Swiggers meets on Wednesday evenings to play board games. Our usual venue is the upstairs room at The Shipwrights Arms (88 Tooley Street, London SE1 2TF). This is a minute's walk
from London
Bridge station (Tooley Street
exit and turn right).Swiggers meets on Wednesday evenings to play board games. Our usual venue is the upstairs room at The Shipwrights Arms (88 Tooley Street, London SE1 2TF). This is a minute's walk
from London
Bridge station (Tooley Street
exit and turn right).
Meetings are organised through a WhatsApp group – contact Pevans or post on our BGG Guild if you're interested in joining in. The Guild has reports of recent meetings if you want to find out more about what we play (and this is where the photos are taken from).
People generally arrive around 6 pm and have usually arranged who's playing what beforehand – visitors can generally be accommodated, though. The pub has a decent menu (the fish and chips is recommended): food can be ordered (from the main bar on the ground floor) until 8 pm and drinks are served until much later. We usually pack up between 10:30 and 11 pm, but this varies according to people's commitments.
We welcome visitors and new members. If you have an interest in board games, get in touch and come along one Wednesday evening. If you want to know more, e-mail Pevans (though I no longer attend regularly). Or see what's happening at the Swiggers BGG Guild.
The games are generally modern, proprietary, board (and card) games, usually involving more skill than luck. In particular, games produced in Germany, where board games are a more significant part of the culture, as well as the UK and USA. Examples of the sort of games we play include: Agricola, Ave Caesar, El Grande, Modern Art, Puerto Rico, (Settlers of) Catan and Ticket to Ride. More recently published games that we have played include: 7 Empires, Rebirth, Revive, Stupor Mundi, Vantage and others.
We have had occasional role-playing sessions, but not for many years now.
The club started life in 1980 (probably – memories are hazy) as the Esso (London) Games Society. The six founder members (Paul Evans, Paul Hanton, Pete Munn, Mike Sharp, Steve Tayler, Alison Wells) all worked for Esso Petroleum in central London and discovered a common interest in role-playing games (specifically Dungeons & Dragons). They set up the club, which met in the social club in the basement of Esso's office block in Victoria (London SW1). The club grew rapidly and the members became regulars at TSR's annual GamesFair convention in Reading.
The proportion of Esso employees dwindled over the years and the group eventually had to leave Esso premises in the late Eighties. We moved to The Victoria, on Buckingham Palace Road and became Swiggers {SW1 g(am)ers}. Over the next couple of years, several pubs were the home of the club until it settled in The Royal Oak on Regency Street, SW1 for several years from June 1991. At the same time, the focus of the club gradually shifted from role-playing to board games and the membership changed.
Redevelopment of the Royal Oak in 1997 forced a further move. After a few unsatisfactory months at the Rising Sun on Buckingham Palace Road, we moved to SE1 and the Bunch of Grapes on St Thomas Street in 1998. The upstairs room at this Young's pub remained our base – through several changes of manager – for eight years.
A new manager took over the Bunch of Grapes towards the end of 2006 and started making things difficult for the club. After he refused to honour our booking of the room, despite having assured us the week before that we were welcome at the pub, we decided we had to find another venue. We are now (18 years and counting) based at the Shipwright's Arms on Tooley Street (a couple of minutes' walk from London Bridge station).
Physical meetings were suspended during the pandemic restrictions in 2020-22, but members continued to 'meet' online, playing games on the various websites that host board games (and chatting on Discord). Once the pub re-opened in May 2022, face-to-face meetings started again, on an ad-hoc basis. Over the next year or so, meetings became regular and the club expanded as new people found it. It's now thriving again.
The club currently has 12-20 people attending each week (it has been as high as 30) and a much larger membership. There's a bit more organisation these days: a WhatsApp group co-ordinates who's coming along each week and what games they want to play (though other games usually get played as well).
The club has no formal rules, membership requirements or membership fees. We welcome anyone who plays games – come and join us.