The College of Southern Maryland is looking for volunteers to teach tabletop games at this year’s Hawkland Gaming Festival, a daylong event returning to the La Plata campus Sept. 19 for its fourth year.
The college is asking community members and students to sign up as hosts, bringing a favorite board game, card game, dexterity game or role-playing game to teach to festival-goers during three-hour shifts scheduled between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. Volunteers can also propose workshops covering cosplay, live performances or live-action role-playing, known as LARP. Anyone interested can register through an online form linked from the festival’s event page.
Festival Director Andrew Wodzianski, a CSM professor of visual and performing arts who has organized the event since its start, said hosting is a way for community gamers to pass along their enthusiasm to newcomers. “Games have a powerful way of bringing people together and building connections,” Wodzianski said. “As a host, you can help others find the same passion you have for a favorite game and build a new community of gamers.”
Hawkland launched in September 2023 as CSM’s first gaming festival, an event that nearly didn’t happen on schedule: organizers had to reschedule the original date after a tropical storm shut down the campus, and the rescheduled festival still drew about 100 attendees despite competing the same weekend with a major gaming convention in Pennsylvania. That inaugural event, held in the college’s Center for Business and Industry and Campus Center buildings, featured a game library, paint-and-take miniatures, designer demonstrations and vendors, with registration capped at 250 gamers and costing $20 in advance or $25 at the door. Members of the college’s Dungeons and Dragons club served as many of the event’s original in-house game masters.
The festival has grown since then while keeping its basic format. Last year’s event ran a full 12 hours, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and this year’s admission price has dropped to $10 per person, with all proceeds going to student scholarships through the CSM Foundation. Beyond the volunteer-run tables, attendees can browse a game library where they can check out titles to play and enter a prize drawing, watch demonstrations of newly released games, take part in a puzzle swap and shop vendors from around the region. Past festivals have also included food trucks and paint-and-take miniature stations.
“Over the last four years, we have seen hundreds of people come out not only to share the love of gaming, but also to help support future CSM students,” Wodzianski said. “We hope to continue growing this event, as well as the Southern Maryland gaming community.”
Hosts can propose essentially any tabletop game — anything, as Wodzianski has put it in past years, “that can be played on a flat surface” — including board games, card games, dexterity games, role-playing games and miniature battle games. The volunteer sign-up form asks hosts to provide details about the game they plan to bring, which helps organizers build the day’s full schedule of tables and time slots.
The festival’s growth mirrors a broader resurgence in tabletop and board gaming culture over the past decade, driven in part by a wave of new game designers, crowdfunded releases and community-run conventions across the country. Organizers have described Hawkland as an effort to give that community a dedicated home in Southern Maryland, where gaming events have historically been smaller and more scattered than in the Baltimore-Washington region’s larger convention scene.
Additional details about the Sept. 19 festival, including a schedule of games as they’re confirmed and a list of participating vendors, are posted on the Hawkland Gaming Festival website at csmd.edu/hawkland. The event will again be held at CSM’s La Plata campus, in the Center for Business and Industry and Campus Center buildings.
Past festivals have leaned into the convention atmosphere with a few running traditions, including a costume-friendly policy welcoming cosplay alongside the college’s mascot, Talon, and a strictly enforced “cosplay is not consent” rule reminding attendees that costumes are not an invitation to unwanted contact. Organizers have also barred prop weapons from the event in past years as a safety precaution. The college has run a post-event survey after recent festivals, using feedback from attendees to shape scheduling and programming for the following year.
