Colin Lam had a solid group of five friends who he would regularly play tabletop games with and when they moved away Lam came to Guelph and filled his gaming need by starting the Guelph Tabletop Gaming Club.
“We all ended up going our separate ways,” said Lam. “So it’s much harder to get everyone together again.”
He moved to Guelph a year ago and as a way to bring people together with similar interests he started the club about three months ago.
The group meets on Fridays at 7 p.m. at The Round Table on Essex Street. Beforehand the group discusses the parameters of the games through Discord a voice, video and text platform. A dozen people have joined the club so far.
“Ideally it would grow to encompass everybody who’s interested,” said Lam.
The group splits up into smaller groups and play separate tabletop games.
“Sounds very cliché but it can be anything that you want it to be. I like to think of it as it’s when we’re kids we sometimes embody these role playing fantasies where we pretend that we’re a knight going off to rescue the village from whatever,” said Lam.
“And a tabletop game is essentially a framework for doing that with a group of friends,” he said.
Many of the members are new to Guelph, Lam said. “Many of them are experienced with tabletop. And many of them have been interested for a long time and they’ve been looking for an opportunity to meet people playing,” he said.
Lam has been playing tabletop games since he was 15. During the pandemic he was part of a group who played Dungeons and Dragons. The tabletop game went on for one and half years.
For the Guelph Tabletop Gaming Club games can pick up from previous weeks. At a given time a game can go on for a couple hours to almost eight hours.
People of any age can join the club. There are a couple of rules Lam encourages. “Make efforts to be inclusive and make efforts to be sensitive to other people’s preferences. If they have boundaries try to respect those,” he said.
Some club members may have a preference to play a tabletop game with a sci-fi, fantasy or other type of story line.
Sometimes people will bring in figurines to represent characters in the game.
“As part of a rather in depth session a friend of mine brought these very elaborate dragon mugs,” Lam said. “It was meant to kind of make the atmosphere a little bit more immersive. Pretending that we were all in a pub.”
