Help the
Yellow Meeple Raise Money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals with Extra
Life
Photo courtesy of Dr. Wictz's Board Games
Our Yellow Meeple is in Indiana right now with his other
meeple fire ranger friends to help Jim
& Adrienne
Jones of Great Big Table raise
money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals during their October 25-27,
2013, Extra Life game-a-thon.
The meeples need your help too!
Last year, Jim & Adrienne reached out to us with the
story of their young daughter, asking if we could support their 2012
game-a-thon. It was an easy decision for us. When they asked, they had no idea
that our family had its own children’s hospital experience a decade earlier.
We sent a copy of our newly published Fill The Barn game along with our donation last fall. This year we
have no new (published) game to accompany the donation, so instead we offered
up a prototype copy of a cooperative game that had earlier caught Jim’s &
Adrienne’s interest. And while game
designers always have spare meeples here and there, we were very careful to
send a specific meeple to Indiana.
This specific yellow meeple gained a slight bit of notoriety
when it was used for some Firebreak
play testing at the Unpub
Zone during Congress of Gamers at the end of September. Bruce from The Party Gamecast committed early
to using the yellow meeple to save the airport from the spreading wildfire. And
what a valiant effort it was – we lost the game, but by golly the airport was
still standing.
That same yellow meeple has also been used by our younger son
Thomas during at-home testing of Firebreak.
Thomas always plays yellow during family game time. Thomas is also an alumnus
of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia NICU.
I originally had a different blog written to promote Extra
Life. That first blog told much more about the story of Thomas. Yet
when I checked with Thomas, he wasn’t really comfortable with us sharing those
details of his early life. As his
parents we respect that. Ask Thomas
about the first several weeks of his life and he will simply tell you that his
lungs were too small, he was in the hospital, and God made him better. And if
you are reading this blog, it means Thomas is comfortable with this shorter
version of his early life.
Whether our yellow meeple and his friends get any prototype
play time controlling wildfires during the Jim & Adrienne Jones game-a-thon
isn’t what’s really important. There are
some things that are far more important than my game designer ego…like raising
money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.
Jim
& Adrienne
Jones are using their game-a-thon to raise money for Riley Children’s Hospital
(Indiana), the hospital that helped their young daughter. Clicking on their
names will take you to the donation page. Even if you can only donate $1, those
dollars add up.
I will also mention Matt Morgan and Team
Explanation Point. Full disclosure, I don’t know Matt or anyone one his
team. All I know from a recent Boardroomers podcast is that Matt &
his team are using their Nov 2nd Extra Life game-a-thon to raise
money for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. While the yellow meeple may not
be at this Extra Life game-a-thon , CHOP will always be near and dear to our
hearts.
There will be Extra Life game-a-thons occurring all over the
country this fall to raise money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. You
can donate to any participant from the top right corner of Extra Life’s web page. Search for #ExtraLife in your Twitter feed and
you will find several game players participating in various game-a-thons for
Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.
Please pick one to support.
Whether you can give $20, $5, or only $1, it will all go to a good
cause, one that benefits real children in real families. If you ever see me at an Unpub playtest event,
I’m happy to share more about our very real story of what one Children’s
Miracle Network Hospital did for our family.
