When Alamo Drafthouse movie-goers showed up to enjoy the long-awaited gaming flick, they were met with an opportunity to actually play D&D, not just watch it on-screen. Dungeons & Drafthouse was an experiment of sorts, and Denver was one of the places where it began. It's now become a monthly event, generally on the first Sunday of each month. The next iteration in Denver will take place on Sunday, July 7, starting at 1:30 p.m., and will last for about four to five hours. It's hosted at all the Mile High theaters, and tickets for the event are $25. (The August event is the rare exception, planned for the second week in August due to the massive gaming convention GenCon happening in the first week.)
Bridget Garraway, Alamo's senior national event manager, says that the idea came from her love for the game. "I played when I was in college, and my passion for gaming totally came back in a rush during the pandemic," she says. "I did what a lot of people did when they were isolated: watched a lot of stuff like Critical Role and Dimension 20, and learned how to play online with friends. It re-spurred my love for it all. And then along came the D&D movie, and it just made me want to spread all that joy."
So Garraway consulted her brother, also a gamer and a Dungeon Master (for the uninitiated, that's the person running the narrative game for the rest of the group). "'What if we did a one-shot home-brew game that's sort of like movie-inspired?'" she proposed. "'Not the movie itself, but with elements that players would recognize and connect back with the movies they love — like the situations they'd be getting into would be similar to famous movie scenes.' He thought it was a great idea." They worked it up, and clearly had a lot of fun doing it. "We called the adventure 'A Night at the Theater,'" she grins.
The first installment of Dungeons & Drafthouse was a smash success in the cities where it was piloted in March 2023. The event offered players some custom dice — and if you know gamers, you know the obsession they have with their dice — and other cool gaming swag. But the game was and remains the focus. The experience was structured to embrace players at all levels — not so easy that experienced gamers would be bored, but also not so complex that new adventurers would feel lost.
After the initial successful reception of Dungeons & Drafthouse, Garraway took a step back to evaluate what to do next. She knew she wanted the program to continue, she says, even after the film had ended its theatrical run, but she knew they had to strategize. "So I joined a bunch of Facebook groups for gamers in the geographical areas in which we were thinking of expanding," Garraway says. "I was able to create this incredibly solid roster of boots-on-the-ground folks from Denver, L.A., New York, Texas and Raleigh. A bunch of amazing creative people that were able to really help us figure things out."
Over time, Garraway and her stalwart party of dungeon developers crafted the ongoing experience they'd envisioned: a monthly event at Alamo Drafthouse bars across the country, with custom maps and pre-generated characters and miniatures and dice and pencils and paper and imagination and story. The event has grown from a handful of pilot cities to nearly a dozen now, and is still trending up.
Don't look now, but there's a goblin-dude there at the bar trying to sleight-of-hand some extra cherries or something.
Alamo Drafthouse
She adds that the philosophy behind Dungeons & Drafthouse is right in keeping with Alamo Drafthouse and what it's always stood for: "Alamo Drafthouse has always been about people from different walks of life, maybe a little on the nerdy side, movie lovers who appreciate a good genre film. That's our audience, and always has been, and it crosses over a lot with the gaming community. D&D, Magic: the Gathering, board games of all types. It's all part of the same passion for a lot of people, and we want those people to come in and drink and bond and connect with each other over a good game. We always want to be that local community theater for our customers. If nothing else, it's great escapism, both gaming and the movies. Sometimes the world sucks. Here's a way to duck out for a few hours and get away from it all, heroic style."
Dungeons & Drafthouse, doors open at 1:30 for the event at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25; for more information, see the website.
