You can't buy a one-day pass to Sakura-Con.
But you're more than welcome to join the Asia Northwest Cultural Education Association (ANCEA), a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Your membership (from $75 early-bird to $120 last-minute) includes three-day access to Sakura-Con over Easter weekend.
That's $40, per person, per day, for access to the entire Seattle Convention Center campus. (Food and beverage not included. No outside food permitted.)
Forty dollars a day. That's a good benchmark of what it costs to rent the campus when nobody else is using it. And since that's the basic idea for the Commons, I became a paid-up member of ANCEA, good through April. I wanted to see how it all works.
Sakura-Con provides a federated umbrella for gaming clubs, anime music video (AMV) creators, K-pop idol groups, kendo practitioners, and cosplay culture.
None of these groups by themselves would have the numbers or the bandwidth to manage an event of this size. Working together, they take over the three SCC buildings – the Summit, the Arch, and starting this year, "Arch Tower," or 800 Pike.
This year, I checked out the games.
Alexandria RPG Library is a collection of about 10,000 role-playing games (RPGs). About 3,000 show up at PAX, 1,000 at Sakura-Con, and smaller cuts for more targeted events depending on the audience. The Library does events for veterans, at-risk youth and senior citizens.
Dragonflight GameCon, an annual event since 1980, lent out over 200 board games over the weekend, 122 on Saturday alone. They have monthly table-top RPG nights at Luther's Table in Renton.
Draw Phase holds community events to teach and play trading card games (TCGs), with currently 60 volunteers ready to teach over a dozen games. It's a concierge model – you find your way to the sign-in desk and a volunteer matches you to a game based on your interest level and experience. How complicated do you want to get? What do you already know? The volunteers will get you started and the games will get you hooked.
Seattle Riichi Mahjong Club meets Sundays at Stoup Brewery in Capitol Hill, and on Mondays in Redmond.
Seattle Go Center was founded in 1995 with the support of Kaoru Iwamoto — a professional Go player who was in the suburbs of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, about five miles from the blast. He was in the middle of a championship match. The windows broke. The game was disrupted. They finished it after lunch. Iwamoto won the title the following year, and spent the rest of his life spreading Go as a message of peace — not a game of capture and destroy, but of territory, of coexistence, where one person ends up with more but both remain on the board.
If you've ever seen the mural painted on the wall of the former Seattle Go Center building in the U District, you've seen the Atomic Bomb Game.
Photo: Seattle Go Center
In 2022, the Nihon Ki-in sold the UDistrict property. The deal included a promise of a floor in the new high rise. The developer walked away. The Go Center was evicted. They're operating out of Phinney Community Center for now.
What these games all have in common is that they're super-portable. Finding space isn't the problem.
The problem is coordination.
It's about matching players to games that are suited to their individual interests, skill levels, and commitment.
It's about having coaches who can teach you the rules of the game, the culture of the table, and the path to mastery.
That's what's special about Sakura-Con. For one weekend a year, you can discover and learn new games across categories, and the organizers from each community are on hand to get you seated, set you up with a game, and teach you how to play.
What would it look like if you could always find a game?
A place to land, repeatedly, reliably, without negotiating the terms from scratch every time.
It's a complicated puzzle: How do you get all the games, players, volunteers, and coaches in and out of different spots at different times?
That's a puzzle worth solving.
Every one of these games has an online version. You can play Go on OGS, mahjong on Mahjong Soul, RPGs on Roll20, TCGs on their respective platforms. Between events, that's what players do. Online solves the availability problem completely.
What online doesn't solve is the human part. The part that gets you out into the world. Because the people with whom you fight dragons and flip tiles may end up becoming your actual friends — and that's the whole game right there.