My tabletop gaming journey began when I was 8 years old and my dad bought me a copy of Pokémon Blue Version for my Game Boy. While Pokémon Blue is not a tabletop game, it’s a video game, it quickly led to an obsession with all things Pokémon, including the collectible trading cards. Growing up in a rural town about halfway between Rochester and Syracuse NY, we did not have a local game shop to frequent. However, my friends and I soon convinced our parents to regularly drive us the 45-minute one-way trip to Millennium Games in Henrietta NY (a suburb of Rochester) to feed our Pokémon habit. It was during one of these trips that an older boy I met at the shop noticed me looking for others to play Pokémon Cards with and asked if I would be interested in a similar but slightly more complicated game called Magic: The Gathering. Magic clicked for me as I had recently become acquainted with the world of fantasy through the first Harry Potter book, followed by The Hobbit (still and all time favorite of mine) and beginning the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In a short time, Magic was my new obsession and I had all my friends hooked as well. A few years later, the Yu-Gi-Oh card game was released in the US and became very popular in my school. I played for a few months before having all of my cards stolen out of my locker and retreating to the familiar territory of Magic for the remainder of high school.
Having spent my high school years labeled a "nerd" I was hesitant to bring up my gaming obsession.
In September of 2008, I started undergrad at the University of Rochester, only a few miles away from Millennium Games (I swear it wasn’t a factor in my school choice!). When you first arrive at college, everyone is trying to impress one another, and having spent my high school years labeled a “nerd” I was hesitant to bring up my gaming obsession, so it was nice to have a familiar place to go nearby when I needed a fix. In time, I fell in with a group I liked, never mentioning my secret hobby until one night I popped by my friends’ dorm only to find a few of them up late on a Friday playing a game of “Drinking Magic”. They asked me if I knew how the game worked, and I confessed that I had nearly a decade of experience. From then on we would get together regularly and play until the early hours of the morning. There were other games too, I was soon introduced to “Drinking Catan” and “Drinking A Game of Thrones: The Board Game” among others. A few semesters later when studying abroad in Berlin, Germany, I immediately recognized a copy of Klaus Teuber’s Catan sitting on the shelf in my host family’s apartment. I asked my host father, a man in his 40s, if he liked to game and he admitted that it was a big hobby of his, and that many Germans gamed for fun. And it was true, many of my classmates enjoyed gaming, and game shops and events were plentiful in the city. I even had time to attend a tournament or two while there.
My life changed that night. I became hooked on Critical Role.
A few years later, I was at the Rochester Institute of Technology working on my Masters, and now even closer to Millennium Games than when I attended the University of Rochester. However, this time was different. Grad school was significantly more expensive and time-consuming than undergrad and I found it impossible to keep up with the latest board games and the meta of Magic. One night while searching YouTube for something to put on in the background as I work, I clicked on a video called D&Diesel. It was the actor Vin Diesel playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) with Dungeon Master (DM) Matt Mercer and some of the cast of Critical Role. My life changed that night. I became hooked on Critical Role. I quickly sped through the 20 or so episodes that had already aired and got my roommates hooked too. We began searching for our own DM to run a game but struggled greatly. Eventually, one of us came across a subreddit called R/LFG (short for “Looking for Group”) and in time found a post from a DM who had recently relocated to the area and was looking for a group to DM for. We quickly responded, inviting him to our house for a game that weekend. The morning of the game came, and we nervously joked with one another that we may have “invited a serial killer over” but our nerves were eased when the Reddit DM showed up and was a totally normal dude working at the local university with a wife and kids. That day was the start of a campaign that lasted six and a half years, only ending when our characters (now level 17) had confronted all of the demon lords and finally chose to hang it up as adventurers as there was nothing left to do. This is not the usual conclusion of a DnD campaign. Many simply fizzle out because people become busy with life, move away, or find their personalities clash. We somehow overcame these obstacles, including a global pandemic, by shifting online when needed and working hard to manage our schedules, finding time to play. But all wasn’t perfect.
When I wasn't at work, I was going stir-crazy in my apartment due to a lack of socialization.
As the six-and-a-half-year campaign drew to a close, I was now working a full-time job, had managed to grow a small board game collection, and had found a few local groups to play a variety of games with regularly. When COVID hit, these game sessions were initially canceled or pushed to online alternatives like Board Game Arena and Tabletop Simulator. Eventually, we were able to form bubbles for gaming in-person again, however, life threw me another hook when in 2021 work required me to relocate to another city where I didn’t know anyone. When I wasn’t at work, I was going stir-crazy in my apartment due to a lack of socialization. I leaned more heavily into online tabletop gaming using simulators and virtual tabletops. Well, they had their pros, like being able to game in my pajamas from my couch at 11 pm, but they lacked the level of socialization that I so loved about gaming to begin with. One night, after a gaming session, another gamer and I found ourselves reminiscing about the good old days of rolling dice in person, seeing others in person, and the genuine connection that came with it. That other gamer was Will Moquin. Will had a background in sales & marketing and ran a Facebook group for tabletop gamers, primarily DnD fans. He deeply empathized with my gaming experiences and the struggle of relocating to a new city. He had the vision for an app that could eliminate this problem. Having spent three years at that point as one of the leads of a moderately successful startup, I thought his vision had a lot of potential and could be big with the right support. However, Will confessed that he had no experience raising investment and scaling a startup. I said, “That’s alright, I do!” It was at that moment that The Adventure Nexus was born.
