Finding people to play with

Yeah, let me know when you go and I'll try to go with you.

edulis wrote: Didn't there used to be a map on this site that showed where we all lived?

Click on "Forums" on the link above, then "member map." Some people haven't updated for a while but a lot of them will still be the same---PM someone near you. I've been thinking about forcing Jeb to play games with me on some weekend if I make the trip to LA.

quozl wrote: Yeah, let me know when you go and I'll try to go with you.

My immediate thought was, “I can bring a two-player game as a backup.”

Though I guess that is sort of counterproductive to this whole enterprise.

I tried some meetup stuff in the past, as well as random boardgaming at local gameshops. Might have gone better if I had followed Uba's advice here. Even so, it seemed like a majority of the players were quiet, slightly obsessive fun murderers who were anxious to play as many games as possible. I have had better results meeting random people through role-playing and then later introducing them to ameritrash-style boardgames.

Yeah I've had a lot of this recently. A year ago I moved out west and had to find gaming friends. Most of what is said here was what I did. I went to every meetup in the area and played games with a ton of random people. Most of the nights I went home and ranted to my wife about what a waste of time it was because everyone wanted to play light games or head down euros and I didn't meet anyone cool. Eventually I did find some people I liked and started trying to organize games and split out from the meetup groups. My go to games for meetups were a mix of Tigris & Euphrates, Dogs of War, and Glory to Rome. Games that can be taught easily yet have a lot of interaction and are not head down euros.

I've been here about a year and have a decent amount of gaming friends now and generally don't go to meetups. Now I mostly just play games with people I know by communicating through the local discord server or through facebook. I don't have a lot of tolerance for filler games or dry euros or even co-ops so the quicker I could leave the meetup scene the better. And I agree, there are many people that do meetups in order to play as many games as quickly as possible and leave right away. Which is a really strange thing to do.

Meetups are tough. Many people there really are very awkward and strange at times honestly. And most of the games played at meetups are inherently euros since they don't require any kind of negotiation or social aspect to play effectively. Or they are very light games like secret hitler or some trash that wastes time and is over in 10 minutes yet takes like 30 minutes. Most of the friends here I've met through the meetup scene though so there are some good people out there.

I need to engage this process now that I'm settled where I am. It's intimidating for me.

It might fall into the "dry euro" category, but Terraforming Mars is a guaranteed play at the local gaming club. Of course playing it assumes that you actually like Terraforming Mars.

As others have said already, patience, time and the willingness to even reach out. Use BGG and see who may be in your area, then look through their game collection. Believe it or not one of my closest friends for the past 11 years (just had a look at his geekmail), saw my collection and asked if we could meet up to play Napoleon's Triumph. I also became friends with three local F:ATties (or TWBGains?) and met up with two others in Toronto a few years back.

I went through a couple of game groups, attended local cons, and FLGS game nights until I finally had an array of tribe members to call on for games. This was over a 13 year period. Eventually I started my own TrashFest as an excuse to get seldom played games (like Psycho Raiders, SEA EVIL, The Gothic Game) off the shelf. I have plans to meet up with an Instagram friend who seems to have similar tastes in the near future. Your miles most definitely will vary. Best of luck!

OH! If you do attend a con, look to host a game if they have an online sign up process. Nothing quicker to possibly finding tribe than by having even one person sign up to play.

ubarose wrote: Any noisy table. These are people who are social gamers. Even if the game sucks, they will be fun to play with.

I'm glad some people like seeing the noisy table, because there's a decent chance that table has me.

This is a tough question, and it almost always takes time. The best advice I've seen here is to be willing to play stuff you aren't wild about. You also need to be okay with bouncing around between tables now and then, because sometimes the people there just want different things.

Any sort of big public gathering that you can get to regularly and easily has been the secret sauce for me. When those kind of events aren't nearby I have always struggled to play stuff. But in both KC and DFW it was regular game events that opened the door to making a lot of friends, and then those friends ended up being really close. I confess, I'm a fairly outgoing person, so that does make it easier. But I think a lot of people here would agree.