The final days of summer represent the end of more than one season for us. It finally feels like we’ve landed on our feet after transitioning to a new location and a new edition of Warhammer 40,000. With all of that behind us, Waystone now just gets to be. Nothing big or revolutionary is on the horizon. We’re just a group of folks with a nifty little space, showing up to play games and connect. As it was meant to be.

Of course, this doesn’t mean there’s no work to be done. On the contrary, the tumult of the past year has frayed the fabric of our little community, and now we get to start the careful work of weaving it back together.

Part of that is re-establishing rituals like the club’s Community Survey—our twice yearly way of collecting feedback from our members and use it to inform the club’s direction. Let’s get into the results from Survey 008, which we conducted back in June.

Community Values

There are a lot of new folks here, so we have extra responsibility these days to make sure that we don’t lose our main thread—the values that act as our club’s foundation:

“Waystone’s goal is to create a space that fosters connection and belonging around a shared love for miniatures games.
We believe everyone deserves to experience the joy of our hobby without judgment—regardless of gender, experience level, sexuality, playstyle, disability, religion, race, or socioeconomic status. We are an LGBTQIA+ community. We strive to be anti-racist, and to respect everyone’s pronouns. Though we are grounded in our values, our space is meant to provide a reprieve from the churn of current political events and online conflict.”

While the feedback on this chart is always nice and tidy and positive, we often get good, constructive feedback in the written responses, which we go over together as a team, one by one.

The biggest pattern we saw this time around were comments about the balance Waystone strikes between welcoming new folks and preserving the sense of community among existing members. As you’ll see, this was a theme across different sections of the survey, and one I’ll keep coming back to in this summary.

“Waystone has really flourished in the new space while also retaining its identity. New people are regularly welcomed in but it doesn’t feel like that comes at the expense of older members getting displaced or edged out.”

Many of us have formed years-long friendships here, traveled out of state together, and even attended each others’ weddings. Some wrote that they felt this sense of community emerged from the move unscathed—welcoming new folks gracefully without compromising the sense of belonging for existing members. Even so, it’s undeniable that the garden bed of our community was completely torn up during the move. I can’t count the number of people who approached me at the bar when we re-opened, looked around, and said, “I used to feel like I knew everyone here.”

“When I joined, Waystone was adjusting the Discord to prioritize the sense of community amongst members. I think the spirit of that idea has not translated great post-move. We’re doing a great job of being open to newcomers, but I’d love to see events and such focusing on that for [existing] members.”

Not only were our day-to-day interactions between existing community-members put on hold during the move, but anticipation for the new space also brought a ton of fresh interest. When we opened, it wasn’t just the space that looked different, it was also the community. It’s ultimately a very good thing—all of us were fresh faces once—but it’s also disorienting, especially as we grieve our old space and the way things used to be.

We’re still tilling this new soil and will be for a while. We’ve spent time talking with folks about how they’d like to see us support community moving forward, and things like the Pigeon Picnic and monthly member-driven Queer Hobby Nights are just a start.

Games We Play

Perhaps the most hotly anticipated part of the survey is seeing the results for our favorite “teams” posted up on the ol’ histogram. I have my personal biases for games like Battletech, but I must say that I just love seeing how the diversity of games at the club continues to increase.

*Note that these are only the top ten games at the club. Many other games have less numerous, but equally dedicated followings.

The proportion of members playing each of these games only increased since last survey (except for Trench Crusade, which had astronomical numbers on the last one). This is a great measure of the health for the club. It means our enjoyment of this hobby doesn’t all rest on a single game system (or manufacturer), and when someone loses interest in their game of choice, it’s more than likely they’ll have friends who can rope them into another one.

Table Booking Experience

This is the section where we get down to brass tacks, as it were. Beyond community and good vibes, most of us are here because we want to be able to play games on big tables. Ensuring that you all can do so is one of our most critical responsibilities as staff.

Here’s how the survey said we were doing 2-3 months ago:

88% of members said they had no trouble booking a table in the past 14 days (up from 56% on the last survey).
Comments were positive about moving to one unified space. The old separation between “Speakeasy” and the “Annex” was a big pain point.
Comments speculated that table capacity might become strained with the release of 11th Edition.

The quantitative data here was stellar (the best it’s ever been, in fact). That being said, if we issued this survey again today, we all know the results would be different.

The new edition of Warhammer 40,000 and the launch of some popular leagues really changed the landscape when it comes to booking tables. So, despite these glowing numbers, we’re still doing work to stay in front of table availability challenges:

We’ve now fixed the wait-list functionality in the booking system. This allows you to indicate if you’d like a notification when a table opens up at a specific date or time, and has been helping a lot of folks get tables when they want.
We just announced that we’re extending Sunday hours to 8pm (starting this weekend). Two hours can make a big difference when it comes to squeezing in more games, so we’re hopeful the impact is felt.

It’s also worth taking a second to think about how all of this looks in the long-term.

When we started Waystone four and a half years ago, we assumed that interest in miniatures games had a limit. We figured that after we tapped into the small group of enthusiasts in Seattle, needing to expand would be the least of our worries.

Year after year, that gets proven wrong.

We don’t want to be overly reactionary to what we’re seeing, but it’s important that we develop a strategy around remaining welcoming while also preserving the intimacy that makes Waystone special. It won’t be easy, but we’re strategizing and starting to take some concrete steps (see below).

Discord

The Waystone Discord is an important part of this discussion because it both drives growth, and is the place where its effects are perhaps most keenly felt. All of the same questions about intimacy and familiarity at the club in-person apply acutely to our digital space, because everyone participates there simultaneously.

Here’s what you all told us on the survey:

80% of members expressed that the community does a good job self-moderating.
88% said we strike a positive balance between giving people freedom and enforcing the rules.
Despite the above, half of members said we should consider having volunteer moderators in the server (and only 16% felt that we shouldn’t).
Comments discussed how the atmosphere can change from channel to channel. Everyone loves the hobby channel (and saw it as a huge nexus of positivity and support), but said that other channels can feel like a generic online chat rooms (along with the accompanying downsides).
A number of commenters felt that they were interacting a lot more with people they’d never seen in-person.

Overall, the feedback here felt positive, which was affirming given the sweeping changes we made to Discord after the last survey. Despite this, Discord has continued to be one of the most challenging and demanding parts of running Waystone.

Stefan and I had to do a quick sanity check recently where we asked ourselves, “What is the actual purpose of our Discord, and where have we strayed from it?”

What we’ve always said is that it’s meant to help people “deepen the connections they make at the club in-person”, but we’ve been finding ourselves intervening in conflicts or problematic situations more and more with people who have never visited Waystone, or who only do so to pick up free and discounted items from the #trade channel.

Given these considerations, the data in this survey, and our questions around growth, we’ve decided that entrance to the Discord will now require someone to first visit Waystone in-person or to receive an invite from an active member. There are plenty of spaces that exist explicitly to facilitate online discussion around games—Waystone can’t be that.

This does alter how many people will be introduced to our space, but we feel strongly that it addresses things in a way that aligns with our values.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be pitfalls. For instance, if our values around safety and inclusivity weren’t extremely transparent, we wouldn’t ask people to walk into the physical space without being able to first get a “temperature check” for the community online.

Club Improvements

We spent a good few months squeezing blood from stones in order to get Waystone 2.0 up and running, and though we knew it wasn’t perfect, we were proud of ourselves and ready for a break. Sitting down to digest constructive feedback from 111 people didn’t sound very appetizing at first, you all understood where we were at in the journey and were extremely empathetic with your feedback (thank you).

The top thing members asked us to address was Terrain Labels & Organization. Given the new terrain rules in Warhammer 40k and the number of games being played at the club, this made sense. Members are independently accessing terrain more than ever, so we started on this improvement before the survey even concluded.

Other priorities that came up were things like targeted soundproofing in areas such as the back room, added lighting in some areas, bigger table carts, and a more visible/accessible snack bar. We’re hoping to tackle each of these one at a time in the coming months (the sound treatment showed up yesterday, so I expect we’ll have that in pretty soon).

When it comes to the pros and cons of growth, I think it’s important to recognize that improvements like these would have felt like huge financial decisions for us a couple years ago. This time around, we were able to pull the trigger without too much handwringing or worrying about being able to pay our rent. That’s an element of this whole discussion that’s worth recognizing, so thank you all for your support.

Charitable Giving

We’re also in a place again to resume raising money for a charitable organization with each Community Survey. Members nominated three organizations: Chief Seattle Club (who we’ve supported in the past), Institute for Justice, and the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network.

In the end, Institute for Justice had the most support from members! If you haven’t heard of them, they are a nonprofit, public interest law firm whose mission is to “end widespread abuses of government power and secure the constitutional rights that allow all Americans to pursue their dreams.”

Over the next six months, we’ll be setting aside money from the club’s Community Amplifier fund to support this awesome organization.

For folks who are new, the Community Amplifier fund is a budget that takes 10% of all Community Amplifier memberships, and uses that money to make the club more accessible and impactful. Not only does it help support charitable organizations, it helps us fund things like our Reduced Cost Membership Policy and provide free snacks at the Tacoma Open.

Final comments

As always, we cannot thank you all enough. Monthly dues keep our lights on, but the spirit of our club would not be able to continue without the extreme thoughtfulness and care each of you brings to the table.

“The survey work and actionable plans you communicate are extremely professional, full of empathy, and kindness. Thank you!”

“Waystone is a project that is trying its best to see its flaws and move towards the better. I think y’all are doing an amazing job and the future looks bright!”

“...I think that decades from now we will all look back at this time and this space and be shocked at the rich web of interpersonal connections that grew out of a little plastic war dollie spot. No matter how long Waystone stays financially healthy and fun to operate you’ve profoundly impacted the lives of a great many people.”

We’ve emerged from some challenging shit—time to paint some little goobers and roll some friggin’ dice.

-Dustin & Stefan

Survey 008 Results // August 2026

Event Recap: Games Workshop Tacoma Open 2026