Our board game guild, the Dice & Mystics, play every Wednesday night at the “Spieletreff” (which roughly translates as “Gamer’s Meeting Place”) at St. Engelbert’s Parish.
On occasions the question has been asked: Are you a church club, some Christian thing?
The answer is: No.
But…​
Actually, the whole D&M enterprise was set off by a Jewish engineer named Howard Wolowitz…
Three supposedly non-gamer friends were sitting on the sofa watching that Christmas episode of “Big Bang Theory” where Howard introduces Santa into a Dungeons & Dragons session. Suddenly one says, “That seems like a lot of fun to me. Couldn’t we play D&D, too?” The other one says, “Well, now you mention it, I’ve always wanted to try that out, you know.” Says number three: “Actually – I used to be a D&D dungeon master once, but no one has been wanting to play with me for ages!”
And so it began. The new 5th edition of D&D had just come out – back to the basics – and we found a fourth party willing to venture to the Sword Coast and into our first roleplaying campaign with us. We met regularly at a local board game café, where we alternatively played some D&D and Descent and board games with similar mechanisms to get used to the concept of character sheets, stats, campaigning etc. to better train us up for the “real thing”.
The question if we are a Christian organisation may have been prompted by the “Saint” in “Spieletreff St. Engelbert”.
We know very little about the religious beliefs or disbeliefs of our members. Three or maybe four Dice & Mystics are clearly Christians, one is known as a regular church goer. There may be more, there may be practitioners of other religions or atheists among us, we have no idea. That is all we know and more than we need to know.
What we all believe in, however, is openness, tolerance, kindness of the heart and having more fun through sharing it. We want to be together, play, laugh, have a good time and invite anybody to come along and join in. Our idea was the following: We own a large board game collection and give people the chance to play games they like, or a place they can take their own favourite games to and find others to play with. Thus we also give access to great games to those who maybe cannot afford to buy them for themselves or a place for gamers or role players who do not want to be forced to keep buying drinks in a pub in order to have a large enough gaming table. And we want to be open for everybody, no matter which gender, age, ethnicity or religion or whatever. Really everybody can come and indulge in the hobby regularly at least once a week without having to spend a single penny.
We were told this attitude goes very well with Christian beliefs and values, so when our board game café suddenly closed down next Christmas, it happened that it was a Christian parish that helped us out.
We were looking for a new friendly location to meet and play. As it was, there is no other board game café anywhere in these parts. Playing at pubs turned out to be fairly disastrous, and things were beginning to look dismal. But we did not think of giving up.
One day we simply went to the parish of St. Engelbert and asked them if maybe we could play board games and D&D at their parish center. Yeah, and why not – there were nice rooms with nice tables (and central heating in winter) and it was easily accessible for everyone. Most days of the week some of the rooms were empty, it seemed. Originally we had been hoping to rent a room for a few hours every week and share the costs if they were not too high.
To cut a short story even shorter: They listened to what we wanted, asked whether we were some official club (no), whether we were commercial in any way (no), and why we were playing together (see above). They liked what we did and why, and said this was something that went very well with their ideas of a peaceful community. We could provide a great creative, intelligent, communicative, socially interactive hobby in a safe environment for free for whoever was looking for pastime and good company! And they nonplussed us by this very generous offer: We could come and use any room we needed and all facilities for free from 5 to 11 p.m. once a week. As a “payment” they would take us by our word: Anybody can come and join in, and we do tidy up after ourselves. The room and date were made known as “Spieletreff” to tell the parishioners what we were doing at their place.
Everybody can bring their drinks and sandwiches from home along if they like, and we have glasses, plates, cutlery etc. at our disposal. We bring teas, coffee and biscuits along for everybody, and often our guests bring milk, sugar and other things – even a penguin shaped gateau for sustenance during a game of Ice Cool! Thus we have drinks and snacks just like our former board game café, and we also adopted their idea to have warm meals on the premises: We have a caterer just round the corner where we can place a collective order and have food delivered right to our tables, and everybody pays individually. If the order is large enough, we even get free drinks with our meals.
We have been the “Dice & Mystics” at the “Spieletreff St. Engelbert” for a few happy years now, and what had started with three friends dreaming of the Sword Coast has evolved into an international, fairly large but still completely informal and non-commercial game club with a growing number of members and events.
So, if you want to play board games or role play, or if you are looking for nice people to play with, get creative! Look around you. Don’t be too shy to approach people and tell them your ideas. Sometimes the solution lies closer than you think. Who would have thought we could run a board game café at a parish center, and for free, too? And all it took was the asking.
Every year at the parish festival we host game rounds and raffle off a fair number of quality games donated by the D&M to all participants, to say THANK YOU to the parish, loudly and from our hearts, and – sssh! – hopefully also further increase the number of enthusiastic gamers…