News

On Sunday, DadLAN held our biggest event to date with 5 simultaneous in-person LANs alongside a remote contingent.

This was our smoothest event to date – local game, nationwide game, food and catching up with friends!
Big thank you to everyone who could make it, either on person or remotely, good to see so many of you in-game and IRL.

It takes a surprising number of people to make events like this happen, so thank you to everyone who contributes to the ongoing running of DadLAN, and to those who make these events possible.
Big thank you also goes to our partners and sponsors:

• WorkVentures
• City of Sydney
• ItsBroken Digital
• Fraser Coast Artisan Pasta Bar
• Domino’s Hervey Bay

What a weekend!

This month was another great success, with the individual subnet games followed by a whole LAN game working a treat!

Big thanks go out to our partner WorkVentures for helping provide hardware and expertise!

Lastly, lock it in Dads – DadLAN April will be on April 14th! Ticket links coming soon in the Discord!

DadLAN is a group dedicated to the mental health and wellbeing of dads (and non-dads) across Australia.

We are a community of over 1000 members in our Discord and run monthly in-person gaming meetups.
Although our in-person events revolve around gaming, our Discord doesn’t with topics as varied as Dad and child health, internet safety, music, tv/movies and coding.

If this feels like a community that you could fit into, please join us on our Discord

Just over a week ago, DadLAN hosted our biggest event to date, hosting approx 50 dads across 3 cities (plus 12 remote players)!

The event was a huge success with minimal lag and technical issues, and plenty of time to play and socialise. Huge thanks goes out to our sponsors helping with both venues and food – WORKSHOP BY POMT – Sydney venue, ItsBroken Digital – Brisbane venue, Scoops and Candy – Brisbane catering.

Tickets are now available for our March events when we will be having Perth (and hopefully Adelaide) join Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for the first time! Speaking of Sydney, do you know of any good venues that would suit our requirements? We are open to suggestions as POMT are unable to host us every month.

Since then, we have hit 1000 Discord members, which is huge! The amount of support the dads are giving each other (not to mention the number of Dad jokes) is truly inspiring.

Did you know we have volunteer roles open? We are looking for an “Operations Bureaucrat” of sorts – venue procurement, government grant applications, sponsorships and the like. All the details are in Discord

If you know of any other dads who would be interested, not just in the gaming, but the general Dad community? Invite them to our Discord

Last Sunday (21/1) we witnessed another highly successful in-person DadLAN at the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre.

Everyone started with a game of Quake 3 before splitting off to play some UT2K4 and OpenRA (Red Alert 2).

It was a great afternoon of pizza, fragging and dad chat. Looking forward to seeing what Melbourne and Brisbane can manage when they come online next month!

As always, join in the chat and help organise on the Discord

DadLAN December was a huge success.

Highlights

• 18 in-person, with 6 remote via DadWAN (including New Zealand!)
• Amazing venue thanks to WORKSHOP | BY POMT – flexible seating, superb internet, and awesome AV integration all around us
• DadWAN – our Wireguard solution – worked flawlessly. David Pirogov even wrote a Wireguard management solution and Discord bot to facilitate self-service config provisioning
• We had 12 laptops and a gigabit switch donated to support this DadLAN and future subnets
• There are over 200 in our Discord channel now (Facebook ads really work!)
• There’s some some great wide-ranging topics being discussed in the Discord, from nerd talk, to dad talk, to music, etc

Coming up:

• Central Coast is spinning up in January
• Melbourne is spinning up in Feburary

DadLAN is a social mental health initiative to bring together Dads to play games and chat. If you have a facility to host us, please reach out.

Join us at https://dadlan.au and see you at the January event!

We hosted our first DadLAN (https://dadlan.au) event on Sunday – a social men’s mental health initiative to bring together Dads in-person and play old school games in a LAN. Kind of like a Men’s Shed for nerds.

Highlights

• There were 9 of us, a great turnout for a first time event
• There is always one person who is great at all games (not me), and now we know who to target next time
• There was some some light Dad chat, and more on the Discord
• We did some troubleshooting, including upgrading the LAN connection with a spare router Toby Vervaart brought in a suitcase full of random equipment
• It was a great, easy-going and fun atmosphere

We’re planning on making this a monthly event, so stay tuned for November’s date by joining the Discord server and if you’d like to run your own local one, we can help set that up with you.