25 Hours of Straight Gaming for Charity

Are you up for playing board games for 25 hours straight?
What about video games?
What if it helps children across the US?

If so, then get ready for playing a ton of board games and card games this weekend.

This Saturday, November 2, is the annual gaming charity drive – Extra Life. All the donations from Extra Life go to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals across the US.

Extra Life began a number of years ago mostly along the video game lines. However, board game and other tabletop game aficionados have jumped on board as well. There may even be an organized event group near you as well.

But you really don’t need to go anywhere special to take part in this charity drive. And for that matter, you don’t even need to play games to show your support. Participating players sign up on the website and then get sponsors to pledge in support of them.

Last year Extra Life raised over $2,300,000!

If you’d like to show your support that way, there are a few teams we know that would be happy to have your support:

Go to the Extra Life website and type Board Game in the search field and you’ll see a number of groups. Or search for “dice” or “podcast”. There are also a number of board game related groups, but they just don’t have “board game” in their group name. Such as the Cardboard Jungle.

Why 25 hours?
Typically the Extra Life event is gaming for 24 hours straight. But this year our daylight savings Fall time change occurs early Sunday morning. So when 2am hits, players will be setting their clocks back an hour. So 25 hours it is!

Here’s what I’d play
While I’m not able to set aside 25 hours for gaming this weekend, I CAN dream.
To attempt playing board games straight for that long, I’d need to pace myself. Playing different types of games at different stages would be key to keeping it fun.

These are the games I’d plan on having close to the table ready to play:
(Extra Life kicks off at 8:00am)

Morning Starters
(Lighter games to get the juices flowing then build up.)

• Spot It
• City Square Off
• BANG!
• Abandon Ship
• Roll Through the Ages
• Forbidden Desert
• Settlers of Catan

Get Rolling
(After the first hour or so it’s time to roll into some more strategic board games.)

• Stone Age
• 7 Wonders
• Dominion
• Castle Panic
• Kingdom Builder
• Risk Legacy
• Smallworld

Mid day
(Great time for meaty games.)

• Power Grid
• Mystery of the Abbey
• Alien Frontiers
• RoboRally (choose a large map)
• Fortune and Glory
• Battlestar Galactica
• Code 777

Evening
(Cycle back to some of the fun games from earlier and mix in some light games again to clense the palatte.)

• Blokus
• Dominion
• Can’t Stop
• Incan Gold
• Ingenious
• Sequence

Late at Night
(Alternate amongst a mix of high energy games and games that keep your attention and your mind clicking. Games with much downtime aren’t good overnight.)

• Ligretto Dice
• Lord of the Rings the Confrontation
• Anomia
• 7 Wonders
• Apples to Apples
• Escape: Cures of the Temple
• King of Tokyo
• Rollick

Wrapping it Up
(Pull out some wacky games that go well when you’re loopy.)

• Dixit Odyssey
• Crappy Birthday
• Backseat Drawing
• Word on the Street
• Snake Oil

Sure even with all those hours, there wouldn’t be time to play all of these games. But they’re the board games and card games I’d have readily available. Then we’d adjust to the in-the-moment player moods.

Oh, to dream.

So many great games – it sounds like a lot of fun. We’ll see which couple games we actually do get played this weekend. Just making this list makes me very interested in pulling a few out.

What games would be on your list for a full day of gaming?