Yorkshire Tabletop Gamers: A bigger project than expected

So this turned out to be a bigger project than I originally expected…

Where are all the gamers?

So I’ve wondered this for a while, but it’s annoying that there’s no one place to find other gamers.

This came home to me recently when I discovered a three-day board games convention in York (about 10 miles away, as the crow flies) happening at the end of the month. And I didn’t know about it!

So I decided to use Blogger to create a directory of gaming groups/events in Yorkshire, and I called it Yorkshire Tabletop Gamers. Each club or event is a separate entry, and you can use the labels to filter them.

How hard can that be?

So many groups…

So I started with the easy stuff – Furnace and North Star and Demon’s Wake and the East Leeds group. Events and groups that I already knew about. But as I searched, I found more and more groups…

I had underestimated two things. First, how many clubs and events there are in Yorkshire – and how big Yorkshire actually is!

What is a tabletop game?

One of my early decisions was what to include. I originally included larps (and have added the BOX Larp Festival), but although they’re adjacent, they aren’t tabletop games, so I didn’t include them.

And (at the moment), I’m not including chess clubs. Perhaps I should, but for now, no.

So by a tabletop gamer I’m looking at board games, ttrpgs, wargames and social deduction games.

And then I found Boardgameclubs.org

Then I discovered Boardgameclubs.org, a map-enabled site that makes mine pretty redundant. Or it would, if it were more complete. It has filters for ttrpgs, but it’s clearly aimed at board game gamers.

And it covers the world, rather than focusing just on Yorkshire. So I’m not giving up.

Shops and stores

I haven’t decided what to do about shops and stores yet. I will probably include them, as it’s nice to visit somewhere and know where you can buy board games and ttrpgs. It’s harder to support them if you don’t know they exist.

And many game shops host game nights, so that’s a good reason to include them.

Status: now

So right now, I’ve pretty much exhausted all the cons and events that I could find in my immediate part of Yorkshire. 

I still have clubs to add that are on boardgames.org, and I’ll work my way through them. And I also need to share the project so that others can find me. And, of course, add the shops.

Yorkshire Tabletop Gamers.