The world is a lot right now. Headlines scream for our attention, deadlines loom, and the constant hum of daily life can often feel overwhelming. Sometimes, we just need a break—a moment to step away from the noise and immerse ourselves in something purely fun.
Enter gaming. Whether it’s an epic adventure, a mind-bending puzzle, or a casual mobile distraction, games offer us an escape hatch, a way to decompress, connect, and even make sense of the world in unexpected ways. In this issue, we’re diving into three reasons locals find time for play—and giving you a few puzzles to solve on your own. Sometimes, pressing pause on reality is exactly what we need.
Noobs welcome
By the time he was ready to start his own game store, indie role-playing game author Todd Leback had grown his blog and website large enough that he knew he wasn’t the only person in Charlottesville interested in RPGs. “Eventually, he decided there was space in the Charlottesville landscape for a specialized game store,” says Truman Brody-Boyd, who with Leback and their friend Miles Rodi start Sabre Games and Cards in 2023. The store is uniquely beginner-friendly, with multiple events geared at getting more people into tabletop games. Combat Patrol night on Wednesday offers newcomers to the miniature-based tabletop role-playing game a chance to play a smaller encounter with loaner armies for folks who want to try Warhammer 40k without investing hundreds of dollars into it in advance.
Relatively new to the local gaming store scene, Sabre Games sits right off the Downtown Mall and is quickly becoming a hotspot for local diehards, tryhards, and noobs alike. “The idea [for the store] came from Todd Leback, who is an indie RPG author who started blogging to promote other indie RPGs, which turned into a webstore that collected indie RPGs and sold his own works,” Brody-Boyd says. “Eventually, he decided there was space in the Charlottesville landscape for a specialized game store.”
The highlight of the week, however, is the store’s Saturday Night Dungeon Crawl Classics “one shots,” a TTRPG that’s based on the ruleset of Dungeons & Dragons Edition 3.5. It’s about as close as one can get to recreating the D&D games of yore. Best of all, it’s not a lengthy time investment, and Sabre has an in-house Dungeon Master, so everyone can focus on playing and not have to design and manage the game itself.
Co-owner Brody-Boyd says Sabre Games’ community is what makes it unique.
“We have an amazing crew of regulars, some of whom have stepped up to lead their own sessions as well, which is really fun to see,” he says. “We have new people stop by to participate as well, so it’s a nice mix of experienced players and new players that can help each other out.”
The appeal of any kind of game, whether it’s sports, video games, poker, or D&D, is the relationships you make with the people you play alongside. Sometimes, those relationships are platonic, Brody-Boyd says, and sometimes not.
“We had a proposal happen a few weeks ago, one of our community DMs had their partner’s friends join them for a one shot and at the end of the adventure, it culminated in him getting down on one knee,” he says. “It was a super special thing to have happen in the store and we love that RPGs can be such a special way to share adventures and connections with one another.”
People who are familiar with D&D but who want to make the jump from player to DM are also in luck: This summer, Sabre Games will be hosting an event specifically designed to help people learn the intricacies and mechanics of running their own games of D&D in the various rulesets. The shop will also host a summer camp for kids ages 10 to 17 who are interested in TTRPGs. Find more information at sabregamesandcards.com.
Asking questions
Who is the former Starr Hill bartender who took over trivia night at its Crozet location and quickly turned it into the hottest bar trivia event in Charlottesville?
The answer: Olivia Brown.
“And no, I didn’t only start a trivia company because it rhymed with my name,” her website reads.
“I’m a UVA grad, and [after graduating in 2015] I moved away, then came back in 2021, and I was the bartender at the Crozet Starr Hill. We were using a third-party company for trivia night, and when that fell through, I took over,” she says.
The northern Virginia transplant says that after assuming trivia duties at the brewery’s other location in downtown Charlottesville, she quickly realized there was a market for a company solely focused on hosting trivia events. Since then, Brown has grown her business from a one-or-two-nights-a-week side gig to a quiz-game empire, hosting events for the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society and the Chris Long Foundation.
“I realized pretty quickly that people would enjoy having a locally owned trivia event company to handle all of this for them,” she says.
Currently, Brown hosts four events a week: Mondays at IX Art Park’s Three Notch’d Brewery at 7pm, Tuesdays at 7pm at Starr Hill Crozet, Wednesdays at Dairy Market’s Starr Hill downtown at 7pm, and Fridays at Superfly Brewing Co. at 6pm.
Brown also has special themed nights focused on pop culture favorites like Lord of the Rings trivia, ’90s Nostalgia, Taylor Swift, or “The Office.” The next themed night is March 17, when she’ll host Harry Potter Trivia Night at Three Notch’d.
On the line, typically, are gift certificates from the hosting restaurant for the first- and second-place winners, but a very popular prize is her third-place offering: selecting a topic for the following week.
“I’ve gotten UVA engineering students who pick extremely difficult topics, I’ve had superfans who pick their favorite bands,” Brown says. “Lately, it’s what people are most excited about winning.”
Family-friendly fantasy
Since the first live-action role play (or LARP) groups were founded in the late 1970s, the fantasy genre has transformed itself from a small, devoted niche in the entertainment industry to mainstream, thanks in part to the success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books and accompanying television series, “Game of Thrones.” With the growth of the genre itself, more and more gamers don’t want to simply watch people going on great adventures; they want to experience adventures of their own. One of those people is Charlottesville’s Silas Byrne, leader of the Charlottesville LARP guild Zorn Vongal.
“We have a good number of participants,” Bryne says. “There’s about 10 or 15 of us that come out, depending on the time of year.”
Zorn Vongal, meaning Mountain Raiders in Khuzdul (Tolkien’s Dwarvish language), was founded by Joe Compton in Greene County in the 2010s. The group uses Dagorhir Boffer rules, meaning all the weapons have to meet a strict criteria, primarily for safety but also for general aesthetics and theme consistency (no pretend laser rifles or Gatling guns allowed). They practice on Sundays at Darden Towe Park, and host special events, like February’s Jilted Lovers Battle throughout the year, often participating in regional events, such as the Brigand’s Ball at Mountain Run Winery in Culpeper.
“I do it to stay in shape,” Byrne says. “We’ve kind of carved out our niche in being a place for nerds to get some exercise and have some fun. Amusingly, the two biggest backgrounds for adults joining are former military and grown-up theater kids who played sports.”
Zorn Vongal endeavors to make most of its LARP events accessible to younger participants and people who want to bring their families along.
“We call them the ‘kobolds,’” Byrne says, referring to the child-sized monsters from Dungeons & Dragons. “It’s like a lighter-weight division, so we don’t have kids going up against grown men.”
Bryne says that, while they don’t have a hard age limit, they encourage newcomers to use common sense in determining whether or not it’s right for their families.
“Obviously we don’t think people should bring their toddlers,” he says. “But I actually brought my daughters. As a dad, it’s incredibly fun to get beaten with a foam sword by your 11-year-old daughter.”
