In the less than two years since Topher Hernandez first moved to the Kansas City area, he has already adjusted to Midwestern life and become one of the coordinators for a social group of board gamers called Bored Without Games. A self-proclaimed “game guru,” he serves as an ambassador of board games for the informal group, which meets several times a week throughout the suburbs to play board and card games, including at the Lenexa Public Market and Servaes Brewing Company. A social worker by trade, Hernandez has been in social work for about 15 years before he switched to information technology. He now works for Netsmart Technologies. He earned his master’s degree in social work at Stonybrook University in New York. He lives in Lenexa with his wife, Vanessa Gonzalez-Hernandez, and their border collie, Rick Gonzalez-Hernandez. When he’s not gaming or working, he’s enjoying the local arts and culture with Vanessa.
I’m from New York, born and raised. You can probably tell from my accent. My wife gets teased about hers a little more. My time in IT helped curb it.
I had the opportunity to transfer out here, so we came and visited. One of the things that we found attractive actually was the board game community. It was very active here, it was very welcoming, so that made us a little more interested in coming, so we came just to visit, check it out.
There was a good amount of arts and culture; it’s nice that we’d drive around, we’d see fountains and sculptures everywhere. The Nelson-Atkins, that’s one of our favorite places to go. It’s free, we keep on saying we need to buy that membership. We definitely want to support them. They have all sorts of interesting exhibits.
There’s a lot more parks and stuff. We go to Sar-Ko-Par quite a bit, just a nice place to walk around. Shawnee Mission Park for our dog, he loves that.
We were living in the suburbs of New York, and we thought there was a little more to do from where we were. We were in New York City, but for us to actually get through to New York, it winds up being a big hassle, and we wanted to do it less and less as we get older. So we’re paying all this money to live near New York and really not taking full advantage of it.
Out here, we’ve enjoyed Kansas City significantly more than we were enjoying New York City just because of convenience, cost of living and all that. We always joke that there’s the “Kansas City 10 minutes.” I can go anywhere I want in 10 minutes. When I was in New York, everything is 20 minutes to get here, and another 20 minutes to get here. It’s just a more organized city, it was built with a little more civic planning in mind.
We were happy with how welcoming it was. I would say it’s board game-related. That’s part of the reason why I got further into the hobby. We’d never showed up to it before, we went to one on Friday, we met a couple people, we had some laughs, we invited some random people to play a party game with us, it was a fantastic moment.
We’ve been talking to those people ever since. We’ve had friends for a year long just because of that one particular night. We meet up regularly, we have a lot of laughs, make fun of each other quite a bit. We have a good time.
That was one of the things — within the first couple of months, we had some friends that we could see ourselves being with for quite some time. And that makes you feel at home real quick. Very quickly, we didn’t feel lonely here.
We’re talking about how friendly people are out here. I’ll tell you the joke we always make: It’s getting “Kansas’ed.” So when you get “Kansas’ed,” we’ll be in a checkout lane, you’re just checking out, and the person will just start talking for like 15 minutes. I didn’t say anything, they’re just being friendly, just having a conversation. They’re telling you about their grandkids.
That is not something that happens anywhere in New York. If someone’s talking to you for more than 15 minutes in New York, it ends in a sales pitch. There’s something they’re trying to sell you. Here, it’s always awkward, like I’m expecting them to try to sell me or give me a business card, and no, they’re like oh, have a good day, just walk away. Just people being friendly.
