‘I’M a bit of a geek,” says Dave Wright, “I’m perfectly happy to call myself that. But geeky things have become cool.”

By day, Wright works as a project manager for a major retail bank, but after clocking off, he could be anything from a dwarf with magical powers to a Jazz Age investigator on the trail of monsters to a medieval quack doctor with an eye for a fast buck.

It’s all thanks to his love of board games, a teenage hobby that’s become an adult passion.

Next weekend he will play yet another role as he welcomes hundreds of paying ticket holders to Tabletop Scotland, the country’s pre-eminent board game bash.

Around 1200 people are expected to attend the two-day event at the Dewars Centre in Perth, some of them travelling from Spain, Germany and even America to roll the dice for Dungeons & Dragons and more.

“To have people travel that far is amazing,” Wright told the Sunday National. “We’ve had people saying ‘what about using a venue in Edinburgh or Glasgow’, but we have people coming who I don’t think would come if it was in those cities, they’re coming because it’s the gateway to the Highlands.”

Attendees can expect full days of board, card and roleplaying games along with seminars on not only playing to win, but creating their own winning titles, from design and writing to crowdfunding.

With more than 4000 new games released worldwide every year – current hits include Pokemon, Arkham Horror and Pandemic Rapid Response – it’s a massive market and the biggest fan con events in the US can attract 70,000 people.

While the capacity in Perth is more modest, the ambition behind it is not. The first Tabletop Scotland event was held one year ago, and Wright and his three co-organisers poured over feedback to make this year’s even more successful.

Now taking over the entire venue, the event has been redesigned to maximise the audience experience and Wright, whose official title is Convention Overlord, has pulled in a full card of exhibitors and retailers, as well as a library of more than 200 games.

When presales ended last Friday more than 900 tickets had been snapped up, with more held back for sale on the door.

“It’s all about the atmosphere,” says Wright, of St Monans in Fife. “When I’m playing a game, I’m not just thinking about the game, I’m thinking about the people I’m with. Tabletop gaming is all about people.”

Prior to founding Tabletop Scotland, Wright started regular games clubs in Edinburgh and Anstruther. The capital meet-up has now spawned the Open Roleplaying Community (ORC), an online resource connecting players in search of games in Edinburgh and the Lothians. Thanks to the internet, tabletop, card and roleplay gaming has increasingly moved from the spare room to cyberspace, with sessions of top titles available via livestream for keen viewers.

One eight-strong D&D team – Critical Role, who happen to be US voice actors – have amassed 600,000 YouTube subscribers and a crowdfunding campaign to turn their round-the-table exploits into an animated special raked in more than $11 million.

According to Wright, part of that success is due to a renewed interest in analogue gaming, and in Dungeons & Dragons in particular. Perhaps the best known title of its kind, it features prominently in 1980s-set horror hit Stranger Things as the favourite past time of its young heroes.

The third series of the Netflix smash was watched through more than 40.7m subscription accounts worldwide in its first weekend.

“That has absolutely had an effect,” he says, “You can even buy a pack now with the storyline the kids play in the show. There’s also been an effect from shows like Game of Thrones increasing people’s appetite for fantasy storylines. That series is about people and dragons and art and armies and politics – exactly what Dungeons & Dragons is and what roleplaying games can be.”

D&D hooked Wright in as a teenager and hasn’t let go. He prefers to play as an “angry dwarf with paladin tendencies”, and to put that in context for non-players, he turns to Lord of the Rings, saying that he is “more Gimli than Aragorn”.

That’s another fantasy epic that has spawned game and movie spin-offs. The overlap between these fields means even Spielberg shark classic Jaws has had the boardgame treatment, as has the Disney stable. Ravensburger’s Disney Villainous, in which movie baddies Maleficent, Ursula, Jafar, Prince John, the Queen of Hearts and Captain Hook try to out-evil each other, picked up the game gong in the 2019 Toy of the Year Awards.

Wright says the reason for this is simple – it’s all about the strength of the storylines and the characters within them. “Sitting down with some cardboard and some plastic and some wood and using your brain or telling a story or being creative is really all this is,” he says.

“It is a geeky hobby, and it still has a stigma, I suppose, but I don’t feel it. I don’t think any of our attendees would be offended by the word ‘geek’.

“But geeky things have become mainstream. Video games were the focus of geeks only before consoles made it to the mainstream market.

“There’s a game for everyone and you can see that in the type of people who come along.

“At the club in Anstruther and we get a fairly diverse mix of male and female, young and old and different backgrounds.

“There have been many attempts to bring the country’s tabletop gaming community together before and it always fell apart.

“There wasn’t a reason to do it. With Tabletop Scotland, we now have that reason.”

Dice will roll from 9am-11pm on Saturday and 9am-6pm the following day. Tickets for the all-ages will be available to buy on the door.