When I find one that seems remotely interesting, there’s only like 4 people marked as attending. Usually a husband and wife and probably their good friend of 10 years.
So I’m hesitant about showing up for board games for example where everybody is extremely close friends except me and they just have this event continuing from when it used to be bigger and have more people.
It’d be fine if the hosts were engaging with new people but I don’t trust that to happen. In my experience the hosts usually don’t know they’re supposed to lead the events and introduce guests and spot and resolve awkwardness unless they were in a sorority.
I imagine I’d show up to scope out the group meetup, but it ends up being a niche location where anybody there is obviously for the meetup. Or worse, I don’t find out they’re close friends until a 3 hour long game already started so leaving would ruin the game.
Or I show up to have beers and hang out and they turn out to be hardcore serious terraform mars players who expect me to know the rules because “why else would you show up to a random board game night?”
This sounds like a lot of worrying but these are all actually based on prior events I’ve gone to with acquaintances from work or new friends I don’t know well. Or like flyers in my apartment for something like a hosted Halloween party.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a good experience unless I’m the one hosting the event and can introduce guests and such, or a very close friend is hosting something so I can call him out to be a better host… But it’s a lot of work to get people interested in doing anything except sitting at home watching Netflix. That’s even before all the planning for the event and doing the hosting.