Daily Devotion

The Edge House is about a lot of things—radical hospitality, vegetable gardening, quality coffee, vulnerability and honesty in conversation—but you may not be aware that one of our passions is board gaming. We’ve a whole wall in the house devoted to the games we’ve amassed over the years that Good Shepherd’s own Roy Johnson built for us and he’s now in process of building us a custom gaming table, lovingly hand-crafted. It’s one of the things we’re most excited to see when we can safely gather again!

I imagine many of you are playing whatever games you have at home but did you know there are websites where you can play with people around the world for free? I played Tzolk’in (my current obsession) with someone from Taiwan yesterday! boardgamearena.com has the friendliest interface and tabletopia.com has a whole other collection of games. I mention this because I always want to spread the love of board gaming, but also because of how this niche world has responded to quarantine.

Months ago, Board Game Arena had, at most 4,000 people logged in at any one time. When the stay-at-home orders started, it jumped to 10,000. Their servers were struggling to keep up with the traffic and the website was extremely slow. Now, it’s common to see as many as 35,000 online and playing. There at the beginning, they realized they had options: they could spend the time and money on connecting to new servers and re-routing traffic, or they could put a hard limit on the number of people who could use the service. They went for the first option and I find this such a gift. While the site as a whole is free to use, they do offer “premium” memberships (yes, I have one, of course!) but the majority of players don’t pay a thing. While of course they do make money from licensing and memberships and expanding capacity would help with that, Board Game Arena chose to spend time and money to offer their service to even more people who wouldn’t be paying because we are all stuck at home.

And I know you’ve seen that generosity from all kinds of organizations and businesses in your own lives—folks doing what they can to give us something to fill our time, to make this restriction easier. What a gift it is to play a board game with someone from Germany, someone from Japan, and someone from Trinidad. What gifts have you received in this time? What gifts have you offered to others, whether you know them or not?

Peace,Alice+

P.S. Need some physical board game recommendations? Check out this video I made:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZyfAjNPhtg&t=7s

The Edge House at the University of Cincinnati is a ministry of and to the church universaland sponsored by Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Cincinnati, Ohio
 

The Rev. Alice Connor, proprietor of Lutheran Campus Ministries at the Edge House3007 Clifton Avenue Cincinnati, OH 45220513-307-2930 www.edge-uc.org