The Waypoint
Arena Modifier ✈️
Layover
Pass completion rates are elevated for both teams. Everything moves smoothly through Gander. The Waypoint has always been generous with connections.
Lore
The Waypoint stands in Gander, Newfoundland—once the most important airport in the world, where every transatlantic flight stopped to refuel, now a town of ten thousand that has always known how to take in strangers. When The Almighty Ice arrived, it arrived the way everything arrives in Gander: in transit, expecting to be received. The Layover modifier lifts pass completion for both teams. Everything moves smoothly through The Waypoint. Connections are made. The Geese play like they have already seen the itinerary and found it acceptable. Le Council's analysts flagged the building as the only arena in the league that benefits the visitors as much as the hosts, and could not decide whether to classify this as a flaw. They left it. The Waypoint has always been generous with connections. Dot said the building remembers a week in the autumn when the whole world landed here at once and the town fed them. JM said that happened before Hockay. Dot said she knew.
The Building
A modest, mid-century terminal of a building—low and long, with a flat cantilevered roof and a row of tall windows that throw clean northern light across a terrazzo concourse. It looks less like an arena than like a place you pass through on the way somewhere else, which is exactly what it is. The seating holds only 4,300, the smallest in the league, arranged close around The Almighty Ice in a single gentle bowl with no upper deck and no bad sightline. A mural in the lobby, mid-century in style and unsignable in origin, depicts aircraft and geese sharing the same sky in the same formation. The departures board above the main entrance still works; it lists no destinations, only times, and the times are always correct for whatever is about to happen. The Almighty Ice surface is the truest in the league—flat, fast, forgiving—and the puck moves across it like it is glad to be going somewhere. The benches face each other across center, equal, unremarkable. Le Council noted that visiting teams report sleeping well in Gander. The Council noted this twice.