Donate to Expand Latine Representation in Gaming

Hi, Mike here! Me and Claudia are foreign nationals from Mexico living in the US where we have been working out of the southeast for the past 15 years. We work hard, we play hard, and one of our biggest loves is for Games of all sorts. Specially analog tabletop games! In the time we have been here we've had the privileged of participating in the communities that flock around the hobby space, being able to write, design, create and promote games. We attend the convention circuit doing workshops, seminars, game events & organizing spaces for Latin-American creatives and community members who are yet to learn how to better access these spaces. Together, we have put together a community built, led and driven project called the "Latine Lounge". Our biggest effort currently is participating in the two biggest events in the continent for games, GENCON in the US, and MEGA XP in México.

This year we were able to support 35 people from other countries, even being able to bridge the gap to get talented artists and first time designers to get the GENCON grant for underpriviledged, less access imbued talents to Indianapolis for GENCON 2025 to huge success. Not content with that, we were able to provide through our group for free or very discounted housing (We work to get everyone in our collaborating group housing as possible as well as planning way ahead of the convetion to gather as many spots as we can and need to cover our peeps!). We are one of two recognized and supported minority led, diversity representation organizations withing GENCON and are very happy to see the leadership of the convention continue to support us with a full room at ICC-124 where we continue to present, promote and run games for everyone in GENCON for the fourth year running. We are the single, largest concentrated effort for Latin representation and go all in on vetting our space , growing and evolving to continue to offer more ways to support under represented communities. Our goal is to share in the love we have received from this hobby through supporting games created by POCs OR have people from our countries run a diversity of games for all folks attending (you do not need to be Latine to be in our space, we are here to connect with everyone!), showing our talents, our style of playing & diversifying our hobby space gaming experiences. This year we were able to offer more than 110 events through the convention and are shooting to get 160 events for next year. Not content with that, this is the first year we were able to gather funds to pay for a booth which we offered to all and any good standing, constructive, community supporting projects and individual creators to connect with us so we could sell their products. Through our "AXOStories & The Latine Lounge Presents" booth we were able to offer a little bit over 50 games from creators that would otherwise not be able to have a presence in the biggest gaming convention of all of the continent. ALSO, this year, for the first time the Latine Lounge was able to provide a grant to brand new first time creators to produce, edit, print and carry their book, which was so good on delivery that it got picked up by the amazing folk at Indie Press Revolution to distribute through all the conventions in the US. We can be the change and the help that we all needed at some time.

To be able to do so, we will be working to get additional resources upfront, we have historically picked up the bill through our joined efforts, but as we grow we are finding more opportunities that we could develop for the space if we are able to have the funding earlier and not limited by our own individual financial capacity. We have had an enormous luck in finding similar minded projects, conventions and individuals, and will be offering some items through this go fund me for an established donation total. IF you want to support our effort, you can do so or look up at upcoming posts where we will be offering some current, awesome, contemporary games, gear, collectibles and accesories from this lovely hobby, but you can also go ahead and support if you are like-minded to our efforts. Every little bit helps, but we do want to provide something back for people doing it if they so desire it. Some of the items we will be posting in the ongoing communication through here will be sort-of-auctioned as an incentive for individual donation totals. All funds will be used to upkeep costs of all involved activity for our presence in the convention circuits, and to support our hosted guests and collaborators.

If you are a project, an organization or a publisher who wants to collaborate or support us in a particular way, please don't hesitate to contact me or drop me a message, you can find me in most places under @themikeballes in social media (bluesky, Twitter & instagram). We are entirely open to hearing on ways we can help, connect you with our community as well as eternally grateful for all the help and support we have received previously. Our timeline will be ongoing, with our quickest upcoming events for the end of the year in queue, and MEGA XP (The biggest and most central event in México and Latin-America due to be pulled in on 2026 for an April date which is closely upcoming). Thank you for reading along, and we hope to be able to get a beautiful thing become even greater.

Best regards,

Mike Balles