Registration for Go Play NW 2021 Online is now open on our Eventbrite page! Tickets are $12 per day for Saturday or Sunday, and the Friday night “lobby con” is included with either day. We’ll have two sessions of games each day on Saturday and Sunday, using the “donut” pitch method that many of you will know well from previous Go Play NW events. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the donut, we’ll post more about that soon.

In some respects, an online event takes more staffing and more time to manage than an in-person event does. In order to provide the best experience we can, we do need to limit the number of attendees to 70 people each day, Saturday and Sunday. Also more as per usual, we will need to close registration a week in advance so we can make final preparations, so ticket sales end early in the morning of Saturday, September 25. Get your tickets soon!

Community-sponsored tickets are available!

As we discussed in our previous post on funding for Go Play NW, we have been working to make Go Play NW more welcome and accessible to a wider variety of people, which has included offering sponsored attendance to people in need. We’re continuing that practice this year by offering a ticket option called “Sponsor an attendee!”—each sponsorship allows us to bring in gamers who might otherwise not be able to attend.

If you would like to attend Go Play NW 2021 Online but for whatever reason the cost doesn’t work for you, please reach out to us by email at business@goplaynw.org to request one of these sponsored tickets. We will not be doing any means testing or inquiring into your situation; these are available on the honor system, on a first-come first-served basis.

We’re excited to see everyone on Friday, October 1 for Go Play NW 2021 Online!

When we hold in-person events, it’s not hard to see where the price of the event goes. We have to rent space for the convention itself, we may offer overnight rooms at the convention, at Seattle University we’re contractually obliged to include some meals for the attendees, we have some physical supplies such as signs and badges, we produce shirts for the event, and we have admissions and sales taxes to pay afterwards. (In addition, we have general operating costs such as maintaining our registration as a corporation and licensing as a business.) With our event this year being held online, the obvious expenses of an in-person event don’t apply, which may raise the question why we’re charging for the event at all. We thought a brief explanation would be in order.

Since our founding, Go Play NW has been supported solely by our community; we do not have corporate sponsors or other funding sources. This year’s expenses include approximately $500 in general operating costs and approximately $200 toward the technical infrastructure (Discord boosts and bots) needed to hold the online event. Our base daily ticket price for this year’s online event reflects our minimum estimate for attendance, the funds needed to cover our expenses, and our desire to be as welcome, and therefore affordable, as possible. Excess funds from this year’s event will go into our foundation funds.

Our foundation funds enable us to reserve a venue for in-person events and cover other functional expenses in advance of opening registration for each year’s event. These funds help us not only be prepared to cover unexpected expenses but also take advantage of opportunities to grow and improve. In recent years we’ve been working toward making Go Play NW more welcome and accessible to a wider variety of people. Our efforts have included offering sponsored attendance to people in need and hiring consultants on accessibility and diversity issues, and we will be continuing to explore more ways to improve in those respects.

Go Play NW is an entirely volunteer-run organization, and neither board members nor staff receive financial compensation for their time and efforts. We appreciate your support!

Just a quick note, it turns out we need some more time to get things in place before we open up registration for Go Play NW 2021 Online, so we’re bumping that to next Tuesday, September 7. Sorry for the delay! We’re eager to get this kicked off but we want to be sure we do things well, and we know you’ll appreciate that. See you soon!

Okay, we’re ready to make this official: we will be holding an online Go Play NW event this year the weekend of Friday October 1 through Sunday October 3. We’ll be using a dedicated Discord server as our base of operations, and we’ll be able to have video, audio-only, and text-only channels for hosting the games.

This year’s event will focus on organizing games through “the donut”, in which we get everyone together and ask for volunteers to step forward and pitch a game they’d like to run or facilitate, and then the rest of the players choose a game to join. Our volunteer staff members Star and ET have worked hard to develop tools and procedures to help make this happen smoothly.

The event will kick off with a social gathering on Friday evening that will give you time to catch up with old friends and meet new ones, and give us time to get everyone checked in for the weekend. Then on Saturday and Sunday we’ll have the game sessions. We’ll announce full details on the schedule and procedures soon!

This will be a paid ticketed event; we’ll be opening registration on Friday September 3. Revenues from this event go towards our regular expenses to keep functioning as an organization; the particular expenses to set up and run this event; and our reserves so that we can host in-person events again as soon as it’s safe to do so—hopefully next year!

In the meantime, in order to help ensure this all works as planned, we’re holding a beta test of our event Discord, and we need around 15 to 20 volunteers to help make that happen! Please join our regular Go Play NW discussion Discord at https://discord.gg/vwrrF2q and check out the #make-it-happen channel to learn more and volunteer!

We’re very excited to bring the Go Play NW experience to you online this year, and we hope you’ll join us!

Well, it sure has been a year. Here at Go Play NW headquarters, we’ve been hunkered down, doing our best to follow good health and safety guidelines with proper diligence, and we’ve had the good fortune to avoid catching COVID-19. We hope all of you have stayed safe and healthy, too.
Back in February, we were happy to see the hope of effective vaccines start to be fulfilled. But we looked at how much still had to be done and saw that there was still no guarantee that we could safely hold an in-person event in July, so we decided once again that we would not schedule one for this year. Even now at the start of May, with far more progress than expected happening on vaccinations and all of our staff likely to be fully vaccinated by the beginning of June, here in Seattle and King County we’re seeing the likelihood of greater restrictions being rolled back into place as infection rates rose in recent weeks. So caution is justified, and while we miss you all terribly, we’ll stay hopeful that we will reach a sufficiently safe level to hold an in-person event next year.
Meanwhile, we also decided to pick up the work we’d done last year on organizing an online event. Although we know some amount of online fatigue has set in for many people, we still think it’d be good to have some opportunity to reconnect this year rather than keep everything on hold yet another year. We’re not quite ready to announce specifics, but we can tell you that we’re looking at doing a few separate one-day events—a “lobby con” day just to hang out and say hello to friends, a donut day for impromptu pick-up gaming, and a prescheduled day for planning some games in advance. We’re aiming for August and hope to have specific dates to announce soon. We hope you’ll join us!
As always, follow us on Twitter @GoPlayNW and come join us on our Discord server. See you soon!

As the year churns along, we’ve been quietly working behind the scenes to figure out what we can do, what makes sense to do, in these strange times. In the wake of deciding to cancel an in-person event for the year, we put a lot of discussion and some planning toward hosting events online this year. As we went through that process, we realized we needed to do some substantial work to better support the safety and accessibility needs for online games, as well as increase the diversity of our attendees—and that work applies to in-person events as well. We were also mindful that both the pandemic and participation in the protest movement against police brutality may make it difficult for our community to participate. Consequently, we decided to poll our members via Twitter and Discord to see whether people felt that the best use of our time and effort was to continue planning some kind of online events, or to redirect that effort into improving the organization overall and preparing for (hopefully) holding an in-person event next year.
The results of that poll were largely in favor of focusing our efforts toward next year, and so that is what we are now doing. While we’re sad not to host any kind of event this year—our first break after 13 years, since starting in 2007—we believe it’s important to provide the best experience we can, and worthwhile to take advantage of these disruptive times and step back to see what we can improve for future events. We appreciate your feedback and support as we go through this process.
We apologize for being largely silent here on the website; do follow us on Twitter @GoPlayNW, where we’re more likely to post. We also have a Discord server, which we invite you to join.
We love you all, and we hope to be able to see you in person at Go Play NW in 2021! Thanks for being part of Go Play NW with us.

Great news, everybody! Registration for Go Play NW 2019 is now open at our Eventbee page.
The event begins on Friday afternoon, with check-in and rooms available starting at 1 PM, and an afternoon game slot at 2 PM. We’re also working on plans for a Friday evening social gathering to help welcome newcomers and give returning members a chance to catch up. As previously mentioned, we have decided to retire the Friday/Saturday Feast this year to better manage expenses and explore new options to improve the event.
Dorm rooms are available for overnight stays on the Seattle U campus for a very reasonable price, with options for an additional evening’s stay if you’re traveling out on Monday. An important note: once again this year, Seattle U has informed us they have limitations on available rooms, but it’s a little more complicated—we are expecting:

• no more than 48 double-occupancy rooms (possibly slightly fewer) available in Campion Hall for stays checking out by Monday.
• up to 30 double-occupancy rooms in the nearby Bellarmine Hall for stays checking out on Sunday.

Unfortunately we don’t yet have the exact number of rooms available in Campion Hall, so early registration is advised if you want to stay through Sunday night to check out Monday. Of course we can and will use double-occupancy rooms for single occupancy reservations, but consider finding a roommate if you want to be sure of a bed on site.
All attendance options include a meal card for lunch in the campus cafeteria; overnight reservations include breakfast as well as lunch.
You can also order the official Go Play NW 2019 shirt, designed as always by John Harper, on the registration page. All shirts must be picked up at the event; we do not ship shirts.
So go register now! We’ll see you in July!

Well, look what the Sasquatch brought back from orbit—it’s the 2018 shirt design straight from John Harper! Featuring the ever-popular Monkey King Sasquatch, who apparently is continuing a career in outer space.

How do you get this great shirt? As always, shirts are only available for pickup at the event, so go register for Go Play NW 2018 and add a shirt while you’re doing that. Shirts are available from XS to XXL in men’s or women’s cut. To make sure we have them ready in time, shirts must be ordered by the end of Thursday, June 14.

Great news, everybody! Registration for Go Play NW 2018 is now open at our Eventbee page.
Like last year, we are opening the event on Friday afternoon, with check-in and rooms available starting at 1 PM, and an afternoon game slot at 2 PM. And we are again holding the Go Play NW Feast, an informal catered meal gathering, on Saturday night.
Dorm rooms are available for overnight stays on the Seattle U campus for a very reasonable price, with options for an additional evening’s stay if you’re traveling out on Monday. An important note: Seattle U has informed us they have limited rooms available: 42 double-occupancy rooms and just 9 single-occupancy rooms. Of course we can and will use double-occupancy rooms for single occupancy reservations, but this would be a good year to consider finding a roommate if you want to be sure of a bed on site.
All ticket options include a meal card for lunch in the campus cafeteria; overnight stays include breakfast as well as lunch.
You can also order the official Go Play NW 2018 shirt, designed as always by John Harper, on the registration page. All shirts must be picked up at the event; we do not ship shirts.
So go register now! We’ll see you in July!

Hey, we’ll have an event guide PDF available later this evening, but here are some of the quick important details now:

• Check in for Go Play NW will be at Campion Hall on the Seattle University campus. The hall’s address for mapping purpose is 914 E Jefferson Street, but use the (north) entrance through the courtyard off E James Way.
• Parking is available in the Murphy Garage, accessed by a driveway off E James Way. Parking costs $5 per day; get a pass at the Campion Hall lobby desk.
• Your badges, WiFi passwords, and T-shirts (if you ordered one) will be at the Campion Hall lobby desk waiting for you.

See you tomorrow at Go Play NW 2017!