Back to the board

It’s Monday evening, and the streets of Waterdeep are awash with intrigue. Members of the city’s ruling body, powerful and prominent citizens who wear masks to hide their true identities, collectively known as the Lords of Waterdeep, are determined to gain sole control of the mythical, medieval metropolis by any means necessary. Turn after turn, they dispatch their agents—warriors, wizards, rogues and pagan priests—into the streets to complete quests and carry out schemes ranging from Machiavellian to murderous. The air is thick with a familiar scent, not of blood, but of pepperoni and garlic.

So things go in Waterdeep, the largest city on the fictional continent of Faerun, but it’s a lot more casual at Mountain Mike’s Pizza on Mangrove Avenue. There are no masks hiding alter egos, and the imaginary Lords’ living counterparts include a wise-cracking Glenn County health inspector, a tattooed 25-year-old Pick-n-Pull employee, and a guy who works at a natural foods store. All are huddled over a board representing a map of the city, sipping beers and sharing laughs as they conspire against one another during this game of the Lords of Waterdeep.

The tattooed gentleman, Steven Allison, dedicates much of his free time to playing, learning about and acquiring new board games. He and roommate Dan Jarman began organizing these Monday night gaming sessions back in June, and both said the events have been building momentum each week, with the largest turnout yet—about two dozen people—showing up on Oct. 12. There’s not a Monopoly board in sight at the meet-ups, but there are dozens of newer board, dice and card games that are helping to fuel a table-top gaming renaissance.

Sales of table-top games of all sorts have increased in the U.S. every year for the past decade, including 25 percent to 40 percent annual leaps each year from 2010 to 2014, according to a November 2014 article in The Guardian. Industry professionals and hobbyists say the games’ resurgent popularity is at once boosted by social media—connecting gamers and exposing them to new products—and is simultaneously a backlash against the lack of personal interaction in a society dominated by digital technology. Locally, a half-dozen small, independent businesses cater to the demands of growing legions of gamers who meet to compete on kitchen tables and at game shops, bars and pizza parlors.

As the drama in Waterdeep wore on that night, other groups of two to six people sat around nearby tables, drawing cards and rolling dice as they explored a haunted house (Betrayal at the House on the Hill), settled regions of medieval France (The Castles of Burgundy) and summoned monsters and fireballs to crush one another in head-to-head magical combat (Magic The Gathering). All around the room nations rose and fell, enemies were vanquished, worlds were born and destroyed and—perhaps most spectacularly—human connections were made

As Allison prepped the board to play Lords of Waterdeep for that Monday’s session, he took a few moments to explain his love of gaming, and how the night came to be.

“Me and my roommate like a lot of these style of games, but none of our friends do,” he said. “We always wanted to get a group of people together to play actual board games, so we decided to make a post on Reddit one day and see if anyone actually showed up.

“The first week only two other people showed up … Russell and Sal,” he said, motioning to a man and a woman at the next table who smiled back over the board they were playing on. “We decided to try again and it just kept growing and growing and now, as you can see, quite a few people show up.”

The gatherings began at another local pizza parlor and are not tied to any single venue, but Allison prefers the meeting room at Mountain Mike’s (“It’s loud in here, but it’s our loud; not people yelling at the TV about football,” he said).

Allison also said the Monday evening event differs from other local game nights, such as one held Tuesdays at Heroes Corner, a comic book and game shop on East Avenue, because the focus is more on socialization than competition. Events at local shops are also often dominated by younger gamers.

“We don’t mind younger people showing up, but we also like to drink beer and we’re a boisterous group. We can get a little crude, and it sucks for people to have to censor themselves … not that it gets too bad, but we’re kind of solidly PG-13 here,” he said.

Allison said playing traditional board games, like Sorry and Life, were “the one big family activity we did when I was growing up,” and he started getting into newer games in recent years. His interest was fueled by the hit Web show TableTop, which is hosted by Star Trek: The Next Generation alum and geek-culture icon Wil Wheaton. The games aren’t cheap, generally ranging from $20 to $80, and he said Wheaton’s show and other Internet gaming resources help him get a feel for a game before he decides to splurge.

Lords of Waterdeep is Allison’s favorite game at the moment, though he named another of his recent discoveries—the ridiculously titled Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre—as a close second (“It’s just a fun, fast-paced, everybody-kills-each-other kinda game.”) His biggest game-finding goal at the moment—due to the success of the game nights—is acquiring games to accomodate more than four players.

“Board games are so personal,” Allison said when asked about their appeal. “In this day and age, you don’t interact as much; everyone’s on their phones, everything’s digital. Some of these games require you to play on teams, and you have to really talk to people and work together. A lot of them are deception-based games. You have to try to read people’s faces, which is something you just can’t do digitally. It keeps everything social.

“The only person I knew here before this started was my roommate Danny,” Allison noted. “Now I hang out with these people every week, and chill with some of them outside of game night.”

“There’s some really good people here … we’re all just a bunch of nerdy gamers,” Jarman interjected as he walked by.

The social aspect is exactly what brought Walter Sharrow into the world of gaming. Sharrow is the current host of a long-running game night held most Tuesday evenings at the DownLo, which, like the gathering at Mountain Mike’s, focuses on modern, in-depth games. He is also a game designer.

“I was never that interested in board games until I decided I needed to socialize, so I started going to bars,” Sharrow said, explaining that Anthony Dipasqua, a former man-about-Chico and DownLo bartender better known as Handsome Gorgeous, invited him to game night. “He saw me sitting around by myself, not doing anything, and said, ‘Hey, come play games with us and, y’know, talk to people.’”

Sharrow was around 30 at the time, and said a rough childhood caused him “to avoid humanity as much as possible for a really long time.”

“It really got me out of my shell,” said Sharrow, who designs graphics for computer games for a living. “Since I’m an artist, whenever I come into something new, I immediately think how I can edit things and make them better. So within a few weeks, I started working on my first game.”

Sharrow said he’s designed dozens of games, hand-drawing custom dice from wooden cubes purchased at Michael’s, making mock-ups on index cards and vigorously play-testing multiple iterations before hiring manufacturers to produce two finished products. His most successful invention to date, called Line Dice, was completed in 2012. He has sold several hundred copies of the game.

“You’re driving down a road,” Sharrow began when asked to describe Line Dice. “You want to make the road legitimate and as long as possible for yourself, and also make it convoluted so people won’t have the ability to play the pieces they have. You want to weave the road in and out and all over the place to stop their ability to move forward, like a game of SimCity gone awry.”

Sharrow invested $2,500 into the game’s first production run, and received two 50-pound boxes filled with thousands of Chinese-manufactured dice he sorted and stuck into cellophane sandwich bags, along with a cardboard label and printed copy of the game’s rules. Subsequent runs have been designed in higher-quality packaging, but he said the sandwich-bag aesthetic, ironically, moves more units at the game’s best-selling location, Made in Chico. He also sells the game online (linedice.com) and, for several years running, at the annual Bay Area gaming convention KublaCon, though he does so in an unconventional way.

“I always get a table at the flea market part where everyone sells their old games, and I sit there with stacks of my brand-new Line Dice,” he said, laughing. “I’ve never seen it written in the rules that you can’t do that, and when people tell me I’m not supposed to be there, I say, ‘Hey, I’ve only got $40 for this table, not a minimum of $500 for a vendor’s table.’”

His other attempt at design to make it past the prototype phase, a card game called Office Life, hasn’t fared as well as Line Dice.

“Its about working in an office,” he explained. “You try to kiss up to the boss, but you don’t know who the boss is because he’s always getting replaced due to corporate restructuring. So you build up this persona, and then use trickery, lies, deception and outright slander to fit what the boss is looking for.

“I thought it was great, but I’ve sold maybe 12 copies. I showed it to some reviewer and he said, ‘I hate your sense of humor.’”

Sharrow is still trying to gain traction with Line Dice, but lately has turned his efforts primarily toward computer game design. Game night continues at the DownLo, but it tends to be a smaller, more intimate affair than the Mountain Mike’s happening.

“I’m terrible at promotion, which is a problem when it comes to game design and marketing and even game night,” Sharrow said. “I’m just getting used to talking and stuff, so I’m not exactly Mr. Gladhands out there working the crowd.”

Any time gamers gather, there’s bound to be some talk of Magic the Gathering. The card game was created in 1993 by mathematician and avid Dungeons & Dragons player Richard Garfield. It immediately found footing in the then-much-smaller, niche role-playing game market, but also had a much broader appeal that continues today. The collectible nature of the cards has created a unique marketplace; in November 2013, an Alpha (first edition) Black Lotus card sold on eBay for $27,302.

In Magic, two or more players assume the roles of powerful wizards called Planeswalkers and engage in duels by summoning creatures and other spells. Decks are built around how the cards interact with one another—known as “synergy”—and combinations of colors with particular strengths.

Becky Strong owns Chico Magic, a store dedicated to the game, and has been collecting and selling Magic cards since her chance discovery of the game shortly after it was created.

“Some friends and I rented a cabin in Tahoe for a big outdoor summer adventure, but it rained the entire time,” she recalled. “Fortunately, someone brought four Magic decks and taught us all to play, and we all got addicted. It cleared up the last day, but we still stayed in and played Magic.”

At the time Strong, who’d formerly worked as a photographer for Chico State and had some success with an independent comic she penned called The Black Web, was already dabbling in sports collectibles and saw the potential value of the cards.

“They were Beta [second edition] decks filled with Black Lotuses and Moxens [another valuable card], all unsleeved, and I told them they should protect them because they might be worth money some day. They laughed, said these are just for fun, and went on eating chips and rubbing their greasy fingers all over them.”

Strong began building her own collection, which she used to seed a display at another dealer’s shop at the Chico Mall, where she eventually opened her own sports collectible store called Sports Play. In 2009, she moved the shop downtown and relaunched as Chico Magic, offering hundreds of thousands of individual cards, new products, regular tournaments and space for people to drop in and play any time the doors are open.

Strong said refocusing the business was difficult, but she was given a boost by a particularly popular expansion set and a promotion by Magic’s makers—Wizards of the Coast—called Hidden Treasures, Deadly Perils. The “hidden treasures” were rare old cards inserted into new packs, Willie Wonka-style, and one of a handful of proverbial Golden Tickets—a Black Lotus—was pulled in her store. She bought the card, and a picture of her holding it went viral, fueling Internet sales and helping Strong connect with other collectors and dealers. She once almost gave that Black Lotus away in a raffle, but decided against it at the last minute, bought a new one to replace the prize, and stores the original—an approximately $6,000 card she considers the store’s mascot and good luck charm—in a safe deposit box. She has another Black Lotus on consignment at the store for $3,500.

Strong sold yet another Black Lotus several years ago to a young man who she said had a problem with friends “borrowing” his cards and never returning them. He paid $300 for what Strong called “the most beautiful Lotus I’d ever seen; in perfect mint condition,” and which she estimates would be worth more than $5,000 today. He immediately grabbed a red pen from the counter and wrote his name across the front, destroying its monetary value but ensuring it would be used for the purpose it was created—to be played with.

Strong said the game and players’ appreciation of it is more important than the value of rare cards, and emphasized that Magic is accessible to any one, of any age, on any budget. She is always looking to help new players, and recently started a Lady Planeswalker group that meets intermittently to allow female players an opportunity to learn and enjoy the game in a low-pressure environment.

Strong also spoke about the social value of gaming. She said each of the game stores in town is home to a strong community of players that sometimes overlaps, and noted that three couples have met and married through gaming at Chico Magic.

“It’s actually face to face, it has a lot of involvement and intricacies,” Strong said of the game’s wide appeal. “It can be played on a very beginning level and a very expert level, all with the exact same cards and decks. It’s a lot like chess in that way; you can play a grandmasters’ game with the same board that you teach a child to play on. Except in Magic, you have a new set of chess pieces coming out every three months, so the game is constantly expanding and evolving.

“The colors are distinctive to certain personality types, and that’s where the true magic—excuse the pun—of the game lies. Someone who likes a fast-paced game can enjoy it just as someone who’s into slower, methodical thinking and planning 100 steps ahead.”

Strong said Magic’s latest expansion, Battle for Zendikar, is among the most popular in years, and the game is on another upswing. The darkest days for the game, she said, were the late-’90s to mid-2000s when online video games like the World of Warcraft and Halo franchises first became massively popular. But Magic and its table-top ilk offer something that can never be replicated in a virtual world, she said.

“[Online gaming] really just sucked everybody into their bedrooms and they all stayed there for a couple of years,” she said. “But most people can only handle that for so long until they get sick of being stuck in that room. They’re all coming back out now looking for that personal connection they missed. I think that’s why Magic, as well as all the board games, are having a big resurgence.

“People need the face to face.”