Tabletop and roleplaying games have emerged from the musty cabinet of kids’ amusements as a creative method of bonding for UMBC alumni and students. Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, Root, Catan, Pandemic—there’s a game for every interest. And games, players said, are a low-stress, high-pay-off way of meeting people and staying connected in a difficult, digital world.
By Susan Thornton Hobby
Ryan Jose remembers starting at UMBC in the fall of 2013 as a commuting first-year student, flailing around like every other newbie, trying to make friends.
“I hardly knew anyone and was desperately looking for the people I could possibly vibe with,” Jose remembered. “I was able to make some connections at orientation, including some that are still good friends today. But it almost felt like survival. Like if I didn’t find my group fast,
I’d be alone for my whole time at UMBC.
“And yet, after all that fuss, I remember just walking into the game room, asking to join a group that was setting up a game of Monopoly, and naturally making friends that turned out to be friends for life! With Monopoly. No one even likes Monopoly.”
These four Monopoly friends—Jose, Jonelle McKenzie, psychology, Jerry Quijote, mathematics, and Takreem Zulfiqar, American studies—scattered across the country after their 2017 graduation. But they still meet online to play games every month. And it all started in the commuter lounge in 2013, where the crew sometimes commandeered all the tables and chairs and pulled 30 people into a game (anything but Monopoly). But the core four of them were always studying together, then taking a break to play.
“‘We really made the most of that space,’ is the kind way to put it,” Jose said. “But that’s what I love, that it facilitated a community. We would still likely be good friends without games, and we quickly were just hanging out to hang out. But games made it easier to open conversations, to just have a break from all the stress that classes brought, and to just be in the same space and learn about each other.”
After graduation, the Monopoly crew moved to different parts of the country—Zulfiqar is married and working for a job training nonprofit in Boston; McKenzie is in behavioral health and lives in Louisiana; Quijote is in procurement in Baltimore; and Jose teaches at Anne Arundel Community College. Once they weren’t all hanging out in the commuter lounge any more, they had a hard time getting together, but kept in touch. Then the pandemic hit.
“We missed our friends,” Zulfiqar said. “So we set up a few game nights online, and that resparked our interest. Now we play once a month minimum, and also play one on one or two or three of us. Jerry was playing Magic: The Gathering with my husband this morning.”
Quijote even devised a Dungeons & Dragons campaign based around an evil professor trying to take over UMBC and the band of
time-traveling superheroes who try to stop her. “The whole campaign was reminiscing about what we did as undergraduates,” Quijote said.
“The UMBC library was the headquarters for the professor.”
Games, they all said, help you learn about people in a way that other social interactions don’t. “What I love about board games is that they open up a space to connect and that they show off aspects of people that aren’t normally visible,” Jose said.
“You learn when you play together,” McKenzie said. “You watch how they react, how they interact with people, you see bonds
between people.” The bond between the four of them is so strong they’re all going on a cruise together this year to celebrate their 30th birthdays.
“We’re all so different,” McKenzie said. “I brag on this friend group because we are so diverse, different religious backgrounds, different ethnicities. But we can always find a point of connection.”
Tonight, outside this room: federal job slashing, wildfires, midterms.
Tonight, inside this room: Five people teaming up to fight chupacabras and banshees; alumni, undergraduates, and grad students collecting and trading peanut-sized blocks representing cardamom and turmeric; three friends all sucking on Dum-Dum lollipops as they scheme as woodland animals.
With the state of the real world, no wonder folks are retreating to games as a way to build friends and community.
“It’s been a stressful day,” club president Josh Bowman told the UMBC Tabletop Gaming Club from the podium at 7 p.m. on the Thursday before spring break. “I’m glad you are all here to spend time with one another. It’s important in times like this.”
After a few announcements, Bowman, a junior in graphic design, called, “Game on!” The players—in Pikachu hoodies, graphic tees, jeweled barrettes, flannel shirts—turned toward each other and their shared quests contained on foldable cardboard squares.
The club, which meets Tuesdays and Thursdays in a huge Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building classroom, is a haven for members. Some eat their dinner salads or sushi while they roll dice, others raucously greet
late-comers by name, and potential players lurk behind tables, learning the rules of games, many of which have instruction books as thick as a thumb. This Thursday, more than 50 people gathered to play games such as Horrified, Century Spice Road, Kites, and Root. The camaraderie is evident in gentle (or less-than-gentle) ribbing over a small victory, a sudden groan when a ranger usurps the rabbit’s forest haven, and a genuine cheer when
a monster is defeated.
“Gaming opens up a free space for being yourself,” said Vance Wild, a sophomore studying psychology, just before his turn at the Century Spice Road table. “I come almost every week.”
“Join in,” players encourage, as more people arrive from late classes or dinner, and chairs are added to tables and the room grows louder and more crowded.
“Us officers do try very hard to ensure that we are able to offer everyone in our club a safe space to relax and ‘nerd out’ with other people who are also looking for a bit of an escape,” said the club’s ambassador, Andrew Kozikowski, a senior studying computer science and philosophy. “Games are great because they offer a way to put your mind to a task without needing to be stressful.”
“Do you want to play a relaxed game just to blow off some homework? Great, play a quick card game. Do you want to focus and think and really strategize to win against some other players? Play a deck builder, or a strategy game like Catan. Do you just want to escape reality for an afternoon and beat up some monsters to save a town? Play D&D or any of the other tabletop role-playing games we have.”
For about an hour, a group of six has been setting up their game on two tables at the back of the room. They’re arranging batteries of miniature red, blue, purple, black, yellow and green spaceships, carriers, cruisers, and space docks, arraying cards and fitting together the playing board covered with glowing planets and stars. A red-head with thick glasses is knitting while she listens to the elaborate rules of Twilight Imperium, a strategic game of galactic domination, from a guy in a burgundy hoodie.
“It’s a quick two-hour explanation,” hoodie guy began, and they all laugh. It’s 9:30 p.m. and they’re just getting started.
“I’m in,” a girl with blue hair yells. “I just have to do laundry tomorrow, I have zero clean clothes.”
“I have to work at 2 a.m., graveyard shift,” says the knitter. “We might be done by then.”
All the players look supremely happy about that timetable.
Tabletop gaming offers both connection and a creativity boost for Anya Grace Hart ’22, visual arts. Hart serves as dungeon master for one of UMBC’s a capella groups, the Mama’s Boys. She started playing Dungeons & Dragons
in 2021, and now steers the game for eight or so Mama’s Boys players.
“We started a little adventure, and I find great joy in running these games,” she said. “It feeds my creativity. You have a vast array of characters, and you put a scenario in front of these characters and you are collaboratively building something creative. And it helps build friendships. I think seeing these fantastical characters offers a glimpse into the players’ minds.”
She has expanded to play D&D games with other groups, too. “Two of my best friends in the world” play D&D online on Discord servers, Hart said. She’s never met them in person.
Gaming transcends campaigns and turns around the board, allowing practice for social skills, problem-solving, and creativity. Players learn vital lessons about working together, allowing others to be the main characters of the story, and creating a world in which despite challenges, the quest continues.
Games may even help the players’ mental health. A 2024 National Institutes of Health study on “the Efficacy of the Tabletop Roleplaying Game Dungeons & Dragons for Improving Mental Health and Self-Concepts” determined, “Participants demonstrated significant decreases in depression, stress, and anxiety and significant increases in self-esteem and self-efficacy over the study period.” The researchers concluded that D&D may have the potential as a “wellbeing intervention or prevention program.”
As well, scientists have studied the capacity of role-playing games to increase empathy. A 2015 study in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis concluded, “fantasy role-players report experiencing higher levels of empathic involvement with others.”
“Role-playing makes you think about other players,” said Hart, who developed her first character, an orange gecko named Artie, for an animation project. “You learn more about others and it can change who you are as a person. There’s an intrinsic empathy in playing games, there’s lots of self-discovery.”
Darcie Adams ’23, political science and gender, women, and sexuality studies, M.P.P. ’25, absolutely agrees. While an undergraduate, he started playing a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) online with a group of four others at UMBC’s LGBTQ club four years ago, at the pandemic’s peak. They’re still playing the same game, about three hours a week, still online.
“This has honestly been the only thing that’s been consistent in the last four years,” said Adams, who is currently getting a master’s degree in community leadership at UMBC. His group of gamer friends, he said, “get my experiences.”
They play a “homebrew game that borrows from Monsters of the Week,” Adams said. “The core theme is trans Gothic, finding your identity through monstrosity.”
This game, Adams said, has allowed him to address themes that are difficult to take to a therapist. “With tabletop gaming, you can be vulnerable, you’re acting as ‘not you,’ but your emotions are behind your actions. It’s easier to work through things in games with the lens of fantasy and lore behind it.”
Gaming, Adams said, puts decisions in front of you in a safe space, not the “cold unfeeling world. In real life, no one gives you a situation and asks you, ‘how do you react?’ You’re just expected to react. The framing in a game gives you time and opportunity to think and reconsider. And it’s a cooperative game, it forces you to consider other people at the table.”
That Monopoly game that started in 2013 with the four commuters? They never finished it. In fact, they feel like if they finished the game that started their friendship, they’d jinx their bond. So none of them ever play Monopoly.
But they play everything else, and pull in other friends and partners. Quijote and his partner have two whole Ikea shelves full of board games. McKenzie’s friends in Louisiana know that she’ll bring the games to parties, and Zulfiqar made friends in her new home city of Boston by joining board game groups.
“As a quieter type of person, it’s also nice to be able to express myself through gameplay and through reacting to others,” Jose said.
“Little did we know 12 years later, we’d be attending each other’s weddings, planning group vacations, and still having game nights even from different cities across the country every month,” Zulfiqar said. “We never did finish that game of Monopoly, but we did start a whole new game of life, together.”
Tags: CAHSS, Feature, gwsst, MPP, Political Science, Spring 2025, visual arts