Social Skills is a monthly column featuring community groups where you can meet new people through exercise or other enjoyable activities.
By now we’ve covered an exhaustive list of sports clubs in the PRD, from rugby to rowing to frisbee to Gaelic football. But lest our non-athletic readers be left in the dust, this month we’re introducing a sedentary sport: tabletop gaming.
The ‘Nanshan board game guild’ WeChat group is free to join, and offers access to multiple groups around the city as well as their resources.
Scott Triplett, organizer of a weekly meetup in Xili, estimates that the WeChat group owns “100 or more games between all of us.” His personal stockpile alone contains 40 titles, like the sardonic, Kickstarter-funded phenomenon Exploding Kittens as well as multiple expansions of the more strategic Settlers of Catan.
Games range from the casual – sometimes as short as 10 minutes – all the way to the expert.
A Shekou group run by Danish native Jesper Nielsen, for instance, is targeted at gamers who enjoy hunkering down over head-scratchers for hours on end. Weekly sessions can last three to six hours as players work their way through “heavy strategy” games with weighty names like Civilization.
No matter the difficulty level, Nielsen notes, board gaming is a good way to “spend time offline” with friends. If you’re interested in swapping your gadgets for game pieces, at least for a couple hours, you’ll be in good company.
To join the group, add Nielsen on WeChat at ID ‘jesperglar’ and ask about the board-game guild.
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