Once upon a time (well, in September 2022, actually), to celebrate The Treehouse’s fifth birthday, we had our first go at running a Megagame. You can find out all about what happened during our first run of Watch the Skies, and get an overview of what on Earth (and off Earth) it actually is, in our previous blog post here. We came away from the previous experience exhausted, exhilarated, and bubbling with ideas for what we wanted to do ‘next time’. Perhaps, in retrospect, we had TOO MANY ideas for tweaks and changes, because it then took us over a year to get our ducks into anything resembling ..read more

  Starting in 2023, The Treehouse board game cafe will be expanding its offerings to include something quite special — our first ever live-action roleplaying game (or LARP, for short)! LARP at the Treehouse: Changeling will be a three-part event taking place on the third Sundays of January, February and March, kicking off with a free character creation session on January 8th. This exciting game, of the variety known as “chamber LARP", comes to us from Jon Fry and Erin Marsh, local LARPers with a particular focus on making the game as accessible for newcomers as possible. Because we know ..read more

On the 23rd September 2022, to celebrate our fifth birthday, The Treehouse ran a megagame. We’d known about Watch the Skies since before the Treehouse opened, thanks to this review from Shut Up & Sit Down, and had always thought it seemed like an outrageously cool concept. Just the idea of 40+ grown-ups putting a whole day aside to play make-believe together is pretty amazing in itself, right? For our first birthday back in 2018, we had the pleasure of hosting Bring Them Home, a 2 - 3 hour game for roughly 20 players, which was run at The Treehouse by its creators, the (coincidentally nam ..read more

Starting October 13th, The Treehouse board game cafe is thrilled to join the ranks of many gaming stores and groups worldwide by entering into the Pathfinder Society! This enormous roleplaying game campaign is played by thousands of adventurers around the world, and gives players the chance to grow and develop their own character without committing to more sessions than they want. You don’t even need to create a character in advance if you don’t want to - pre-generated characters are always available to jump right in and play! To help potential players orient themselves in this brave new world ..read more

Greetings, dear reader! Today is World Book Day, and to celebrate, we have an agony aunt question to help those who like storytelling in their games, but who prefer the role of reader to writer… Dear Aunty Chella, I love the idea of games with a narrative, but the thought of role playing gives me performance anxiety! I like the idea of coming away from a games night with a story to tell, but I’m just not up for writing a character as I play - I feel way too self conscious… but it’s hard to do one without the other… right? I want to know if there’s something else out there for me in the world o ..read more

As we prepare to make a triumphant return to the world of Solken in our upcoming roleplaying season, our GMs have put together this handy primer to the world and its inhabitants. Solken is a world of high fantasy created by the Treehouse in 2017, and was the setting of our first Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Back then, it was a world recovering from catastrophe; a world whose central culture had been lost in an apocalyptic event and who sought to recover its soul with the guidance of the seven gods. Now, the gods are dead. At the conclusion of the original Solken campaign, the pantheon (six ..read more

The nights are drawing in and there’s a smell of pumpkin spice on the breeze… it can only mean one thing: Halloween is nigh. For obvious reasons, this year’s spook fest is going to be a bit different than usual in this part of the world, with less trick-or-treating, fewer students roaming the streets in costume (one assumes, anyway) and more… well, staying in I guess. There’s a pretty reasonable argument to say that the world is scary enough right now without finding ways to add to it, but as anyone who has ever enjoyed a horror film knows, some ways of being scared are more fun than others, a ..read more

There’s no getting round it: this week’s new ‘rule of six’ has been bad news for party plans across the UK. But fear not - we’ve arrived on your doorstep half an hour early, clutching a big bag of board games to make everything better! Because everyone wants that person at their party, right? Slightly awkward though the circumstances are, we genuinely believe that board games offer the perfect solution to the small party problem - that is, how to create an atmosphere conducive to letting off steam with only the number of people you can fit in a taxi. We’re here to tell you that there are SO MA ..read more

Greetings couch-dwellers! Today we’re talking to Treehouse Games Guru James to find out more about Tabletop Simulator, and why he would recommend it for new and experienced gamers alike… Briefly, what is Tabletop Simulator? Tabletop simulator, often abbreviated to TTS, is a piece of software that creates a virtual table on which you can play board games, card games and just about anything else you can think of. It’s available for download on Steam (a popular gaming platform for PC) for £14.99 and is often on sale for 50% or less, although this may not apply in the next few weeks while it’s see ..read more

After an update on the general state of play at The Treehouse during the Coronavirus lockdown, we discuss ways to play games online with people in other places, and shine the spotlight on Jackbox games as a way to have a virtual party, before wrapping up with some announcements on what's coming up over the next few weeks. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support The Treehouse while we're closed, you can make a small contribution here. Links from the episode: Tabletopia Tabletop Simulator on Steam Jackbox Party Pack ..read more