The main thing folk love about tabletop games (beyond playing) is how they break them free from screens. We spend our lives staring at them. TVs. PCs. Macs. Phones. Pads. Pods. They’re our boon and bane. What would we do without them?
Well, play tabletop games for a start, and in case you hadn’t noticed, analogue gaming is booming.
It isn’t just sad old nostalgic gits like me that are buying and playing board, card, dice and role-playing games, either. Apparently, facing people across a table is something all humans seem to crave, especially in this sea of LCD and LED. Who woulda thunk it, eh?
So what better place to play such games than a remote island bereft of TVs and mobile reception, and with a zero tolerance approach to pretty much anything electronic in the pub.
There is such an island gaming paradise. Welcome to Lundy.
On paper, Lundy’s an unremarkable lump of granite, three miles long by half a mile wide, squatting 12 miles off the west coast of Devon, England. Its most well known for being a UK sea area and its seasonal puffins.
Dig a little deeper and you’ll find a rich historical pedigree stretching back to the stone age. Pagan burial mounds sit alongside medieval tombstones. An island that’s been called home by pirates, renegades and Barbary corsairs. Its unforgiving granite is a graveyard for countless wrecked ships (including HMS Montagu, a Royal Navy Battleship from 1906) and even a crashed WW2 German Heinkel bomber.
A 12th century castle still juts over ruined ramparts. A 19th century lighthouse stands sentinel on the island’s highest point. A Victorian mansion nestles in its own private valley.
And here’s where Lundy plays the ace up its sleeve: those three architectural heritage hotpots (and plenty more besides) are available for rent.
In all, Lundy can accommodate almost 100 guests in everything from mansions catering for a dozen guests to hermit-like lodgings for one.
I was invited to Lundy for the first time in 2006 ago by my brother. He’d had a regular DnD group at Bristol uni — not a million miles away. When his degree course visited Lundy for a field trip, he fell in love with the place and seeds were sown to return with his gaming group.
Since then a band of geeks have been making a pilgrimage to the island each winter, annually increasing in number and grey hairs in equal measure.
It’s hardly surprising. On an island with so few trappings of technology beyond light bulbs (which turn off at midnight when the generator is shut down), there’s few distractions from gaming.
Combine that with good hearty grub and reasonably priced beer in the tavern and it’s easy to see why it’s the perfect geek retreat.
So, having hogged the place to ourselves for almost a decade and a half, it’s time to play host to some Lundy virgins, and let them experience the joy of having literally nothing to do but drink, eat, play games and wallow in the Lundy’s heritage and rugged island beauty
They’ll fly from the mainland by helicopter to be dropped off a stone’s throw from the tavern. They’ll turn off their mobiles, grab a drink, sit by a roaring fire, soak in the good cheer and join in a game or three.
Over the following days, apart from a fairly intense diet of tavern fare and marathon gaming, they’ll get guided tours around the island’s Best Bits by a few of us reprobates who almost know it like the locals.
Talking of the locals, this is a place where you can walk into the tavern and find a bunch of them playing Pandemic or an epic, day-long game of Talisman. Not bad when you consider there’s only about twenty permanent residents!
We’re arriving the weekend around the death-day anniversary of renowned odd-ball H. P. Lovecraft, creator of what’s now dubbed the Cthulhu Mythos, which has spawned more games than even Pirates or Zombies. Which is saying something.
Therefore we’re going all-out on a Cthulhu theme in our gaming. Cthulhu Wars, Elder Sign, Eldritch Horror, Call of Cthulhu… it’s not like we’re short of awesome titles to chose from, that will cover a wide variety of gameplay and mechanics.
And let’s face it, with so much late 19th/early 20th century history on the island, not to mention the very rocks steeped in aeons past, it’s hard to think of a location more suited to Lovecraftian gaming.
So for less than the price of a hotel at your average games convention, why not join us for a gaming experience like no other?
THIS IS FOR YOU IF:
- You love tabletop games.
- You think helicopters are cool.
- You want mobile phones banned in the pub.
- You like candlelit RPGs after midnight.
- You like pubs in strange places.
- You like the outdoors and/or sitting in by the fire with a cuppa.
- You’re not one of these. Well, not too many of them.
Read about 2019’s event HERE, where we prevailed even though the weather did everything it could to stop us!
Tickets are selling fast for 2020’s event. If you’re too late then to avoid missing out next time, sign up to the mailing list here to register your interest, or just subscribe to Tabletop Tribe in the sidebar!
