Central Coast: Local Game Community News
Formerly Central Coast Games
The Central Coast Games project has come to an end, well it’s changing. I set out to create a tabletop gaming community on the Central Coast of California and connect existing communities, and that’s what I did; mission succeeded. Now it’s time to begin a new project, and that project is the Local Game Community.
The Local Game Community is a project that will unify local tabletop gaming communities across America. This is an ambitious project, but it doesn’t include event planning like I did for MimicCon or epicly failing to start a nonprofit, haha. Instead, I’m going to be helping form tabletop communities everywhere by building a network of resources and tools to serve organizers and inspire others to pick up the reigns of being organizers themselves in their local communities..
When we make our communities stronger, our communities make us stronger.
Table of Contents
A Word From Our Sponsor
What This Will Look Like
What This Means For You
The Substack Community
Why Are We Building This?
Community Highlight - Zander’s Game House
Support Your Local Game Store For The Holidays
brought to you by Black Rose Designs
Upcoming Conventions & Events
Thank You
A Word From Our Sponsor
Hello everyone. Black Rose Designs is a local dice and tabletop gaming accessory company born and operated in Santa Maria, CA (headquartered at Dargarrd Keep, Nightlund). The
cultcompany was born from a small community of players and are happy to support the growth of the community as a whole. Check out our Instagram and follow so you can keep up to date with everything Black Rose is unleashing! Also, mycaptivesemployers said that for every new follower, I would get an extra minute of outside time. Thanks and hope to see you soon. I am told interns find "new opportunities" fairly often around here!"
Sincerely,
The Intern
note, the Intern is a paid employee of Black Rose Designs and a sworn vassal of Lord Soth, CEO. Don't concern yourself with his well being.
You can also find the amazing Black Rose Designs booth at LA Comic Con December 1-3
What This Will Look Like
As usual, I am organizing this effort primarily on Discord and secondarily here on substack and Facebook. We have undertaken a monumental construction project on our Discord server pushing against the limitations on the platform to accomplish our goals. And, I’m happy to announce that after two months, we’ve reached a major milestone. For the past couple weeks we have been stress testing features, debugging, and polishing in preparation for its launch. When I started working on this project I was worried that Discord’s technical limitations would make the design vision impossible, but we’ve managed to fit all of our desired designs, features, and tools into a single server and I’m happy to announce that it’s no longer a theoretical model, but it exists and it works.
When it launches officially, in the next week, it will provide every new user with a tabletop gaming community that is local to them. In some ways, it’s a smart community, and it will provide any tabletop gamer no matter where they are connecting from, a network of nearby tabletop gamers, helpful guides for starting a club, managing clubs, a list of nearby clubs, news and updates about their specific communities and neighborhoods, guides for event planning, people who want to help, and a dedicated team to help organizers, creators, event-planners, and small businesses onboard and connect with their local communities.
What This Means for You
If you were a subscriber to the Central Coast Games Newsletter solely for local updates and news about game conventions and events then good news. News and updates for the Central Coast of California will continue to be delivered quarterly from LGC Central Coast Newsletter.
The Substack Community
The Local Game Community Newsletter will carry the baton of our continually growing ambitions for tabletop gaming. The newsletter will broadly cover tabletop gaming, community development, game conventions, and how we’re using social media to make an impact in local communities everywhere. We will also be partnering with like minded bloggers and creators to work towards our shared passions for tabletop gaming.
Why Are We Building This?
The tabletop gaming industry is growing rapidly (almost $25bn in 2022) and speculators are expecting it to double by 2028.The virtual tabletop industry has been very effectively taking advantage of this growth by making these games more accessible online in virtual tabletops. Whether it’s Magic Arena or Roll20, players all over the world are taking the path of least resistance and acclimating to the more accessible virtual tabletops.
Though, I am happy to see my favorite hobbies flourish, I worry that many new players will never discover the real magic of them. The power they have to build lasting relationships and empathy through play, one of the basic foundations of learning social skills throughout the animal kingdom. When we get together to play Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer, or Yu-Gi-Oh!, we’re not just rolling dice, we’re building friendships and creating real social networks throughout the community that enrich our lives individually and the neighborhoods we live in, and we’re supporting the small businesses that in turn support our communities.
I have readily embraced technology at every turn, personally, but I’m very fearful to see virtual play tabletops replacing real face to face tabletop gaming. It’s time to build something that will help create more opportunities for local gaming, something that will make face to face gaming more accessible so we can compete more effectively with virtual tabletops. That’s why we’re building this; we’re in the golden age of tabletop, without a good solution for cultivating tabletop communities.
Community Highlight - Zander’s Game House
Zander’s Game House is a community oriented game retailer absolutely killing it with a business model which puts community needs first. Jeanne Sikoff, owner operator, provides plenty of her retail space to the public to use to play games and share their hobbies. Zander’s Game House boasts a Game Board Library with more than 1000 titles for guests to play and barrow, and organizes unique gaming events like Miniature Painting For Beginners, and hosts tons of open to the public D&D campaigns.
Congratulations Jeanne Sikoff for winning Entrepreneur of the Year for the 56th annual Camarillo Top 10 Community Awards!
Support Your Local Game Store for the Holidays
Our local game stores are the beating hearts of our communities. They are deeply ingrained in our neighborhoods and serve as gathering spots, places of discovery, sources of advice, shared passions, and often the first place we played our favorite games. So, as we venture into the festive shopping rush, let’s consider the impact of our choices and use our dollars to reinforce our foundations by supporting local game stores, and Main Street, in general.
Check out your local game shops and keep them in mind for the holiday shopping season.
Paso Robles
Atascadero
Arroyo Grande
Games Exchange
Santa Maria
Lompoc
Goleta
Santa Barbara
Ventura
Camarillo
Westlake Village
Local Game Community brought to you by Black Rose Designs
Upcoming Conventions & Events
Bakersfield Comic Con geek culture convention November 18-19 Bakersfield, CA
LA Comic Con geek culture convention December 1-3 Los Angeles, CA
ConQuest Ventura game convention January 19-21 Ventura, CA
Mouse-Con disneyana fan convention January 27th Bakersfield, CA
Strategicon game convention February 16-19 Los Angeles, CA
StocktonCon geek culture convention February 24-25 Stockton, CA
KublaCon game convention May 24-27 Burlingame, CA
Thank You
Thank you all for joining us on this journey of uniting our communities to create camaraderie through gaming and hobbying.
Good luck with this! A gaming community has to have a local focus, but this also means that continuity is a problem because a local focus also means that the community may not be large enough or sufficiently well-connected to ensure an effective succession once the founder leaves the scene. If you can develop a resource that will help solve that problem, it will be great help to the hobby over the long term.