Planning a surprisingly normal 24-hour game day

Normal is whatever you make of it, and this year has certainly seen a lot of people inventing new normals for themselves.

When it comes to our annual charity gaming event, however, things are pretty much status quo compared to recent years.

We've been busy behind the scenes planning our Extra Life 24-hour game day, the culmination of our annual efforts towards helping the Alberta Children's Hospital Foundation.

Thanks to low COVID-19 case numbers in Medicine Hat (eight active cases as of Monday in a city of 65,000), we've made the decision to have our closest friends over starting at 8 a.m. (Mountain time) on Saturday, Nov. 7. It's a list of 14 people, and they've been our social cohorts since the pandemic began in March so we're confident we're being safe. If any one of us becomes symptomatic this week they'll need a negative COVID test in order to be here.

Fundraising is serious business, but it's also a lot of fun! Back in August we earned a 20-sided die from Extra Life and we are putting it to use for our game day.

Here's how it works: You go to one of our team member's fundraising pages during game day, choose an incentive and we'll roll the die. What happens then? Depends what's rolled. See the document here for the wide array of possibilities! I actually made my own hot sauce this year for No. 6.

For US$5 you can get one person of your choice to do what the die roll dictates. Want us all to do it? That's US$50. Want to pick the thing one person does? That's US$25. And if you want to pick something from the list for us all to do, ante up US$100.

We will be live-streaming at least half of the day's activities, which will include lots of board games, video games and even axe throwing at SixOneSix Entertainment.

There are also other members of the #Dominicstrong team who will do their own thing! We encourage you to check them all out by visiting the team page at https://www.extra-life.org/team/dominicstrong. It all goes to the same wonderful place.

And of course if you want to join our team virtually, there's still lots of time! Feel free to click that team link and sign up yourself.

We do it in memory of Dominic, but also for all the kids in hospital and all of those who benefit from it. So many kids from our community in Medicine Hat get help there and this is one way we can give back.