A St. Albert board game convention is going online for its 20th anniversary year.
Registration for the 20th annual Gamealot board game convention in St. Albert is now open. The annual fundraiser typically draws some 200 people to the Kinsmen Banquet Centre for two and a half days of gaming.
Gamealot co-organizer Tracy Engel said the convention team had some great ideas to celebrate the event's 20th anniversary, but had to toss them out the window once the COVID-19 pandemic made mass gatherings unsafe.
Because of the pandemic, Tracy said Gamealot would be completely online this year — a first for the event. Instead of playing around a physical table, players would gather in virtual forums such as Tabletop Simulator (a program that reproduces board games in a 3D environment) or video conferences (by pointing a camera at the board and having the host move the pieces).
“However you want to run your game virtually, we’re completely open to that,” Tracy said.
Participants can pay $10 to take part in as many games as they want, or $25 to do that and get a fancy 20th anniversary T-shirt, Tracy said. They can also register to host their own games. Guests can visit Mission: Fun and Games (one of the event’s sponsors) on St. Albert Trail to bid on the prize packs in this year’s silent auction. All proceeds from the event go to the St. Albert Family Resource Centre.
The games start at 4 p.m. Oct. 23 and run until 4 p.m. Oct. 25. It officially stops each night at midnight, but Tracy said players can game all night if they want.
“The fun name for ‘Gamealot’ is ‘Sleep-a-little,’” she quipped.
20 years of gaming
Event founder and Mission: Fun and Games owner John Engel (Tracy’s husband) said he got the idea for Gamealot after bad weather cut short his family’s camping trip in Westlock in 2000. Thinking about how to use his new free time, he decided to host a convention and put Gamealot together in about three weeks.
Gamealot was for many years hosted at Mission: Fun and Games, which used to be in the strip mall on McKenney Ave. John said he turned it into a fundraiser for the St. Albert Food Bank when the bank moved into the mall around 2002, substituting the entry fee for bags of food.
The event grew and grew over the years, and soon became too big for the store to host, John said. Storing and shipping all the donated food also became impractical once the store moved to its current home on St. Albert Trail. John turned management of the event over to the Gamealot committee in 2012, which moved the event to the Kinsmen Banquet Centre in 2014. The event also switched its donations to the St. Albert Family Resource Centre that year, in part because the centre was able to staff the kitchen at the banquet centre during the event.
Gamealot has raised some $15,000 for charity in the last three years, Tracy said. The convention has set its sights much lower this year due to the pandemic, and hopes to muster $1,000.
Kim and Allen Gould will be back again at Gamealot this year, having attended it since 2001. Accompanying them will be their daughter Delilah, who has been going to Gamealot since she was a baby and hosting games since she was four.
“Allen and I were big into (collectible card games) in the late 1990s,” Kim said, and the convention is a great way to meet new friends and play new games.
Tracy recalled many fun moments from past Gamealots, including midnight games of the hidden role game Werewolf and that time a role-playing game group had their table collapse during a particularly dramatic moment.
Allen said this year’s convention would be quieter than past ones, but it would still be fun.
“There will be games, and it’s still for a good cause.”
Tracy said that she loved seeing families come out to play and make new friends, noting that some go on to form gaming groups of their own.
“If we can bring gamers together that play games for the rest of their lives together, how awesome is that?”
Visit gamealot.games for details.
