hobbies is boardgaming: getting together with family, friends, or total strangers to push bits of plastic around on a cardboard playing surface, and incidentally socializing with the aforementioned people.
Sacramento is blessed with a large number of boardgamers, but many of these folks don’t realize how many new people they could be meeting and playing against. One way to find potential players is to hang around in local game stores, such as Viking Hobby. An even better idea is to join the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup — These dedicated gamers get together at least once a week to socialize and play various games. (Disclosure: I’m the so-called Organizer of this group.) We’re currently meeting every Tuesday night at the Fox & Goose Public House, and we also arrange several other public and private events every month. Check our upcoming events for details.
I was posting the next meeting of the Sacramento Go Club on the Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup Group, but this week for some reason Meetup’s software is giving me grief about the event’s URL. I’m guessing it’s barfing on the ‘~’ character in the URL, which is perfectly legal (and worked fine until a few days ago). I really want a URL for the event, so I’m posting it here. Thanks, Meetup. It’s not enough that you’re charging me to organize cool events, now I’ve got to do fake redirects to keep your damn site happy. 
Most (hopefully all) of the organizers of various Sacramento gaming groups, websites, et cetera, will be getting together for an organizational meeting on Sunday, the 11th at 5:30 PM. Our preferred meeting place, Fox & Goose, is closed on Sunday evening, so we’re trying to come up with a suitable “stand-in” venue. I’ll update and/or comment on this post when we settle on a meeting place.
FYI, this is a meeting, not a game event!
Organizers of gaming events or groups in the Sacramento area are invited to attend. Whether you host game nights at home, run a “real” game club, manage a gaming website, or are one of the Meetup co-organizers, we’d like to all get together to coordinate our efforts.
Topics of discussion: (”Agenda” sounds so formal…)
- ConQuest convention in Sacramento 2006
- Membership, i.e. Chicago vs Sacramento
- Calendar, scheduling–are we having “too many” events?
- Locations–can we schedule/post events outside Sacramento, e.g. Elk Grove, Davis, Roseville, etc?
- Interlinking Sacramento-area gaming websites
- Promoting the hobby/our groups–game store flyers, word of mouth, news coverage?
- New members–some prefer more structured introduction, some just like to dive in. We’re good at the latter, need to improve for the former.
- Recurring meetup events–designating “hosts” or who’s responsible for posting the event, collecting feedback, etc.
- Meetup “kitty”–the site is no longer free. I don’t mind paying for it for the time being, but I’d like to start collecting change from people willing to chip in. I guess this means treasury reporting.
- Other topics upon request, leave a comment on this entry.
- Gaming, if there’s time and inclination.
About three weeks ago, I got together with a few other Harry Potter fans to discuss the story. One of the topics that came up was the release date for the final book. Somebody (don’t remember who, sorry) said that they heard it would be published in 2007. This lead to speculation about the actual release date, which we predict will be July 7, 2007. This will be a Saturday (Friday night/Saturday morning at midnight), just like the last few books. Besides, since 7 is the most powerful magical number, how could the 7th book possibly be released on any other date than 7/7/7 (2007-07-07)?
The Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup Group held their first Saturday game day yesterday at the Arden-Dimick library. I’m pretty sure we had 26 people playing at one point, but I was too busy playing to keep track of people entering and leaving.
Kevin has put a list of games that we played on the ‘Geek. This list allows comments, so if you were at this event be sure to jot down your thoughts on the games you played or the event in general.
The Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup Group held their second game night at the Arden-Dimick library last night. Turnout was a bit light, only eight people, probably because of the plethora of gaming opportunities available–four events in the past week plus three or four in the coming week. If only we had this “problem” more often!
Games played were Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers and Star Munchkin. I’ve been wanting to play the Munchkin card games for some time but had never had the opportunity before, so last night was my introduction to Steve Jackson’s silliness in the form of Star Munchkin. The game is almost absurdly simple–there is very little in the way of strategy, not a whole lot of thought required. Normally this would be the type of game I wouldn’t even think about playing. But the flavor text on the cards, and even some of the illustrations, are so hilarious that all the deficiencies of the game were summarily ignored. I don’t know what the “replay ability” of this game would be: the simplicity of the game would seem to detract from this, and the humor of the cards might eventually wear off, but there are a lot of cards in this game. Even the cards with duplicate text have unique and amusing illustrations, and it seemed to me that the players who were thoroughly familiar with the game got a kick out of all the new players’ reactions to the cards. I’ll have to play this a few times before I decide to buy it or not.
I didn’t play Carcassonne myself, but Kevin did. He posted a geeklist with a recap of the games, including details of the Carcassonne game.
A few days ago I was browsing the ‘Geek when I found another cool feature: session reports by gaming group. There’s not much to this–it merely allows one to search the session report database by gaming group, but this simple addition to the feature list could be a great help to members of groups (such as the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup) who want to find session reports on BGG by and about members of their group.
There is some discussion among the session report authors in the boardgames meetup about the group name we should use. Since this is a freeform text field, and the group name must be a case-insensitive exact match, if we do not agree to a single name then the feature will be almost useless. Currently the two contenders are Sacramento Boardgames Meetup (no reports as of 2005-08-15, merits include being the official group name) and Sacramento Meetup (for brevity, “boardgames” being somewhat redundant on a site called BoardGameGeek).
Other groups of interest (to me) include:
Woo hoo! Thanks to Hugh, we just caught up with Chicago for the third largest boardgames meetup in the world! If you’re in the Sacramento area, check out our event calendar and come see why a cow town like Sacramento can overshadow a major city like Chicago. We’ve got an awesome group of friendly gamers, and we’re adding new events to our calendar all the time.
