6 Years of the 13th Tribe

You know when there is something you do for a long time and it is just fun each and every time despite the work or the effort you have to put into it? That is hosting a game group for me. This past weekend was the last meeting of 2010 for the 13^th Tribe (which is the name of the group). As I was playing games, I thought about all the fun we’d had as a group over the year, and let everyone know that I glad they’d been able to come.  I’m looking forward to next year!

However, I wanted to take a quick look back on the 6 years that I’ve hosted the group. I’ve wrote about this stuff before on boardgamegeek.com, but since it has been a year since I’ve done that, I felt like writing about it again. The group really started in the fall of 2004 when I moved in to an apartment with a new roommate named Ed O’Connor. I had known Ed for a few years and we were excited about getting some gaming in while living together. By January 2005 we had begun meeting regularly in the apartment with just a few of us at the small homemade table that we had. This continued over once Krista and I were married, but by 2006 it was obvious we needed a new place to meet as we were too cramped with just one table in a small apartment.

So in 2006 I talked to the Smokey Row coffee shop in Oskaloosa, IA and got permission to use their conference room for free every other Thursday. This is when we saw quite a bit of growth and were getting 8-12 people out a night for gaming. Then in 2007 we moved to Indianapolis and immediately started a game group here, mostly of some gamers I’d met at GenCon and some family and friends. It has since continued to grow and now I’m actually have had to turn away people, since our basement can only handle so many people a day.

Why, do you ask, has running this game group been a good experience for me? I’ll tell you. It has allowed me to meet some great people, who I consider friends. The best part of it though is meeting these people who I wouldn’t normally meet. We’re from all different walks of life from teenagers still in high school to married men in their late 50s, from Democrats to Republicans, from Christians to Atheists, from have big families to single people, from hard-core Ameritrash gamers to elite Eurogamers (I threw that one in for the gamers reading this one, they’ll know what I mean), from retail sales associates to cartographers, from game designers to video reviewers, there have been all kinds of people that I’ve had the chance to meet and get to know a bit. That is what has made organizing this group a great experience for me! Oh yeah…the games themselves has also been fun too.

Here are a few quick stats about the group over the last 6 years:

·         163 different people have played at least 1 game with us.

·         600 sessions of games played (since 2007).

·         167 unique games played (since 2007).

·         28 people is the largest attendance to one event.