"Game" Day Gathering

Basic Premise

A Sunday gathering centered around football and board games with fun for everyone.

My Planning Considerations

• Among my friends there are no casual sports watchers, they are either pretty die hard fans or don’t follow any sports in the slightest. So when my friend and dining club event series co-host wanted to do a Sunday Game Day gathering, I was wondering if we would be able to gather enough interested parties.
  • This is when I got the idea to play off of the “Game” part of “Game Day” and do board games at the same time. I had hosted a board game night before, so it wasn’t a huge stretch of the imagination, and I knew two of my friends who really liked board games who would definitely be down.
• Like all of our previous dining club events, there was a cost associated with it, but we wanted to try to keep the cost as low as possible, so we decided on $10 per person. This ended up being pretty spot-on, and we actually made a little bit of money from it because we had a lot of last minute RSVPs for the event.
• The menu was fairly typical Game Day fare:
  • Wings
  • Chips and Dip
    • Queso Dip
    • Guacamole
  • Cannoli
• I set up a long table as an extension of my dining room table so that people could play games and eat as well as still be in view of the TV in case they wanted to multi-task and be a part of both football and board games.

Event Retrospective

• 18 people ended up attending and I think that this was my most successful event because of the number of conversational surfaces, but also the diversity of attendees.
  • It was half people from work and half people I knew from elsewhere so I was able to prevent work talk for the most part.
• The dual nature of this event allowed for “[a] crossover of different interests and allows people to socialize at their own speed”, as said by a happy attendee!
• We played the game Two Rooms and a Boom with almost the entire party which was a lot of fun. It made people have to talk to new people and all be a part of the same game.
• In the future I think I would also try to set up another table in my bedroom (which is the only other separate room in my apartment), so that there could be another congregation of people playing games who might need a little more quiet for socialization. This wouldn’t replace the dining room game table because I did like that people were in the same room and had general awareness of each other.
  • There were some people who weren’t really involved in the football game or board games and were there just talking to people in the kitchen or elsewhere which I liked to. As long as people were connecting and interacting I wasn’t too pressed about how they were engaging with the event concept itself.