Whereabouts do you live? I know the struggle pretty well of finding people to play with since I stopped going to college and didn't have friends back home who stayed in the area. I ended up going to BGG and looking at the regional forums there to see if there were any groups nearby. I'm pretty fortunate to be in New Jersey, so even if there were no groups in the state, I'm not too far from Philly or NYC which have a few. But yeah, check out the forums, I ended up with two groups through that.
The middle of South Carolina. It is a military town; it has an Air Force Base specifically, which should mean that there is a large concentration of nerds available in one spot, but the guys from base that I see at the local store are only there to play MtG. There is a satelite location for one of the state's universities here that has a lot of students enrolled, and they have a gaming group that has a couple dozen members, but they primarily play video games and refuse to go anywhere to play (I posted recently about a regular from the local store who also works there occasionally and how he wanted to get me a visitor pass for the campus so that maybe I could speak to the gaming group and plead with them to go to the store. I guess he is the treasurer or something for the group, some chair member, and he said he has been trying for years to get these people who sit around the campus game room complaining that there is nothing to do in town to go to the store for game nights, and not a single one of them will ever go anywhere for any game).
The town has a small game store, where people primarily go to play MtG and Pokemon. In the summer at the store's busiest on a game night, there would maybe be 6 people including myself? Two of those who were a couple guaranteed regulars who showed up for board game nights, DnD nights, Pokemon DnD nights, FNM, and Cardfight Vanguard (as well as one of them being the guy I mentioned above who worked part-time there) have had to cut down their attendance because of midterms and stuff at that local campus. Another guy who was a regular went off to college an hour away and decided that he had to cut down his attendance and game nights were out; he could only do X-Wing and DnD from now on. And speaking of X-Wing, when I started attending X-Wing nights, there were 5 people or so who showed up for that, but the group as a whole made a decision to stop attending X-Wing nights at that store because they felt like the store wasn't a good place to play because of a laundry list of problems with it, so now I play at their houses when they get together. None of them that I have spoken to really seem like they want to try board games proper except for one guy, who told me that there were a lot of tabletop games he wanted to play, but that was a couple days before he deployed for a six month rotation (he's still not back). There is another store that is a used video game/anime/CCG store, but they only do CCGs.
Speaking of the local store also, there are barely any customers ever. When I am there, the most times I've ever seen any customers come in for things have been to browse the MtG singles collections or to pick up comic book pulls. I'm not the best customer either; I try to buy things every now and then but I can only bring myself to buy small items like sleeves or deck boxes or dice or individual X-Wing ships because there is a very limited selection of games and they are all MSRP. Despite that, I try to talk the place up to people I know and recommend it for various activities; there is a game 'bunker' in the back with a ton of TVs and current gen consoles that gets rented out for parties, so I suggest that to parents. I recommend it to the church-going people I know, like a pastor, because it is a safer spot in town compared to some of the rough areas. I pass the store's info on to some of the people I hear constantly say "Man, there is nothing to do around here." But no one ever takes my advice and goes. The store owner literally printed off little handouts for the regulars with a list of steps for recommending his store to people, thing like "After gaining someone's interest, recommend a time and date where you could meet them at the store so they would feel more at ease." But I can't gain anyone interest.
Columbia is an hour away and has a couple stores. One is a large store that had a MASSIVE turn out for Tabletop Day and gets a lot of board gamers and not just CCGers. I met some cool people there when I attended a TT Day session in 2014. Unfortunantly, it is an hour away. Not too far if I wanted to drive in on a weekend but out of the question on a weeknight. Funny that I've got no job at the moment and have all the time in the world to play games, but I do have to pick my wife up from work at 5 which makes getting to any events on a weeknight very tough. Charleston has a ton of stores and groups, and Charlotte does as well (probably more than Charleston), but those are both two hours away from me which is a lot harder to make happen even on a weekend, which would have to be an all-day thing.
I've checked BGG for people. The regional subforums very rarely have people talking about gaming in Florence, which is also an hour away. I haven't seen a Florence thread in at least a year and I think the main person who would comment only played Attack Wing, but I've mentioned the local store on those threads in case any of them wanted to make the drive into town to check it out. As far as I know, no one has. The bulk of the SC posts I see in the SouthEast subforum are for the Greenville/Spartanberg area which has a large university but is a couple hours away, further than Charleston or Charlotte. And then there is a lot of activity in the Charlotte metro area but that is still a drive that I cannot make frequently. I've used the zip code finder on BGG to look up the base and the surrounding towns. Most everyone I've looked up on there have been people who were stationed here at some point and are long gone, with the occasional person who registered like 8 years ago and hasn't logged in to the site in 8 years. No Facebook gaming groups for the area. The best we have is a regional X-Wing FB group with a couple of the members being located here in town (the members of the group that used to play at the local store that I mentioned before). There are no MeetUp groups for gaming here. I suppose I COULD start one, except the town literally only has like 5 groups period on MeetUp for various activities, and they barely have any members, so I have to assume that no one here knows about it. And I guess "you'll never know unless you try" would apply and I won't get anyone signed up for a group I never start, but with the luck I've hard already, it is hard to be confident in my success on MeetUp.
And then for myself, I've mentioned a couple times that I don't really have any friends here. Most of them moved away when I was still in the Air Force and the remainder moved away after I got out and went to work overseas for three years. My wife has a large group of friends which is essentially the town's Filipino community, but none of them are interested in gaming at all. When I am at get-togethers or parties, I'll talk to some of the husbands and stuff, a lot of them who are currently active duty, and mention the game store or what games I'll be playing. They may ask what I've been up to and I'll say "Oh, I had an X-Wing tournament in Columbia on Saturday" and then briefly describe the game and how it's played, but that is as far as that goes; no one has said "That sounds interesting" or "Hmm, maybe I'll check that out." I'm just not a social person at all though, which makes the situation with the local pretty frustrating, that I finally out myself out there and forced myself into a new setting with new people, and then the small group fell apart and no one shows up.
I know I've complained about a few of these things many times ITT in the past, and hate that I probably come off pretty negative, always complaining about the same thing. It's just a downer for me. I got into this hobby at the beginning of 2014 and was very excited about it. I quickly amassed a large collection despite only having one person at the remote site I worked at overseas that I could reliably count on to play games with me. After a year of constant gaming, that guy moved to a different shift and the next year and a half had us trying without success to get moved to the same shift so we could hang out. I complained a lot about that in here but I kept telling myself "When I get back to the states, back to civilization, this will be different." My wife was on my ass constantly about the large stacks of games that were forming in the apartment from sales or GeekAuctions or whatever, and I kept telling her "No, I'm going to play those when I get back, they aren't totally useless." We actually had more than a couple arguments over it. Then I came back home for good, started renting a garage so I couldthe games into them and out of the way in the apartment, found a local store and an X-Wing group... And I can't play any games.
I've only got a tablet right now, but I suppose that I need to buy a computer. I mean, I do need one for various things, but at least then I would have VASSAL available to me, or could play games by email or play by forum. I'd be able to get my fill of X-Wing via VASSAL too, which I do play somewhat often, but not enough to satisfy me (plus I was sick the past two or three weeks and couldn't really play X-Wing with anyone at all). I really wanted to start up a BattleCON league once league play with promo support was announced a couple weeks back, but I wouldn't have anyone to play with here. I could get some BattleCON going over a video chat client though (which I have seen suggested in here from at least one person who said they would like to play it over Skype or something), which is also acceptable for league play. So maybe getting a computer would be the best thing for me in the short term, until I can get a job in Colorado Springs and move there. I've already done my research on living there and looked at the game situation and it seems like a gaming Mecca compared to here.
Apologies to thread regulars for yet another one of my rants. LunarKnite asked, so I answered.
I have to imagine that Jersey would have some good game groups, and like you say, Philly is pretty close. I would normally fly back and forth to Greenland by way of BWI but a few times I had to go through Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst and I looked up stores in Jersey; it looked like there were a couple good ones but even when showing up with 7 or 8 hours before a flight, I never felt like I had enough time to get a cab or hop a train and go to one of them (especially with a ton of luggage and no knowledge of the surrounding area and no cell phone with me on those trips). I just looked at the NE subforum on BGG and saw that southern Jersey has a store where 10 people showed up last Tuesday to play Hanabi, Roll for the Galaxy, Five Tribes, and another game. That sounds better than my last two months worth of Tuesdays. I see several MeetUp groups and good stores for Northern Jersey mentioned on BGG too. So it looks like depending on where you live in the state, there is more going on than there is here.
