Board gaming but never bored

By Ryan Percy

A small house in Windsor has the only light post on the street — a proud lighthouse beacon. Inside, narrow carpeted steps lead down to a world of wonder and discovery. Bookshelves cover every edge of the room. Stacked high and filling each are boxes and books in every colour. Each is a world of discovery, each is a night’s worth of fun.

Maurice Tousignant, though everyone calls him Moe, is one of the few individuals in Windsor who can claim boardgaming has been in his veins for 43 years. A Windsor native, growing up on the west side, Moe grew up in a household with a fondness for games. One of his earliest memories? Sitting on his father’s lap as he watched his dad paint lead Dungeons and Dragons miniatures.

He would play board games with family and family friends whenever he could. However in elementary school his love of games branded him the ‘nerdy kid’. The bullying got so bad he went to a high school outside of his district. He took the opportunity to reform himself. He wore leather, grew his hair out and projected a ‘don’t mess with me’ attitude. He began listening to metal music. During this time he started posting on local online forum sites and engaging with the RPG crowd in Windsor digitally. It was around then he met Deanne, the girl he would end up marrying, playing a BBS-based Warhammer Fantasy RPG.

“At high school we were both in English class, Deanne sat next to me,” Moe says, as his shining wedding ring clinks against the wooden table. “She was doing bad things, writing on her desk in dwarven runes from Lord of the Rings. One of the first ever interactions I had with her was reading out loud what she had written on the desk. Which completely embarrassed but impressed her at the same time.”

During his teens, he spent time at the University of Windsor at the Windsor Gaming Society. He played a number of games and was even the reason the club started letting in non-university students. Moe also experienced one of his first cases of discrimination from inside the gaming community there. A group was playing the FASA Star Trek RPG using a setup involving a row of couches mimicking the Enterprise’s bridge and another table for the away team.

“It was amazing. I was never invited or allowed to play that,” Moe begins after a sip of water. “Any time I asked they said, ‘No, no you’re too young.’ Am I too young for Star Trek? That one ate at me for years.”

Moe admits being prone to his own kind of discrimination as well at that age. A certain sense of elitism bloomed, as he believed certain games were superior to others, more serious. Better. However, since then his opinions have changed, for the most part.

While working towards a Bachelors of Computer Science at the University of Windsor, he became president of the WGS. Even after graduating Moe remained president until the club eventually disintegrated.

He created the Windsor Gaming Resource as a web portal to combine the various gaming news RSS feeds. Eventually a forum was added and people started to meet up at local events he set up.

One such event is the yearly Extra Life 24-hour board game marathon to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network. To date, Moe has put on the event six times and Windsor board game players have banded together to raise over $21,000 dollars for children’s hospitals.

In 2018 the event was held at The CG Realm. Ian Gereghty-Davies, now 48, used to be a partner at Hugin & Munin, one of the best local game shops in Windsor before it closed down and he took his experience to CG Realm. Behind a glass counter filled with hundreds of cards, he says Moe has been one of the foundational members of the board game scene in Windsor.

“Moe came into my first store in 2003,” Ian says as he goes to put away a binder of holographic cards. “He is a great gaming community leader who is always interested in getting gamers together. He has been the key for getting many events together such as board game nights and advertising Tabletop Day and Free RPG Day.”

“Getting gamers together to game,” Moe says is his ethos behind the WGR. His father had a number of board games but rarely had people to play them with and Moe hates seeing anyone in the same situation.

Gatekeeping a big concern. He grew up ostracized and found people who would embrace him only to find more stigmatization in the community he joined. Now he tries his best to help be as a welcoming as possible.

With the years passing by, Moe debates stepping back. Running events means he can not play in them as much. While he continues to gift the world with his near encyclopedic gaming knowledge as the Tabletop Bellhop, he’s looking to pass the torch of WGR to the next generation. He hopes the gate to gaming stays open and no one who wants to enter is kept out.