Question for those familiar with the Chicago area:
Where are the geeks? Back in Milwaukee, there were several gaming pubs and a hole-in-the-wall LGS that was packed to the gills Saturday nights, with Warhammer players, at least one 4-player EDH game going, and maybe a D&D session in the corner. There were one or two women there, typically someone's SO, but they held their own in Magic, and knew the references.
I go to a much larger store in a "real" city, and it's a godsdamned ghost town. Empty tables on a Saturday evening. It's got a handful of lumpy, poorly-dressed beardless dudes who use "diversity" in every other sentence, but there's no women, and fewer actual black people than the podunk hole-in-the-wall. I feel like the coolest person there (which is not a good sign).
All the board game players I've met in Chicago just hold private groups rather than meet at a designated hall. As mentioned elsewhere there are some locations that are trying to do what you suggest but they aren't super popular.
As someone else said, Snakes and Lattes is one of the more geeky places in the city at least for board games. The Games Tender there has told me that they tried MTG and didn't get much of a showing. There is a DnD bar called Dmen Tap up in avondale that has a campaign on Weds, open to new people. Dice Dojo up in Edgewater is much more neckbeardy. I never did my FNM there but they sold cards and the clerks seemed knowledgeable. Avoid Bonus Round its super woke, wouldn't even stock secret hitler because it was made by "those people" according to them.
I've been to both dice dojo and had been hanging around with some of the bonus rounds people when they were just a board game meetup and didn't buy the place yet. Went to the place too for a few months but I kind of got the impression they didn't like me/my group very much and they are indeed very woke. As far as I can tell most board game enthusiasts simply do private gatherings, which is the direction I went as soon as I had gathered a stable group.
I actually disagree with the whole private gathering exclusivity idea. my experience is that most people meet through meetups or they bring their existing friends. I know a couple groups in Chicago, that do the exclusively euro-style, long, strategy games in a rotating manner, and they use meetup to find new games/and or people and occasionally get together privately for a very specific game. Since moving away from Chicago a couple months ago, I'd say my new city has 11 board game bars in the area and I play at many of them through both meetups and private gatherings with people I met from those meetups.
I'm very much not against meetups in general, I got to know the person who ultimately set me up with my fiance through a board game meetup so I have a kind of fondness for them as an idea. I'm just describing my experience with the Chicago boardgame scene and why it may different from other towns.
I think the term geek has gone full circle. Almost everyone is into some video game or some traditonally geek hobby nowadays: that the true social recluses/retards who partake in those hobbies out of necessity can once again reclaim that term.
Having a geek hobby is not the identifier anymore.
I recently started a MeetUp for tabletop stuff and it's either super-woke Blue Tribe (e.g. a black woman who said "Well, Africa's my culture", despite having never left the US in her life) or aspies that I can only tolerate for about an hour before I get the urge to strangle them. I've met about two or three people whose I genuinely enjoy gaming with. It's maddening.
Most normal people are just meeting with each other at their homes rather than a central location, which to actually be central and desirable would need to also be quite profitable which can be a hard thing for hobby spaces to achieve. There is a certain level of scale this all just falls apart where the place needs to charge customers more than it would cost to just buy the game and play it at home. The killer feature of allowing you to meet more people becomes difficult when all the people it's most fun to play with all meet each other after a few visits and never return while those who would not be invited are a fixture.
I wonder if bigger cities are more prone to boom/bust cycles, where a well-run group that organically arises with low status members achieves some success, which attracts attention and higher-status people in sufficient quantity to drive out the original members. Then the new arrivals list interest but the original members have already moved on, and the group dies. In smaller cities there may not be enough interested high-status members to displace the founders. Or perhaps the status games are not as ruthless to begin with.
In any case, I am aware of a sex club that has game nights in Milwaukee, so maybe it's just a Milwaukee thing. The vestigal influence of GenCon perhaps.
That sounds very much like the "geeks, mops and sociopaths" model of subcultures, though that adds the notion of "sociopaths": those in it to make money from the new popularity that end up focusing around the more easily monetised influx, rapidly diluting the original thing towards mass appeal.
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Notes -
Question for those familiar with the Chicago area:
Where are the geeks? Back in Milwaukee, there were several gaming pubs and a hole-in-the-wall LGS that was packed to the gills Saturday nights, with Warhammer players, at least one 4-player EDH game going, and maybe a D&D session in the corner. There were one or two women there, typically someone's SO, but they held their own in Magic, and knew the references.
I go to a much larger store in a "real" city, and it's a godsdamned ghost town. Empty tables on a Saturday evening. It's got a handful of lumpy, poorly-dressed beardless dudes who use "diversity" in every other sentence, but there's no women, and fewer actual black people than the podunk hole-in-the-wall. I feel like the coolest person there (which is not a good sign).
All the board game players I've met in Chicago just hold private groups rather than meet at a designated hall. As mentioned elsewhere there are some locations that are trying to do what you suggest but they aren't super popular.
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As someone else said, Snakes and Lattes is one of the more geeky places in the city at least for board games. The Games Tender there has told me that they tried MTG and didn't get much of a showing. There is a DnD bar called Dmen Tap up in avondale that has a campaign on Weds, open to new people. Dice Dojo up in Edgewater is much more neckbeardy. I never did my FNM there but they sold cards and the clerks seemed knowledgeable. Avoid Bonus Round its super woke, wouldn't even stock secret hitler because it was made by "those people" according to them.
Actually Dive Dojo is the place I mentioned that was a ghost town full of diversity lingo, so the neck beard stronghold has fallen.
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I've been to both dice dojo and had been hanging around with some of the bonus rounds people when they were just a board game meetup and didn't buy the place yet. Went to the place too for a few months but I kind of got the impression they didn't like me/my group very much and they are indeed very woke. As far as I can tell most board game enthusiasts simply do private gatherings, which is the direction I went as soon as I had gathered a stable group.
I actually disagree with the whole private gathering exclusivity idea. my experience is that most people meet through meetups or they bring their existing friends. I know a couple groups in Chicago, that do the exclusively euro-style, long, strategy games in a rotating manner, and they use meetup to find new games/and or people and occasionally get together privately for a very specific game. Since moving away from Chicago a couple months ago, I'd say my new city has 11 board game bars in the area and I play at many of them through both meetups and private gatherings with people I met from those meetups.
I'm very much not against meetups in general, I got to know the person who ultimately set me up with my fiance through a board game meetup so I have a kind of fondness for them as an idea. I'm just describing my experience with the Chicago boardgame scene and why it may different from other towns.
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How many years have passed between your two experiences? Only because I bet “geek”dom has been trending toward a more chronically online culture
I think the term geek has gone full circle. Almost everyone is into some video game or some traditonally geek hobby nowadays: that the true social recluses/retards who partake in those hobbies out of necessity can once again reclaim that term.
Having a geek hobby is not the identifier anymore.
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Try Snakes and Lattes on Milwaukee. It's got a good crowd every weekend, though mostly board games, not Warhammer or D&D.
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I recently started a MeetUp for tabletop stuff and it's either super-woke Blue Tribe (e.g. a black woman who said "Well, Africa's my culture", despite having never left the US in her life) or aspies that I can only tolerate for about an hour before I get the urge to strangle them. I've met about two or three people whose I genuinely enjoy gaming with. It's maddening.
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Most normal people are just meeting with each other at their homes rather than a central location, which to actually be central and desirable would need to also be quite profitable which can be a hard thing for hobby spaces to achieve. There is a certain level of scale this all just falls apart where the place needs to charge customers more than it would cost to just buy the game and play it at home. The killer feature of allowing you to meet more people becomes difficult when all the people it's most fun to play with all meet each other after a few visits and never return while those who would not be invited are a fixture.
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I wonder if bigger cities are more prone to boom/bust cycles, where a well-run group that organically arises with low status members achieves some success, which attracts attention and higher-status people in sufficient quantity to drive out the original members. Then the new arrivals list interest but the original members have already moved on, and the group dies. In smaller cities there may not be enough interested high-status members to displace the founders. Or perhaps the status games are not as ruthless to begin with.
In any case, I am aware of a sex club that has game nights in Milwaukee, so maybe it's just a Milwaukee thing. The vestigal influence of GenCon perhaps.
That sounds very much like the "geeks, mops and sociopaths" model of subcultures, though that adds the notion of "sociopaths": those in it to make money from the new popularity that end up focusing around the more easily monetised influx, rapidly diluting the original thing towards mass appeal.
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