Game Time

Published September 24th, 2024 at 3:21 pm

Board games aren’t just kids’ stuff these days. 

There’s been a major surge of interest in table games, especially role-playing games — independent or collaborative games in which participants take on character personas and make choices to accomplish goals. During the COVID pandemic, game sales soared and new audiences were introduced to hobbies that they could do indoors. With the spike in board game popularity came an increase in attending board game related events. Today, conventions are everywhere, including Albuquerque.

MañanaCon is a game player convention presented by Tara King and Paul Schulzetenberg, Albuquerque locals who have run gaming events in the Duke City, Los Angeles and Minneapolis since 2005. Schulzetenberg says MañanaCon is similar to other conventions such as Comicon and even has its own “flavor of celebrities” in terms of designers and publishers in the game world, but the focus of MañanaCon is meeting gamers with similar tastes and interests and playing together.

“It’s a great place to go for people who want to check out what board games are about and have people teach them. Or for people who are looking to play board games and can’t find people to play with,” Schulzetenburg says. “It’s aimed at the people who are very into this stuff all the way down to very casual people who are looking to check it out.”

King and Schulzetenberg expect this year’s MañanaCon to be three times the size of last year’s event and they say that playing board games is really catching fire as a hobby.

“Dungeons and Dragons was on Stranger Things, it was healthy already, but there’s been a real flowering of the role playing gaming hobby, which is one of the types of games we support,” Schulzetenburg says. “The board gaming hobby is more popular than it’s ever been here in the United States. It really is an incredible period of growth.”

Schulzetenberg says in a good table or role-playing game, you end in a slightly different place at the end of the session than the beginning of the session, kind of like a good movie. Not all role playing games these days deal with traditional storylines or medieval themes. King says that the role-playing games played at MañanaCon are a mix of independent, zany, fluid role-playing games and structured games such as Dungeons and Dragons.

“One we ran last year is called Honey Heist and you’re playing as a big bear that’s committing crimes. So it’s a very silly, very humorous experience, and you know bears are not very good at committing crimes,” King says. “A lot of the dice rolling is about whether you succeed at convincing the human that you actually are a salesman or whatever your weird goal is in the story.”

The games have customizable, collectable, and sometimes expensive accessories including miniatures and customizable dice, and the miniature scene is a big part of the conventions. Schulzetenberg says nothing matches miniatures games for “table presence” and that collecting and painting pieces and terrains is a hobby in itself.

“Once you’ve painted it, you wanna do something with it, you wanna show it off. And so a lot of miniatures people have really wonderful armies they’ll put out and play. Even if you don’t enjoy miniatures yourself, if that’s not your type of game, they are absolutely a spectacle to see.”

King and Schulzetenberg say MañanaCon is not as focused on competition as it is on discovery, and it aims to create a diverse community of gamers.

“I’ve always felt like it’s not that people aren’t playing the games, it’s that they don’t want to play them in a public setting because they’re intimidated, because it’s too competitive or whatever the reason is,” King says. “We tried really hard to offer different kinds of games so that different kinds of gamers are coming and make sure everybody really feels welcome and that they matter when they come.”