Due to family health issues, Linda & Christof Deimer founded NMGS near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a means for the New Mexico gaming community to continue playing online and to support local game stores. This was largely intended to facilitate the “Stay at Home, Play at Home” initiative which was designed to advocate for social distancing & to flatten the curve. Since then the community of New Mexico Gamers Society has grown and continues to thrive.

Initially, the first members of NMGS were from the D&D Adventurers League community at Ettin Games & Hobbies in Albuquerque. Since then, the online community has been growing to include game stores throughout New Mexico from the Four Corners area down to the border, and has gamers that are interested in a variety of games and play styles. While our community members are largely made up of New Mexico residents, this is not a requirement as we have members from throughout the country and even abroad.

The majority of conversations with the gaming community are done in the NMGS discord server, where each event host has the option of having their own text and voice channels and there are several channels for assorted topics, such as announcements of upcoming events, Virtual Table Tops (help & how to), miniature painting, game creation & development, memes, Looking for Group, and so forth. Beyond the Organized play 5th edition D&D there are also event hosts that are running homebrew D&D games, Pathfinder, Cthulu, X-wing, Vampire the Masquerade and more. NMGS is always looking to diversify the availability of gaming styles and systems played even further.

All members must agree to the NMGS Code of Conduct prior to being allowed to join the discord or participate in any NMGS event. Initially NMGS registered events with a scheduling service that allowed participants to signup for open seats which is ideal for organized play or large scale events. After several years organized events through NMGS began to dwindle to virtually non-existent levels as event hosts opted to have more closed groups with occasional openings that were promoted in Looking for Group channels, rather than organized events that had regular open seats. As the scheduling service was no longer being utilized it was decided to cancel the paid service and allow event hosts to organize their events directly with players and promote those events on our calendar and announcement channels.  Whether game runners want to run open seat game sessions or have dedicated closed groups that might occasionally be looking for additional players, NMGS is happy to set them up as event hosts and have their games on the calendar. When a new Event Host is first established NMGS sets them up in the discord to post in the announcements channel & provides them with their own text and voice channels if desired. New Mexico Gamers Society utilizes a number of premium services that are paid for with donations or by the administrators. These services include a premium Roll20 subscription with many books purchased that can be shared on request, hosting and domain services through Dreamhost, & so forth.

The website for NMGS is the home to the ongoing gaming calendar and features a list of New Mexico game stores, a permanent invite link to the NMGS discord as well as the NMGS profiles on various social media platforms, as well as a detailed FAQ that covers some specific questions that new comers often have. The website is designed and maintained by Christof Deimer while he and Linda Deimer both serve as Admins for the group as well as hosting regular events themselves. There are a number of moderators that help with the discord channels & scores of event hosts that help run events.