The Ugandan Village Boardgame Convention

The boys are heading up to Koro tomorrow very early to make a 5-6 hour bus ride to the village area in Northern Uganda.  They know the ropes, but have never handled an event quite like this.  They are meeting Sharon, Daniel, Sam and Dorothy, other members of our project on-site, who are also going to be helping with the Convention.

Patrick has been working on a special simplified RPG ruleset for his event - The Caverns of Koro - and he plans this as a competition dungeon, where people have to get as far as they can in his ten-room dungeon and gain the most treasure.  He'll be playtesting it ahead of the Convention itself.  The others have been working more on the boardgames side, with a focus on developing a special Codenames event, using large cards.  Their work on this has been staggering and many of the local youth artists have drawn a Codenames Pictures Card.

We chose Codenames Pictures because we are planning to test it in a local language version, which will mean anyone can play, whatever their standard of English.  Joseph and Brian have coordinated this bit.

Joseph has also taken responsibility for managing the Omweso tournament.  Omweso is similar to Mancala and is played frequently by people young and old in Uganda.  We've acquired through your support four Omweso sets, which are going to be given out as prizes to the winners of this tournament.  Joseph is also going to handle the RoboRally tournament on Saturday, when Arnold has taught a few people how to play.

Arnold is the youngest of the four but he knows his boardgames better than almost all the others and he likes to play a whole variety.  Today he was trying out "Ice Flow", a game about treading on the ice and avoiding the polar bears.  He'll be trying to encourage young people to try new games and will be giving some strategy masterclasses on some of the games.  Arnold does not speak the local language more than a few words, so it will be a challenge for him.

Lastly Beckham will be handling the computer boardgames.  We managed to acquire Patchwork, Splendor, Le Havre and a few others to add to Small World, Ticket to Ride and the more traditional chess and draughts.  Splendor has been a really excellent hit the last couple of days and we also really like Patchwork.  We have to keep our fingers crossed that our container will arrive on time, as it contains the generator that will charge these laptops!

All in all, it's an exciting time.  The kids will also get a chance to explore the area, meet new friends, pick mangoes off the tree as well as work on the Convention itself.  More info to come soon...