Walk down to Plyler basement any Thursday night, and you will stumble upon a cozy club community sprawling out board games in Room 026. This is the Ace of Clubs, a collection of students as varied as the club’s board game collection.
“It is not known what ‘inspired’ the club,” Ace of Clubs President Anna Clare O’Gorman ‘24 said. “I think it was just people who wanted to play board games and have an organized place to do that.”
A young organization, Ace of Clubs was founded in 2014. By 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak, gathering restrictions caused group meetings overall to fizzle out. Once possible, the faculty advisor of the club — Associate Professor Lori Alvin in the mathematics department — reached out to students who had previously been involved to get the club up and running again.
“We do our best to make the club low-stakes and mellow,” Ace of Clubs Vice President Ellie Howard ‘25 said. “We like to play games that the collective group wants to play, and if we have new members, we always ask what their favorite game is and do our best to incorporate that.”
Times of safety and health concerns offer us insight as to how important an organized setting for common interests — especially those as inviting as Ace of Clubs — is for communities and the individuals within them. A space with low barriers to entry gives students a break from stacked schedules and complex webs of commitments. Away from library nooks or open classrooms is a place where any student can come for some needed time to relax in a space that brings people together.
“Even people I have met, where maybe we weren’t as close, when we started going to this club consistently together, it has made us closer,” O’Gorman said. “Having something you can go to consistently — meeting other people, bringing people with you — has been a big part of my experience with the club. Because anyone, if they want to, can do it.”
In this way, this ardent love of the game seems to be rooted in a love of the people that come with it. Along with the joys of having a consistent, low-stakes outlet, O’Gorman says the club collaborates with organizations like the Alpha Phi Omega (APO) service fraternity and the Furman Pride Alliance (FPA).
“(APO) has fellowship credits — I’m also in (APO), so that’s how I know,” O’Gorman said. “So it (was) kind of a way to get the fellowship credit with other brothers, but also meet new people. It is always fun to meet new people. The FPA event was fun because it was for Ace Awareness Week, you know, ‘Ace’ of Clubs.”
Ace of Clubs has not only collaborated with APO and FPA. They also lend their extensive board game collection — “two big bags of board games,” as O’Gorman calls it — to other organizations looking to add some low-effort fun to a gathering. Through Ace of Clubs, connecting across campus seems to just be in the cards. Board games are for anyone and everyone, O’Gorman says, but for them, a good old-fashioned game night also grants the freedom to explore.
“(It can be) a relaxing game or a competitive game where you use your brain, like Monopoly,” O’Gorman said. “I really appreciate having time away from electronics and screens. It feels like everything — like homework — is just looking at screens all the time.”
For those interested in having skin in the game, Ace of Clubs is open to all potential members and collaborators on Thursday nights at 7 p.m.
