We’re Warwick Tabletop Games and Roleplaying Society, the university’s largest society for all things tabletop. We have a packed calendar covering board games, card games, wargames and RPGs (both pen and paper and live action), so there’s bound to be an event for you! We provide a friendly and welcoming environment - regardless of experience, you’re always welcome at our events. Members of exec (in their purple hoodies) will always be around, so if you’d like to try something new just show up and we’ll help you out.
If you attend our events and online spaces, we expect you to adhere to our Code of Conduct, otherwise we will ask you to leave.
You can find out where each event is hosted on our Schedule page!
In Wargames, we simulate battles through the use of miniatures. These range from small skirmishes to planet-wide conflicts, with players using a mixture of luck and skill to carefully position units and resolve the resulting combat through rolling dice.
Our Wargames sessions involve a range of game systems; regularly played systems include: Warhammer 40,000; Kill Team; Warmahordes; X-wing; Star Wars Armada; and Star Wars Legion. Don't worry if you have a preferred games system that isn't listed here, as we are always happy to try out a new wargame. We also have society armies allowing anybody to turn up and play, regardless of experience!
If you like drafting Magic: the Gathering, then this is the event for you! We draft an assortment of the latest standard set, cubes, unusual sets (e.g. Masters, Un-sets, Commander sets...) and flashbacks, which are all scheduled in advance here, with details of their buy-in cost (most of our drafts require you to buy packs to draft with, which we provide for purchase) and prize structure.
Please note: draft is a competitive format, and is thus not suitable for people who have never played Magic: the Gathering before! If you want to learn how to play Magic, we recommend you check out our Casual Card Games events, where someone can teach you how to play.
Come along to try out some new board games or play some of your old favourites. We have everything from light party games to full 4 hour epics, so we're sure to find one for you in our extensive collection of 110+ games. You can drag your mates with you, or come alone and we'll bring together a group for you to play with.
If you're a board game enthusiast, this is a great way to meet like-minded people at Warwick, and if you're brand new to the scene, there'll be a team of exec and regular members ready to show you the ropes. Board games are a great way to make friendships that will last throughout uni and beyond!
Collectable Card Games (CCGs) are games where each participant has their own, specially built deck of cards, and uses that deck to play against other players with similarly constructed decks. Here at CCGs, we embrace all kinds of players - from competitive to casual to complete beginners! So come join us as we battle it out in the friendliest way possible in a myriad of games, such as Magic: The Gathering, Android: Netrunner, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, to name but a few. If you have your own spicy deck constructions you’d like to show off, then please do bring them along. But, if you don’t even know what a deck is, let alone why you’d want to sleeve it, then we’ll have plenty of people on hand who are ready and willing to show you the ropes and provide cards for you to borrow and play with!
Also, if you're looking for some Magic: The Gathering drafting rather than a constructed format, check out our weekly draft event.
RPGs are forums for collaborative storytelling. Often facilitated by a Game/Dungeon master (G/DM), they provide the rules and framework for you and your group to play out the stories and the characters that you want to. Whether you want to be adventurers at the centre of some epic saga, thieves trying to survive in a haunted city, or raccoons misusing a defibrillator to win a race, there’s an RPG for you. While Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is the most popular RPG played at the society, there’s also a wide offering of other RPG systems available -- from other large systems like Pathfinder and Call of Cthulhu, to tiny systems like Goblin Quest and Crash Pandas. If you want to run your own RPG, follow this simple two and a half step guideline:
1. Talk to our RPGs Rep (currently Oli, contact details on our Exec page), who will be able to give you to host your games in.
2. Make a event on our Events page to get players.
(2.5. Actually run the RPG)
LARP (Live Action Role Play) takes roleplaying beyond dice rolling and gridded mats. In LARP, you physically take part in the adventure, either as a player character or one of the monsters.
Fighting is done with an assortment of foam weapons such as swords, axes and two-handed weapons, in addition to a wide range of options for magic. People of all skills are welcome, from LARP combat experts to those holding a sword for the first time. The society has all the required gear but you may bring your own if you wish.
We advertise these in our newsletters!
Board Games brings everyone together to spend an entire weekend* (yep, including overnight Saturday night) doing nothing but board gaming fun. It's the perfect opportunity to crack out those long epics that you can't manage in a single 8-hour board games session during the week, to join in with a massive pizza order on Saturday evening, or to play chaotic Jackbox in a sleep-deprived state at 3am on Sunday morning.
* Staying for the entire weekend is not mandatory; please drop in and out whenever you like! Especially if you need to go and sleep.
It's Board Games Weekend, but Tabletop. Yes, that's right, all of Tabletop. This is the weekend where the stars align and wargames, board games, collectable card games, and RPGs coexist in harmony. So take the text from Board Games Weekend and sub in Tabletop wherever you read Board Games, and you're gucci.
At the end of every term, you can battle it out over 6 quiz rounds (+ an optional, but unmissable, bonus round!) of sometimes bizarre, sometimes Tabletop-themed questions to win the coveted Tabletop Quiz Crown. Written by our exec, past rounds have included Board Game Geek Board Game List Board Game Board Game Game Guru Game, Magic Card or Metal Band, Kazoos, and assorted dice.
Scroll up to Tabletop Weeked and imagine that... but for an entire extra day. Yep, 36 hours of non-stop hip-hop lost the plot flip-flop hard rock knock knock Tabletop. It's the perfect way to end your year at Uni after a solid few months of revising for and panicking about exams.
Tabletop Radio was our response to not being able to fundraise for charity in-person due to Covid; it is a 26 hour charity stream that we ran during Pride Month for the last 2 years. In 2020, we raised £600 for Stonewall, and in 2021, we raised £2000 for Mermaids! Due to its great success, we plan to continue Tabletop Radio in future years, though hopefully we will be able to stream all together from one room. We stream a wide variety of segments that cover many of the activities that we and the people in the tabletop community love, from the games themselves to talks on them, with plenty of incentives to reward those who donate.
In Hallowe'ek we get spooky by running Hallowe'en-themed versions of our events! We've run Boo-ard Games, in which spooky games are played; Scary CCGs in which people bring spooky decks; spooky RPG one-shots in more horror-oriented systems; Magic drafts with spooky sets; and of course Extremely Normal Wargames because we haven't thought of a way to spookify it yet. Sometimes people even get dressed up in costume!
Ever wanted Dungeons and Dragons... But Bigger? And more Chaotic? An Epic D&D experience has many tables of players, each with their own DM, all taking part in the same overarching adventure to achieve a common goal. Our past Epic D&D adventures have been Stardock Under Siege and The Great Knucklehead Rally. We look forward to bringing you more of these giant games in the future!
Megagames are like very large boardgames, with elements of role-playing games, LARP and wargames rolled in. They involve anything from 30 players to three or four hundred players, and usually involve chaotic panicking as everyone is trying to stop the world from ending while trying to advance their own personal agendas. We sometimes run them!
We've run two megagames so far -- Watch the Skies in 2019, where players take the roles of politicians, scientists, press and aliens on the world's stage and try to prevent societal collapse; and The Depths, a bespoke online megagame playtest in which you are all submariners trying to deal with a flooded planet. We're hoping to run more of these in future!
Build Your Own Board Game sees us and Game Design Society run a board game jam together - in which you have a weekend to make a board game! We've seen a variety of games come out of this, from games about space exploration with cards, a dexterity-based wargame and the answer to the question of whether 100 duck-sized horses would beat a horse-sized duck. The end of this newsletter shows off some of the games made two years ago, and this newsletter shows off some games made digitally this year.
While Tocil Woods is a perfectly nice place for LARPing, sometimes we go somewhere a little more grand. As such, near the end of Term 3 we go and LARP in Kenilworth Castle! All of the stuff you love about LARP, but instead of lots of trees there's a castle.