Gambling Lambs started out life as a simple get together back in 2007 when a few friends decided to meet up in Lee Rosy’s Tea in Nottingham simply to play on their Nintendo DS’ together (mainly to play Animal Crossing as we’d all just made towns and wanted to visit each other to pilfer each others gold and free items help out with the weeding and such.)

We ended up playing a lot of Animal Crossing that night and we decided to meet up again the following week to do much of the same, and lo, we did and much fun was to be had.

Over the course of the next few months where we’d meet up every Thursday evening, we shared lots of different DS game ideas and found a new favourite of Mario Kart DS. A handful of other people (friends at the time and also complete strangers who just wanted to join in) had become part of our little ‘DS Night’ and we raced Yoshi and Dry Bones late into the evening.

DS Night, as it came to be known, proved to be a success and after a whole year, that’s 52 weeks of DS’ing, we’d reached our 1st birthday! We’d never have thought that the few of us meeting up on Animal Crossing to trap each other in pitfall seed holes save up for that extra floor for our houses would turn into such a successful DS gaming night.

For the birthday shenanigans, we all made the effort to bake our own game themed cakes and cookies, and amongst these delightful treats there was a Portal Cake, a Pacman Cake, 1up Cakes and Mario Kart Item Cookies! We had a very fun, cake filled night that night!

Over the next year, DS Night just grew and grew, with more games, more people and bigger ambitions from all the attendees. We found more friends through the night than we cared to remember then around October time 2008, when the annual GameCity festival takes place, we were invited to be part of their programme (allbeit a very small part). The guys over at Pocket Gamer had offered a few prizes and came down to take part in a special DS night where people could compete in game such as Mario Kart to win these prizes! We had a few more people come along after they’d seen it advertised on the site and in the programme and we were glad to be part of such a great event.

After that, time passed and weeks went by where there was much gaming taking place until the February of 2009 when we had our second (yes, second! We could hardly believe it was still going on!) birthday. Again, we all brought home-made gaming inspired cakes and snacks amongst which were a Pipe Bomb cake from Left 4 Dead, a Tetris cake where each tetrimono was an individual cake, more Mario Kart cookies and a Nintendo DS cake.

Over the next few weeks, after 2 years of DS Night, we noticed a problem. We’d saturated the Nottingham social DS market.. All the people that wanted to get together and play DS together was already attending and we couldn’t do anything new with our night.

So we formulated a plan.

We decided it would be the best idea and the most fun to expand DS Night to incorporate all types of games. Turn it into a ‘general’ games night. Then anyone can turn up and play any kind of game. It was the perfect idea.
We got together over several weeks to discuss what needs doing. We needed a new name. We needed to spread out the events as all games every Thursday would be too much. We needed to promote.
And we did it all. We changed the name, after much thought, to Gambling Lambs (As it is now known). We thought of hundereds of names we could go by, but everything we thought of was too related to a specific type of game, be it Video Game, Board Game or Card game etc, so we chose something that was entirely un-game related but still showed our sense of play. WordPlay.
We settled on the idea that we’d hold the event once a month, to make it more attendable as if it were weekly, we’d see a lot of people not turning up and the night would go stale.

We had the best of luck in getting the word out as well, as David (who helps run the event) works closely with the gaming industry and can spread the word and also that GameCity (Mentioned above) had taken notice and graciously promoted the night for us on their website and included us in part of their GameCity Squared launch.

Everything that could be done had been done and we were officially launched on Thursday August 6th 2009. DS Night had been Reborn!

Now, our future aims are to fully establish ourselves within the local community and promote ourselves more widely to get a much more variety of people attending as we want people to experience all kinds of games that they wouldn’t normally have thought to try. We want to get people gaming! And we need your help!

Remember to come along!

Remember to spread the word.

Remember to play!