I was up till about 4 in post-Tabletop Radio haze on call, and am now sitting here with hot chocolate, the Heaven Will Be Mine soundtrack, and a maelstrom of emotions I'm still trying to process because just? holy shit y'all? we've done? so much?
❗ Announcements ❗
🎲 Tabletop Extravaganza!
Tabletop Extravaganza is this weekend! Literally, it's midday to midnight both days which given my sleep schedule is probably all of the weekend where I'll be conscious. (Though I will stress again you absolutely do not have to and probably should not be there for the whole thing). If you're planning on running something and want to make sure you get players then go throw up a website event.
There's at least one specific event at the extravaganza I'm actually able to advertise here - Reylynn's offering an tutorial/intro to 40k 9th edition on tabletop simulator at some point (depending on when people can do), probably during the extravaganza. Signups are here, and all you need is basic familiarity with tabletop simulator.
🚨 EGM and moderation meeting.
We'll be having an EGM in week 12 (date TBC) to discuss the moderation guidelines and the renaming of exactly what CCGs stands for since that's technically a constitution changing motion. (Currently it's Casual Card Games, we're considering changing it back to collectible and trusting that we don't need to spell it out in the name to foster a casual, welcoming environment.)
Exec meeting don't get emoji I guess.
We're also having an exec meeting next Monday on the Discord from 3pm to 4pm. As always, non exec are free to come along, sit in call, and suggest stuff in chat.
❔ What's happening this week? ❔
- Monday 5-10pm: Online Wargames
- Tuesday 6-10pm: Online Draft - Henry just told me to say it's a surprise... - free! (as it's online) - you must sign up here to take part
- Wednesday 5-10pm: Online Board Games
- Thursday 5-10pm: Online CCGs
Remember, you can always find an up-to-date timetable of what's going on on our website's Schedule page, and you can see special events (including RPGs) and sign up to them via our Events page.
💭 What happened last week? 💭
❓ Tabletop Quiz
The Tabletop Quiz was last Friday, and only overran a little bit! It was three and a half hours (ishhhhh) of absolute chaos, from the ridiculous connections of Jamie's colour round and the terrible inventions of Sol's kickstarters to the fabled Jon round. Of special note was the bit where Sol realised the question happened to be about the colours of exact brand of nail polish they were wearing and proceeded to reel off the answers. For those who missed it, here's a sample of the John round and Jamie's fiendishly clever True Colours round (where you had to identify the odd colour out for half a point, and the pride flag the rest of the colours made for the other half). The answer to the John round question is just a flat "no." (because you don't have the information you'd need to do it), while Jamie's is the trans pride flag (the odd one out is Pineapple punch, the rest are a white, pink and blue nail polish.)
📻 Tabletop Radio
We raised £2048 for Mermaids. That's genuinely kind of an overwhelming number to think about. When we were sorting stretch goals, we set our £1000 goal thinking it was an aspirational dream - it was there mostly as something we could hype up, but not something we particularly planned on achieving - if we could that would be awesome but we were fully prepared for it to not happen...
And then day one happened and you completely blew that out of the water. So we made some more stretch goals, which you might remember from my very silly little rushed incentive slide thing, only for you to go on and achieve all of those too!? I'm going to keep going on and on about this because that's still kind of hard for me to properly process and take in, that we all did something that raised so much for charity.
I only caught parts of the stream (due to having to organise stuff and try and get food), and you should soon (but not yet as of this newsletter being published) be able to find all the VODs on our youtube channel, but here's a rough list of highlights in chronological order.
Day 1!
- We hit our first stretch goal less than half an hour in, dooming Finnbar to peanut butter marmite.
- R.G. gave us actual wholesome content in Jackbox
- Thirsty Sword Lesbians, in which Alex rolled exactly twice, both times to commune with ghosts, and both times it went horribly wrong. (Also, we get a £300 donation and panic because they can't have intended to give that much right? Reader, they absolutely did intend to give that much.)
- The £300 donation turns out to be for Never Gonna Give You Up to be played on kazoo with no warning, and the entire stream is rickrolled.
- Finnbar's fate catches up with them, and they have to eat peanut butter marmite. (although they get to have lychees to make up for it.)
- Codenames has Living 6 being given as a clue. This is how we learn that neither police officers nor lawyers are actually alive.
- Anakin speedruns a talk they wrote on the day (maybe watch that bit of the VOD at 0.75x speed!), Jamie tells us about psychic pirates, James tells us why we need mourn the death of LARP no longer, Finnbar summarises the entire field of game design (a talk which is already out of date given one of our stretch goals), and the fabled Centalk is given, endangering everyone listening in the name of keeping the truth about our half horse half human nemeses alive.
- Lewis gets hit by a Snare! in Tabletopoly after finally getting his first donation card a long way in, and rainbow capitalism drives Reylynn to "victory." (Alex might disagree that everyone else selling you all their property to celebrate pride month at the end of the game to time is legal under monopoly rules, but they're wrong)
- The Official Tabletop Radio Board Game is made, obseleting Finnbar's TED talk by filling the niche of a social deduction dexterity game in the great genre grid, and making a shockingly good base for a game in half an hour with chat's help.
- Bob Ross! Ares and some people in chat make some really cool art! I have no idea how they managed this, given at this point I was struggling to stay conscious, but here's Ares' Bob Ross paintings.
Day 2
- My 2 minute updated interlude graphic, mentioning that our £2000 stretch goal is "mostly just there because we need a ridiculous goal". You then proceeded to go slam a thousand pounds into our expectations and crush our fragile perception of the limits of your generosity. I'll repeat it every opportunity I get because £2048!!!
- Are salads better hot or cold? How artsy are highly stylish commercials, really? Somehow, our wavelength players got both of these dead on.
- A BBEG voiced reading of Call Me Maybe
- Rainbow Paranoia, in which Artock refused to learn that you can't just colour things in with a red marker pen to make them safe and legal for you to handle, even if you are red clearance, some orders are interpreted very literally, and copious amounts of superglue are misused.
- Finnbar gets through four kazoo pieces in one interlude somehow?!? How their lungs coped I do not know.
- Kermit the Frog reads an extract from an essay about the gender cube, while trying to convince everyone that this is totally what Yoda sounds like.
- Jamie's makeup stream. (still cis though)
- My hubris comes back to bite me in netrunner, as Jamie takes advantage of me running face first into one of the two cards which would have let her kill me.
- I get bored of origami, try (and fail) to make a good paper plane, and have to run halfway round claycroft to pick it up after its maiden voyage out of my window. (I assume everyone else was rightfully laughing at this while they made good origami but I haven't checked the VOD)
- Anakin sings two bits of karaoke as well wow this interlude is busy.
- The RPG Design talk, which I don't have any really funny things to say about it was just genuinely interesting to hear perspectives from people whose RPG experience is very different to mine
- Wheel Spin Speedrun as Anakin tries to get as many of them done as possible before the end.
- 5d Chess, in which my terrible advice like "pawns and knights are obselete on the modern battlefield so it doesn't matter if we lose any", combined with Finnbar taking every other turn to try and salvage my plays somehow wins a game against Benji and Oli, to the shock of literally everyone in the call as it moved from us in a really bad position and dodging check to suddenly "Checkmate, White wins!" Time travel op nerf plz.
- The closing interlude, and Lord Vader reading "Go the Frick to Sleep." (We did not, and stayed in call until 4am, which probably goes some way to explaining why this newsletter is being posted on Tuesday.)
List of Donors!!!
Benji "Good with Money" McRizzle (Fun fact! I only ended up in 5d chess because I jumped into call to just sort of gawp silently at Benji after he dropped £312 in one donation to steal the throne of highest donor.)
Jost (£300 rickroll!!!! I can't even be mad that's so much money!)
Anonymous (and their 8 clones who are all also called anonymous)
Argee! (ok I just looked at the spreadsheet I'm copying the names off and I knew they donated a lot but 21 different donations?!?)
themarve11
Jakub
George K
car-a-ha-ha-ha
James Newton
Jon B
Jamie
Josh
Artemis
James L
Samantha
af
McGonigle
AceEmpress (oh look it's me! in my own newsletter!)
Alex 2
Daniel Cheney
Matt G
JonC
Sol
Reylynn
M8War
Anakin
Alonso
Finnbar
Lewis P.
Mariusz L
stinkyflatmate
Alex UwU
Oli
Evan
LYC
Larp Cannon (wearing multiple seperate disguises throughout the course of the stream)
Lewis
Final thanks, and extra content
Everyone! Seriously, thanks to all of you who came along, whether or not you donated! Even just being there and watching the stream helps so much with making sure we're not just screaming into an empty void. Also, it's worth noting that we've got a lot of stretch goals still to do (5 episodes of Monsters on a Cruise Ship, the Tabletop Anime Intro, making the official 1 page RPG of tabletop radio, and Ares' Ringfit stream), and incentives still to stream (Apparently 20 songs need kazoo-ing and 10 need singing!), so keep an eye out for our incentive stream and those stretch goals over the coming weeks and months - they'll be announced on the Discord for sure and probably also elsewhere.
Wash your hands, stay inside, and come play some games with us (online) 💛
Hannah Collins (she/they/fae) (Communications and Operations, so overwhelmed by generosity fae posted this newsletter late)
@aceempress#9631 on Discord
hannah.a.collins@warwick.ac.uk
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