[Gaming] Weekly Games with the Philippine Tabletop Gamers

Today, March 30, is International Tabletop Day, the brainchild of the folks at Geek & Sundry to celebrate gaming as a way of interacting with friends and family. And all you have to do is play a good old board game with your family or gather your friends for a nice little dungeon crawl - whichever game style floats your fancy.

Beyond the fact that I am meeting friends later for a night of tabletop gaming (and inevitably some drinking), I thought it might help commemorate today by talking about a way to address one of the biggest problem for gamers - finding players! Gaming circles here in the Philippines seem rather isolated and not so well-known. And so beyond immediate circles of friends, it's always nice to get in touch with like-minded gamers to try out new games and such.

Thankfully there's a group that's trying to open more doors for gamers to introduce them to new tabletop games, new players and hopefully form new gaming circles as well.

Every week, the Philippine Tabletop Gamers meet-up at Eastwood to do precisely that - play games and have fun. I got to join the group last week where we played Castle Falkenstein for the first time. The group has a natural interest more in favor of tabletop RPGs given there are already other venues that celebrate board games in general.

These weekly gaming sessions happen either on a Tuesday or a Thursday - schedules are finalized over social media channels on Google+ and Facebook. From there players start to gather around 07:00pm and games run until around midnight or so, given the assumption that folks still have work to deal with the next day. The weekly meet-ups are still in their early stages and thus far the group has only been able to gather enough players for a single game per night. But the group is pretty hopeful that as attendance grows, the group will have enough players for two or more game sessions running simultaneously.

Here are a few more photos of the Castle Falkenstein session:

If you're interested in joining one of these sessions or even just want to participate with the online discussions, feel free to join the Philippine Tabletop group on Google+, which is where the bulk of the discussions happen. There's also a Facebook version of the group, but it's mainly used for scheduling announcements. The exact location of the meet-ups are also part of the social media event pages.

Happy gaming!