By Aidan Steng
While the tabletop culture on Long Island may still have an underground feel to it, Long Island Tabletop Gaming is attempting to change that.
Housed by the Cradle of Aviation Museum, the group hosted its annual Long Island Tabletop Gaming Expo on April 5 and 6. The event was the site of various tabletop games, tournaments, cosplayers, merchandise, a live dungeon, an escape room and everything tabletop.
Spread throughout the museum were various tables, booths, exhibits and activities for all to enjoy. Attendees were also privy to aviation-centric spectacles of the venue itself.
“We have a lot of variety,” Long Island Tabletop Gaming manager, George Smith said. “There’s a little bit of something for everyone … We also have a museum section that talks about the early types of board games that there are and just early types of gaming in general.”
Long Island Tabletop Gaming is responsible for the event and was initially created in 2018 as a subset of Long Island Retro Gaming due to a high demand for more tabletop exhibits at their events. However, the organization’s growth in popularity over time has now put them on par with their retro-gaming-focused sister group.
“At first, we had a small portion of our retro expo doing a tabletop area, and then it got so popular that it was like ‘this needs its own weekend,’” said Long Island Tabletop Gaming associate, Terry Taylor. “In the last two or three years this blew up, and we could not believe the amount of attendees and people who were involved and wanted to be involved.”
Long Island Retro Gaming’s original bump in popularity and prominence in the community was triggered when they began to run events at the Cradle of Aviation Museum almost a decade ago. The museum sits between 150 and 175 thousand square feet and includes 75 air and spacecraft, making it a desirable venue for such a large-scale event.
Pivotal to the move was Seamus Keane, the Cradle of Aviation Museum’s director of special events.
“I had developed a traveling exhibit … and the guys from Long Island Retro Gaming Expo came to me,” Keane said. “We just partnered up, and it was a natural fit.”
“I’m really happy they’re doing this,” said Long Island native, Anthony Olivieri. “Sometimes I’ll get sad thinking about how few events there are for people who just feel like having a good time with like-minded fans of [tabletop games], so we need more of these around.”
Long Island Tabletop Gaming’s role-playing game coordinator, Benjamin Cohen, shared this sentiment, saying “It’s a good thing for us to be raising awareness because there is definitely a table top scene on Long Island,”
For Long Island Tabletop Gaming and Retro Gaming, their mission is clear. They aim to grow the gaming scene on Long Island as whole and cultivate an environment where the culture can thrive.
Taylor described the motivation for the organization by saying, “There’s not a day that I am here that I don’t see people loving it … to find this community, really feel part of something and see friendships flourish. Once this is over, the tabletop gaming masters still run games and other things that are smaller and get people that only found out about them here to be part of that and build the community bigger by large in the Long Island area. People who may not have this love who don’t realize that other people have this love too get to come here and be part of it.”
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Aidan Steng is a reporter with The SBU Media Group, part of Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism’s Working Newsroom program for students and local media.
Watch a video wrap-up of the event below:
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