Team NZS Takes on Extra Life

What is Extra Life?

It’s that time of the year again! Each year, The Meeple Street joins the rest of Team NZS games to help raise money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals through Extra Life for Kids. The concept of Extra Life is similar to those who raise money by running a marathon, but instead gamers who raise money through Extra Life will have a 24 hour gaming marathon in November. All the money raised goes to one of the children’s hospitals in the Children’s Miracle Network. The hospital I am representing is the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, but our team represents hospitals from all around the country. Any money raised goes to help sick and injured children get the help that they need. The vast majority of the donations go to charitable care, which helps children who could not otherwise afford care get the help that they need. Money may also go to education, research and providing special services to children who need them.

Why is it Important to Me?

Extra Life is an important charity to me because it goes directly to helping children in need. As an educator, I often see children in my classroom who are either personally struggling or have a family member struggling. The emotional and physical strain that these students go through is incredibly difficult to watch and not be able to solve. While I cannot fix their problems, or magically make their pain go away, I do like knowing that I can make a small difference by donating to Extra Life. My hope is that by raising money for charities that help provide support to children in need, the families who desperately need the help with have just a little less burden on their shoulders. Additionally, the money that goes into research can help these children by providing state-of-the-art treatments and help children have the best life possible.

Meet Our Champion Child: Ziler

One of the children that your donations will go towards helping is our champion child, Ziler. Despite her young age, Ziler has already gone through multiple brain surgeries because of her Hydrocephalus. That has not slowed her down though! This vibrant young lady is full of bright energy. You may see her playing games on our streams over at https://www.twitch.tv/familygamenightinwv or at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsRHYuIpvaf7xSY4Mdc-0Aw. Make sure you are following along so you don’t miss any of our fun streams! Ziler joined Chris on International Tabletop Day for games of Guess Who and Fibber, and we hope to continue to see her bright smile throughout our campaign!

How Can You Get Involved?

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Our Extra Life Campaign is extremely community focused, we want to use that not only as a way to get donations, but also as a way to get involved and interact with the board gaming community. There are four main ways you can become involved with our campaign: joining our team, donating money to our campaign, sharing our campaign and donating product to our campaign for giveaways.

Our team is always looking to expand and involve new members of the community. If you are interested in joining Team NZS in raising money for Extra Life for Kids, please reach out to me! I would love to get you involved. Our team is very flexible, allowing any team members to be as involved as they would like!

If you are unable to join the team, but would still like to help you could donate money to any of our Extra Life Campaign pages. Here is the link to my page: https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donordrive.participant&participantID=357744. Here is the link to the rest of my team:https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.teamParticipants&teamID=45305. We donate to different hospitals around the country, so you can find one that you feel passionately about and donate to that person.

As a way to give back to the community, anyone who donates any amount of money is automatically entered into our giveaways. Over the course of the next few months Team NZS will be giving away over 85 different things including games like Bunny Kingdom, Werewolf, Werewords, Santorini, Doxie Dash, Codenames and more. In addition to the games being given away, we will also be giving away dice bags, dice, board game and RPG apparel, RPG adventures and more. Each dollar you donate gives you one entry into the giveaway. If you donate $100 you are entered 125 times, and if you donate $1000 you are entered 2000 times. Giveaways will be done through live streams, Instagram Live, Instagram and other means. You do not have to be present in those activities to win, we will reach out to you through Instagram or email if you have won.

If you do not want to donate, you could also share the word about our campaign. By sharing our campaign with the hashtag #TeamNZSExtraLife2019 you will also be entered into our giveaways. Sharing the campaign gets you one entry into those giveaways. If you are someone who uses Instagram, you could share the post listed here. The ability to share our campaign with others allows us to reach new faces! This can be extremely helpful and we appreciate anyone who takes the time to share our campaign!

Finally, if you are a publisher, designer or create product within the board gaming community, you could donate items for our giveaways. These donations allow us to become more involved with the community and give back to those who are helping us raise money for Extra Life! If you are interested in donating anything for giveaways please email me at macko@themeeplestreet.com.

More Community Involvement

Giveaways will not be Team NZS’ only engagement this year though. Join us starting June 28th, at 8pm Central as we live stream our Team NZS D&D Game. We will be streaming live through our Twitch, but if you miss the stream you can catch up with us on our Youtube Channel. We will be coming together as a team and as a party as we explore the Sword Coast. During our live streams we will be playing 5th edition D&D, goofing off some, and doing live giveaways. It is a great way to get to know the various members of our team! This is going to be an exciting game because for many of our team members, this will be their first D&D experience! Tune in to learn more about the characters pictured above!

Many of our team members are also doing milestones as a way to bring some fun into meeting our goals. Check out our individual team pages to see each person’s milestones. My personal milestones are if I meet my halfway point ($250) I will stream an entire game of me playing Meeple Circus with only my non-dominate hand. If I reach my goal ($500), I will reach out to the Instagram Community and let them decide what color I should dye my hair for the entire summer. Want to see me do some other milestones? Throw out some ideas in the comments below!