Have you ever wanted to be a Pokemon Champion? Two campus organizations are coming together to help you do just that.

Coup de Grais- one of the two cosponsors of the event is focused on table top gaming. The group plays everything from D&D to whatever obscure games are brought each week and is open to anyone who loves tabletop games. Not only do they love the classics, but learning about new games is half the fun. One of their biggest goals is to foster development between students who share a common interest.

The same can be said of Pokemon Champions. This club centers around…you guessed it: Pokemon. They are primarily interested in the video game series that started with Red and Blue in the mid-1990s. But fans of any of the games, or the TV series are welcome to come together to share their passion for the Japanese Pocket Monsters.

These two clubs come together once a year to put on one of the biggest Pokémon/ game immersion related events of the year. This year will be the 2nd annual event after a huge success last year. The idea is to recreate the Pokémon game experience in real life right here on campus. Auditions are currently underway to help pick out the 8 volunteers who will be the campus gym leaders challenging students to come and best them using their own handpicked teams on the Nintendo system. Just like in the game, the gym leaders will have themed teams, colorful costumes and hilarious catch phrases to make the experience as immersive a possible. Take a chance at beating them, and if your team is strong enough, you could go home with some custom made shrink-dink EMU gym badges.

The gym leaders will typically be available for challenge at least one hour every day of the week. On some days there will be bonus gym leaders who will only be around one day. You can only use one of these specialty badges to move toward the elite four, however. All of the schedules will be posted at a table in the Student Center, or for this week, the Pokemon Center. Here you can take a break, talk shop and plan how to win your next battle.

If you’ve ever beaten a Pokemon game before, you know that after you prove your mettle and beat all eight gym leaders, you can move on and challenge the elite 4, who will be in EMU’s own hall of champions in the Student Center. Best them, and you will be the Pokemon Champion, as long as you can take on all comers for the rest of the event. This King of the Hill position can become quite competitive as there will be a prize awarded to the overall champion.

The games being played this year are Pokemon X & Y, as well as Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire. There are going to be some restrictions of team builds…it isn’t much of a challenge if someone brings six MewTwos to a Magicarp fight.

The final rules and details will become available as the tournament gets closer. It will take place in March this year. If you are interested at all in helping out, a good place to start would be to contact Brandon Prater, at BPrater1@emich.edu who is organizing the event. The clubs cosponsoring the event both meet once a week. The room occasionally vary, but Pokemon Chamions meets on Mondays from 5-8 and Coup de Grais meets on Thursday from 4-6.