02498: Tobie in the Gaming Wild


Today I joined Tobie for Unbox: The Pinoy Tabletop Sessions event at Onboard Game+Gastro Pub at Circuit Makati. The event aimed to showcase local tabletop game creators ranging from the creatives behind card games like Hugot and Pawikan Patrol to other tabletop RPGs like Tadhana and Tobie's own creations. It was a nice little venue that made the different creators really available to the participants for demo play sessions and even little interviews on their respective design processes. And for the most part it was also an opportunity to meet up with different friends that Tobie and I have made in recent years while running the local gaming convention circuit.

It's nice to see not just how many different local creators are out there but also how their different projects have progressed over time. We got one of the first copies of Pawikan Patrol and now it actually gets sold in pretty sturdy boxes while ours pretty much came with the most eco-friendly packaging possible - very little. Some creators had new games still in the prototyping stage while others were already gearing up for 2nd editions or expansions for their games.

It was a naturally tiring event but we ended the day feeling the good kind of tired before heading back to the Sietch. I talked through the events of the day with Tobie over dinner and it was certainly a lot of good stuff to process. I really enjoy how excited Tobie gets to meet new people and try to get them interested in the tabletop RPG hobby. Even if only one person out of everyone he spoke to today decides to take up the hobby (and not even necessarily his game in particular), then that makes all the effort worth it for him. And I love that sort of passion he demonstrates during such community events.

Now we have a whole Saturday night ahead of us and we're not quite in the mood to go to bed just yet. So I expect we'll play a few games before turning in. Not a bad way to wrap up a Saturday at all.

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