VFW hosts game nights, hoping to attract more vets

Dice roll across the tables at Table Rock VFW Post 5362 and a veteran slides their game piece over the mat, covered in miniature figurines of hand-painted men, monsters, ships, and castles.

Around them, other veterans and their kids play different tabletop games, laughing and talking under collections of flags and art commemorating other soldiers.

Every Wednesday from 4-8 p.m., the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) post is packed with veterans, auxiliary (family) members, and invited “bona fide” guests, all for the gaming night hosted each week.

“We had another gaming group that kind of moved around, playing in people’s basements and whatnot,” said Michael Pritchard, the Quartermaster, or chief financial officer, of the post. “We would play at Timmy Mac’s (Comics & Games), but he didn’t really have as much area.”

Around 2014, Pritchard, who was a member of the VFW at the time, suggested they take it to the post on Hopewell Road, behind Morganton Heights Shopping Center.

He and Post Commander Mark Shell, who also sat in for the interview, explained that COVID-19 nearly killed the weekly event, but in recent years, interest has come back full force, with four different games dominating the space on Wednesdays: Warhammer 40,000, Dystopian Wars, BLKOUT, and Magic: The Gathering.

Aside from Magic, many of the games are tabletop war games that utilize dice, figurines, and different strategic advantages and disadvantages.

“We’re not here to ‘yuck’ your ‘yum,’” Shell said, as several players behind him echoed another player’s “Oooh.” “Whatever you’re into, as far as playing, as long as it’s legal and you’re not doing anything wrong, it doesn’t matter.”

“People could come up here and play Cribbage or Spades,” he continued. “We don’t care what the game is. It’s about camaraderie and connection within the community and just having a good time.”

Both Shell and Pritchard recounted how they would carry Dungeons & Dragons books with them on deployment to help wind down after missions.

Back at base, they’d play Spades and Hearts, popular 52-card games played with a traditional deck, “very competitively.”

“The gaming club is just the gaming side of it,” Pritchard said. “Any veteran that’s interested in anything, we could do something for that.”

Shell and Pritchard plan to start opening the VFW more nights a week for BINGO and anything else the members want to do. They specified that they currently don’t serve alcohol and they keep it clean around the post.

“A lot of people in the VFW say, ‘Listen, you can be a post that has a canteen, or you can be a canteen that runs the post,’” Shell said. “We don’t have either currently, which, to be honest with you, I kind of like. It keeps a lot of the troubles that some VFW posts might have out.”

The main message Pritchard wanted to get across was that the VFW is a totally different organization than what it used to be.

“The community hears ‘VFW,’ they think we still have a bar (and) we’re in here smoking, drinking, shooting pool, stabbing people … and that’s definitely not the atmosphere or the culture,” Pritchard said. “We’ve got our kids in here and their friends. There’s teachers in here, right now. … It’s not the dregs of society in here raising hell, anymore.”

Shell said game nights serve two purposes: recruiting people on one hand and giving veterans a night each week to get out of the house.

“It gives (vets) a place to come out and touch grass, to be able to talk to a veteran across the table,” Shell said, going on to point out that the VFW, as a national organization, has a video game initiative in place, but it doesn’t get people sitting side-by-side in real time.

He also pointed out that the strategy of the kinds of games they play helps him with his TBI (traumatic brain injury) and keeps the brain healthy.

“(The VFW) is all about helping the veteran in whatever they want to do and (game night) just turned out to be something that scratched a lot of our itches,” Pritchard explained.

Both men referenced a rise in suicide among their colleagues, explaining that the largest goal was bringing the numbers down from the national average of about 22 veterans who take their own lives each day.

“It’s a horrible way to say it, but whatever keeps you from swallowing a shotgun,” Shell said. “I’ve lost more soldiers, since coming back, to suicide, addiction, and drugs, than I ever did in combat. That’s a damn shame.”

Pritchard said many veterans are resistant to coming to the post, saying they’re “not a joiner” or don’t like crowds.

“We are you,” he said. “We understand that. This is a place you can hang out and not like crowds.”