Dungeons & Dragons & donating to help children’s hospitals

By Ryan Percy

Windsor’s board game and roleplaying game community recently came together to donate more than $7,000 to help support children’s hospitals.

During the first weekend in November the CG Realm opened at 10 a.m. on Saturday and ran until 5 p.m. on Sunday. For 32 hours, since that weekend was daylight savings, the store and attached Windsor Sandwich Shop hosted the Windsor Gaming Resource’s sixth annual Extra Life marathon.

Extra Life is a charity that supports the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. Each person who joins Extra Life gets to choose which hospital their raised money will go towards. One hundred per cent of that person’s raised donations go to the hospital they choose.

By the start of the event members of the Windsor gaming community had already raised more than $2,000 for the 2018 Extra Life marathon.

Moe Tousignant, 43, is the man behind the Windsor Gaming Resource and helped organize the event. He said the goal is to unite the community to support a good cause.

“Obviously the most important thing is raising money for the kids,” Tousignant said. “But personally what I get out of it is I love seeing all these people from Windsor gaming together. This place is packed. I haven’t seen it this busy in months.”

During the event other donations were raised from a bake sale. People at the marathon received a 10 per cent discount at Windsor Sandwich Shop, which shares the same building, and all of the staff’s tips were donated to Extra Life during the 32 hour period. Both a silent and live auction were held with some items going for hundreds of dollars. Finally, the event saw the return of Cheat Jars. Mason jars were set on each gaming table, allowing players to reroll dice or draw extra cards for a small donation.

The event brought out gamers from a wide age range. Ciaran Shuart, 17, brought his friends out to gather around a table and take part in some dungeon delving excitement. He said the chance to game for so long for a good cause was an opportunity he could not miss out on.

“This is easily the best game store I have seen in a long time,” said Shuart. “I hope we have more events like this because this is a great way to get the charity going and what better way to donate to charity than to have a 32 hour long marathon of Dungeons and Dragons?”

Tousignant’s donations go to the Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. Melissa Szot is a special events coordinator at Sick Kids and is the hospital’s lead on Extra Life. She says in the eight years Sick Kids has taken part in Extra Life the hospital has received more than $1.5 million. Szot said a number of the children at the hospital use gaming as a form of coping and even go out to events as ambassadors for the hospital to share their story to those who attend.

“Seeing the commitment from our community is really inspiring,” Szor said. “We have a lot of participants who joined Extra Life and who maybe don’t have, at the beginning, an extremely personal connection to Sick Kids but their all in. So seeing them support something so intensely and so selflessly is very inspiring.”

Over the past six years the Windsor Gaming Resource has raised more than $21,000 for the Children’s Miracle Network. Tousignant said with help from others he plans for next year’s Extra Life to be bigger and better than before.