I was at the Knavecon boardgame convention in Limerick over the weekend. It was my first time attending the con and I enjoyed it a lot and will definitely be back next year. Started out the day at 10 am with a quick game of Love Letter (a game of risk, deduction, and luck for 2–4 players. Your goal is to get your love letter into Princess Annette’s hands while deflecting the letters from competing suitors) and finished the day late in the evening at 3.30 am with big game of Zombicide (a collaborative game in which players take the role of a survivor – each with unique abilities – and harness both their skills and the power of teamwork against the hordes of unthinking undead) Throughout the day my roles in games varied from commanding the Galactica as William Adama in the Battlestar Galactica board game to murdering a bunch of ladies as Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel. I also vaguely recall building a massive game winning railroad from Palermo in Sicily all the way up to Moscow in Russia in the brilliant ‘Ticket to Ride: Europe’ game.
Board games are something I’ve gotten interested in a lot over the past 2 years. There are some really interesting games today that are worlds away from games such as Cluedo and Monopoly that you may have played as a kid. Unfortunately you can end up spending a quite a bit of money collecting games but rarely get to chance to get people together to play them.
I set up the website boardgamesireland.com to try and keep track of any boardgame meet ups out there and to help promote them. We also run a weekly meet up group of our own which has been hugely successful. We currently meet up at Thomas Reads on the corner of Dame Street and Parliament Street each Tuesday evening and we’re currently seeing about 30-40 people in attendance each week. It’s a great opportunity to bring along your games and play them with a large number of people, you also get to try out new games that other people have brought along. An interesting trend at the meet ups I’ve noticed is people who have just moved to Ireland to work and are looking for an easy way to socialise and meet new people.