As the first semester of the academic year began winding down in December, we wanted to host an event at Howest Campus Stack that would bring the entire IT cluster together to unwind before the upcoming exam season. On Thursday, December 4th, we did exactly that by organizing a massive, campus-wide Board Game Night!
From 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM, the Campus Stack zone was packed with students from all different IT tracks, plenty of food and drinks, and a massive variety of tabletop games.
The Ultimate Choice: Cybernight or Card Games?
One of our favorite traditions at Campus Stack is ensuring that our core community events don’t stop just because we are running a special social night. Because it was a Thursday, our usual weekly Cybernight was still running in parallel.
This created an awesome, dynamic atmosphere in the room. We had students who were deeply focused on cracking intense CTF security challenges on one side of the room, while right next to them, groups of students were engaged in intense strategic battles over board games. You could literally pivot from debugging code to executing a perfect tabletop strategy in the span of five minutes.
A Big Variety of Games (and Strategies)
We provided a massive selection of games to ensure there was something for everyone. Whether students wanted quick, chaotic card games to play with a large group of classmates or deeply tactical, long-form board games that required heavy thinking, the tables were completely full.
Uniting the IT Cluster
As Community Manager, my favorite part of the evening was seeing the cross-collaboration between different years and tracks. It wasn’t just cybersecurity students hanging out together; we had software developers, network engineers, and systems administrators all sitting at the same tables, sharing a slice of pizza, and laughing over bad dice rolls.
Building a tight-knit tech community means creating spaces where people can connect on a human level outside of rigid lab assignments and lectures. Seeing the energy in the room on December 4th proved that the Howest IT cluster isn’t just a great academic program—it’s a fantastic community.
A huge thank you to the entire Campus Stack team for helping pull the logistics together, to Howest for keeping us fueled with great food and drinks, and to everyone who brought their favorite games and best strategies to the table.
We’ve got a lot more community events lined up for the next semester, so make sure you stay tuned to the Discord! 🎲🍕