There is a place on NC State’s campus where you can travel to an ancient lair, scale its tallest peak and win a magical duel, all by simply casting a die or playing a card. It’s called the NC State Table Top Gaming Club.
“[Table top gaming is] anything you can play when the power’s out,” said Andrew Johnson, a senior studying materials science and engineering and also the president of the NC State’s Table Top Gaming Club.
Johnson went into great detail about the different games played at Table Top Club ranging from the more popular games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering to newer games picked up at local game shops. The club’s collection of games are brought to each meeting, allowing members to pick and choose what they want to play at any time.
A normal Table Top meeting has around 70 to 80 students; a turnout which Johnson and fellow club member Aaron Hackett, a senior studying materials sciences and engineering, both stated was surprising for one specific reason. The club meets on Friday evenings, a time period that competes with Friday Night Magic, a weekly game tournament for Magic players.
Johnson and Hackett said that despite this competition, they still have a huge turnout of Magic players each week. One of the things the club does differently is they allow members to play for free, while card and game shops charge entrance fees for Friday Night Magic.
“Yes you can win stuff, but a lot of people who come here don’t play competitively like that,” Hackett said. “They play casually just for the fun of playing Magic, which in my opinion is the best way to play Magic.”
Hackett also said that the club allows the use of proxy cards, a fake card used to symbolize a real Magic card in the game that is rare or expensive. A single rare card can cost hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, according to Hackett. This allows players to experiment with cards that they would otherwise not be able to play with at an event like Friday Night Magic.
Practices of using proxy cards and one shots make games played in Table Top Club more approachable. A one shot is a sort of cheat sheet for a character in Dungeons and Dragons that outlines the character’s traits, their backstory and even their personality. This allows players to skip the time consuming character building stage of the game.
The club has also recently been venturing out into new territory. Epic Games, a Cary-based video game development company best known for its development of the Unreal Engine and the Gears of War franchise, contacted the Table Top Club last month. At the most recent club meeting, Epic sent a representative to the meeting and held sign-ups for their game tester program.
“At Epic we have a user research lab where we bring in regular folks to test new products” Paul Heath said, a user experience project manager at Epic Games. “We find that a lot of our demographics for game testing are obviously college students, so we have a database of testers on file, but we are always trying to reach out and expand that.”
Heath said that Epic is making an effort to reach out to local universities in the community to search for new testers.
In addition to Table Top Club, Epic has been in contact with the E-Sports Club and the Video Game Development Club on campus. The company also searches for testers at other universities such as Wake Tech, Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill.
“There’s one announced title that we’re working on called Fortnight,” Heath said. “If you get selected to come in, there’s a chance that you might get to see some top secret stuff.”
According to Heath, people who sign up to be testers for free on Epic’s website are then screened by online surveys where potential testers are asked to self report about their gaming habits. Heath said that the qualifications to be a tester depend entirely on what sort of project they are testing.
“Sometimes we’re looking for people with lots of gaming experience in a certain genre,” Heath said. “Sometimes we’re looking for people who are super casual and have maybe never played this type of game before.”
Heath said the testers that end up playing secret projects are required to sign nondisclosure agreements, agreeing to not talk about what they play. Testers are often paid for their services by Epic in Amazon gift cards.
For those interested in attending a Table Top meeting, the club meets every Friday from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. in the Witherspoon Student Center, Room 126. The next event the club is planning is a Magic the Gathering tournament that will take place in mid-October.
