Enigma club members bond over RPGs, blackjack and campuswide games of vampire tag
Members of Enigma, a science fiction and fantasy gaming club on campus, participate in activities ranging from tabletop role-playing games to vampire tag. (Mia Kayser/Daily Bruin Staff)
By Kate Nucci
Oct. 17, 2019 11:48 p.m.
Next week, Enigma members will don sneakers, pick up maps and chase each other across campus.
This week was quieter – students gambled chips to win a set of role-playing-game dice.
“Basically it is all sorts of different nerdy interests all wrapped into one club,” said Hayden Parsley, president of the club and a fourth-year English student. “Most people come in with one or two (interests) and leave with all of them.”
Enigma, UCLA’s science fiction and gaming club, has been around since 1986. Students meet every Tuesday and play card, board and video games, roleplay or participate in activities such as trivia or text-based adventure journeys. Any students or members of the public can attend any of the meetings.
During the first few weeks of the quarter, members bring their own board games and host open game nights, Parsley said. Later in the quarter they will compete in trivia and self-made jeopardy games, watch movies, play cross-campus vampire tag and participate in an associated science fiction book club. Past events have included an apocalypse planning event and a massive game of the social bluffing game Mafia.
The club hosts a different activity each week. On Tuesday, officers led casino games such as Texas Hold ‘em poker and blackjack. The three students with the most chips at the end of the night each won a set of Dungeons & Dragons dice, Parsley said.
The club’s Halloween tradition is watching the movie “Wild Zero,” said Grace Bowers, a fourth-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student and club librarian. They chose the movie because they think it’s terrible, and they enjoy watching the reactions of new club members, Parsley added.
“It actually has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I’m about 90% sure that’s because someone from Enigma wrote (the review),” Bowers said.
Sam Edelsonn, a fourth-year history student, said he has been a member of Enigma since transferring to UCLA last year. He found the website online and attended the first meeting, and has tried to attend every meeting since, he said.
Edelsonn joined to play tabletop RPG games such as D&D, a game in which one person, called a dungeon master, serves as the storyteller and guides other players roleplaying as self-made characters through a self-directed adventure.
One of his favorite memories after joining the club came during their first one-shot night, he said, during which members play shortened versions of RPG games for only one night. That night, Edelsonn served as dungeon master with a freshman who had never played the game before, he said.
“I played it with him (again) like two weeks ago and we had a conversation, and he basically said that that was … one of the most fun times he’s ever had his entire life,” Edelsonn said. “And that’s (because of) the first game of D&D he played and he hasn’t stopped since because of what I made.”
Sci-fi clubs are often considered reactionary and exclusive to new members, Edelsonn said. With Enigma, Edelsonn said he has never felt that way.
“It was extremely egalitarian, which is just extremely wholesome to see, and like, players of all different sorts of backgrounds coming together to like, share and … collaborate over things that are passionate for them, like science fiction and fantasy,” Edelsonn said.
Club members play a wide variety of games, but the events are less important than the people, Parsley said.
“It’s not that much about what the event is. … It really is about the club and the people,” Parsley said. “Most of us will do whatever, will do anything. And it’s just to be here with people with similar interests, hang out and do something kind of organized and kind of fun.”
Daniel Mitchener, the social chair of Enigma and a fourth-year computer science and engineering student, said some of his favorite memories at UCLA took place after Enigma meetings, in the De Neve dining hall.
“Some of the best memories (and) some of the best friends have been made just sitting there talking about life, and various nerdy things, (and) lots of fights about Star Wars,” Mitchener said.
