The Strategy club made its debut this year at NCHS. The club ,which meets every Tuesday after school, is a place where members can get together to play strategy card and board games.

At the club’s weekly meeting, the club’s sponsor Mr. Nathan Bastert tries exposing the members to many strategy games, including Dominion and Love Letter.

However, Bastert said that, “For the most part, they play a game called Magic: The Gathering, which is a collectible card game.” The game involves tapping land cards to collect energy called Mana, which is used to play spells.

Bastert wanted the create the club because, according to him, there is no official support at the school for a part of the population that has become large enough to not be ignored: gaming.

“The realm of gaming is expanding and becoming, not only more socially acceptable, but popular,” Bastert said.  “Everybody knows someone that plays a game.”

One of the reasons that gaming may have become so prevalent recently is because of more and more people identifying with gamer attitude. Since gaming is not viewed as mainstream, it has developed into its own culture, which Bastert defined as “a brotherhood of, ‘I play this game, you play this game,’ and [the players] immediately have something to connect over.”

Unfortunately, though, because of rejection from mainstream culture, gamers tend to adopt a “rejection attitude towards the people that have rejected them,” as described by Bastert. This means that the mainstream audience doesn’t quite understand what gaming is.

Because of this, Bastert said that his future plans for the club are focused a lot on bridging the gap between the mainstream audience and gamers. “It’s about visibility, it’s about exposure to the population at large,” he explained. “I want people to see these games.”