 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, we are a webcast, an online show. Call us what you want, but that description is up for debate for some people. But whatever you want to call us, we are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. If you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We record all of our shows and you can go to our website, which I will show you at the end of the show, and watch any of our recordings. We keep the recordings there, any presentations or handouts or documentation people have used, and we save any links that people have shared into a delicious account that we have. So everything you can need to be there. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, mini training sessions, demos. Basically our only criteria is that it is a library related, anything library related, and we will put it on the show. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations, but we also bring in guest speakers from outside the Commission, and that's what we have today online with us are actually two people who are also remote from each other and remote from us this morning. We're just crossing the whole country today. John Papas is at Bucks County for library and he's in Pennsylvania, over on the east coast for us. There we go. Nice pictures you got there. I guess I love that game by the way, but I'm sure you'll get into that. And Marty, I had a question. First, was actually in Huntsville, Alabama at the moment. Used to be here in Nebraska previously, but has now moved on. So we're yeah, we've got Marty and John both in the line here going to talk to us about board games. Lots of people play board games, of course, and now libraries have been getting into it for a long time, and so I'm just gonna hand over to you guys and let you take it away. Awesome. No pressure. My name is John Papas. I'm from Bucks County Library. I'm a library manager here. I've been developing a board game collection for our system. We have about seven branches and we have about a hundred games currently in circulation right now. My eyes are not anywhere near that bloodshot as the picture looks. And I am co-presenting with Marty first. Yeah. My name is Marty first. I am currently here in Huntsville, Alabama. As Chris has said previously, I was in Omaha Public Library, and that's one of the libraries along with Messenger Public Library in North Aurora, Illinois, where I helped create a monthly board game night, which hopefully will turn into a board game collection. That's up to the people who are still there. But yeah, this is gonna be, I think, the second time John and I have presented on this and I'm really excited about it. It's gonna be really cool. All right. Do you want to talk about gloom a little bit or should I? Sure. Yeah. I can talk about gloom. These are two fan cards that we did for Halloween because we were feeling silly from gloom. Gloom is by Atlas Games. It's a storytelling card game with kind of like an Edward Gory vibe. You have a family, I think it's five members, and you want horrible, horrible things to happen to them because the more horrible things happen to them, the lower their worth score is, and when you want them to have as low as possible a score before you kill them off. But as you're trying to do horrible things to your family, everybody else is trying to do wonderful things. It's a married and all of these wonderful things to alter that score. It's really fun. It's a great game for Halloween. The storytelling aspect, you can go really, really far with it or you can just kind of keep it nice and light. It's great for that. It's an adorable game, especially if you like Edward Gory. Okay. So before we get started, we're gonna do a little bit of an intro on why are we even talking about board games. Why designer board games? We're all used to monopoly and risk and sorry and all that. But designer board games promote creativity and increase social engagement across generations so much better than those do. They're new to everybody in a lot of cases. They can be thought-provoking and challenging as well as fun. But on top of that, they help build a culture of positive social interaction between players, which are often of different age groups or social groups. I know, John, you had a bunch of the Golden Gamers, I think is what it was, which was specifically seniors. You can tell they're having a blast. Everybody can come together to play board games. It doesn't matter how old you are, how young you are, what your background is. It's just a great catalyst for that. I think one of the best-selling points I had for board games and board game events was the multi-generational aspect. It's really easy to get a whole bunch of people, families, teens, older adults, seniors, all together into one room playing games. Right. So before we, you can go to the next one. So if you've never, you know, haven't played board games since you were a kid, it can be a little intimidating. But most places have what we like to call the friendly local gaming store. And, you know, these are just some tips on, you know, when you go there, what you should do. First of all, go there. Look around, see what's going on. See what kind of people are there. Are there families? Are there, you know, 20s and 30s, stuff things, older adults? And find out what they're playing. Find out if that space is welcoming to new people. If they're welcoming, you know, welcoming to all ages, genders, families, or if they cater to, you know, a specific set, like the more experienced gamers. Do they cater only to like Magic the Gathering type, you know, trading card people? Do they cater only to the miniature Warhammer large scale battle type games? You know, those are very different game shops than board game shops. You should be able to ask the staff about the games, and they should be incredibly eager and willing to help you. And they may even be open to building a partnership with your library. I know at both Messenger and at OPL with Saddlebrook, we were able to reach out to local game stores and get them to help us not only teach us about games, but also lend us some demo copies and help us promote as well. They can be an invaluable resource for that. Lastly, most game stores have open gaming nights, where you can come and play a game from their open box library. And that's a really great way in addition to some other ways we'll talk about to get to know the game before you either introduce it at a game night or add it to your collection, because really the only way to get a game to understand the game is to play it. Play games you've never played before, or that are outside your comfort zone. You know, if you've never played a cooperative game before, play one. If you've never played a crazy political strategy game before, play one. You're not going to break it. I've had mixed results with with game stores. Some have been great, and some have been horribly unwelcoming. So it definitely varies. I think a lot more game stores that are staying in business are becoming more sort of entry gamer friendly. So they're promoting more family games and more gateway games, and they're trying to make the space look brighter and more welcoming. So it really depends. I've had I've had a few bad ones recently. The the the local game store that just moved into my neighborhood has been really great. And they actually have a small demo library of games that you can play right there. And they've recently offered to let our library use those for game nights. Yeah, I was gonna mention that too. We have a gaming store here that I go to every now and then. And we're lucky it's they are very welcoming everyone who's there. You can just walk up and stand next to people playing a game and watch and they'll start telling you how to play it. You know, strangers will say, All right, we're going to play. Take it to ride over here. Who's up and a whole bunch of people don't know each other. Just go to the table and play. And it is very welcoming. But you do, I think, have to be brave about it. Sometimes when you first walk in, you may not realize that these people they might be friendly, but they're just in the middle of a game right now. But once you sit down next to someone or you know, they want people who plays games want to share, they want to bring you in. I think that's the kind of feeling I got. Yeah, there's a little bit of online research you can do to when in Aurora or in North War, when we were first looking to content game stores, you could kind of tell from their websites and Facebook presence and whatnot, what kind of game store they were. You know, if you see lots of pictures of people playing those, you know, Warhammer type games or everything on their website is all about Magic Tournament, Magic Tournament, Magic Tournament. It's not necessarily going to be what you're looking for. We were lucky enough in North War there were multiple game stores so we could find one that would, you know, had what we needed and would work with us. In addition to game stores, you know, that face-to-face people thing. YouTube is a wonderful, great place to learn about games. It's one of the first places that I look when I'm researching a new game because I don't have to leave my desk. And I've even had program participants coming into Monthly Game Night tell me that, oh, hey, before we got here, we looked at the rules to Inkling Gold. So we kind of know what's going on, which was great. Tabletop is a show hosted by Will Wheaton on Geek and Sundry and I think they're in their fourth season now, third or fourth season. They play through lots of different titles and it's a great way to get a sense of the social interaction aspect because they're not just playing the game. They're not, it's not a tutorial on how to play the game. They're just playing the game. So you get to, and they're talking about it and whatnot. It can be a little bit more than, like, PG-rated. So it's a good idea if you want to just put it work. Not always, but wear headphones. Starlet Citadel is an online board game store. So they give lots of quick reviews of popular games and they update about once a month, but they've got a pretty good backlog as well. They are a store, so they don't get super critical. They're saying, hey, buy this game. Watch It Play is done by Rodney Smith, who at this point is a professional game explainer. So he does full playthroughs of board and card games. It's a great way to understand the mechanics, because it's like lots of closeups on the actual materials and whatnot, and he's teaching you how to play the game. It's great for brushing up to learn a new game, or, you know, I haven't played this in a year, I can't remember, and I don't have it in front of me, kind of thing. Board games with Scott. It's Scott Nicholson, and he is the grandmaster of games and libraries. He's specifically about games in libraries. He's got over 70 videos. He's the go-to source for what we do. He doesn't update that channel anymore. Most of the games he's talking about are still very popular and in print. He's also created lots of other resources for gaming and libraries. Like everybody plays at the library and a gaming and libraries video course. And from my experience, he's really accessible. You know, he's on social media. If you have a question, you know, reach out to Scott. Don't, like, spam him, though. Also with Starlet Citadel, their videos are usually between three to five minutes long. The production quality is really good. I've tended to either include a link to their videos on, with like a QR code, if anyone still wants to use those, that goes out with the games that circulate. So that there's a really quick and easy way of either learning whether or not you like this game, or giving you a very brief rules overview to understand how to play. Watch it played can go for like an hour sometimes. Like, they're they're pretty, pretty long, thorough playthroughs. And Scott Nicholson is just awesome. I realize now that three of these resources are in Canada. They are so far ahead of us. Starlet Citadel is a Canadian store, Rodney is Canadian, and Scott just moved up to Canada, being all academic and stuff. Yeah. Well, and I think one that's not on here is the Dice Tower, I want to say. They do reviews, but they all, then they talk about the mechanics and their experiences with the games as well. So. All right. Well, the, I'll say that the major resource for learning about board games and which board games you would want to use for your library is board game geek. It is basically the internet movie database of board games, which means that, you know, 80% of the stuff could be incorrect, so you need to be careful when you're looking through it. It lets you look up games by mechanism, lets you look up games by theme, player count, length of play. So all those things you should be taking into consideration when you're looking into purchasing a game, you can search through board game geek. The database is huge. They have so many games that it will be almost overwhelming. So we're going to take a quick tour through the site and work through a few of the elements. It is, however, an important note. It's used mostly by enthusiasts and hobbyists. So there's definitely a skew towards the games that are included and rated. So there's like a top one. I think that the number one board game, apparently in board game geekdom, is Twilight Struggle, which is a two-player Cold War card game that can take a very long time. It's very relatively complex. So despite it being number one, it may not be the best fit for a gateway game sort of collection at a library. We're at board game geek. And a few things I want to point out. Down here we have the hotness. I hope everyone is seeing this. This will show you currently the most popular games that are coming out. It changes often. It's basically stuff that has a lot of buzz around it. So if you're looking at games that are maybe ready for pre-order or stuff that has long been out of print, but people are interested in it again, this is a good place to look through. Generally for my use, I use the advanced search. And this will let you search through a few things. So if you are looking at starting a new library collection, and you wanted the minimum age to be six years old, so you wanted generally, you know, games for most age groups, you could, you don't want two-player games. You want high level. You want to be able to play with a lot of people. So we'll go four to eight. And you want games that are going to play a minimum of, we'll go 45 minutes. Submit. And it'll pull up games that hit all those criteria for you. You can also go by category or mechanism if you want to get really specific. I use that a lot when I'm trying to create the set list, you know, the menu for game night. So that way you don't have, every single game isn't the same mechanic. Or when I'm trying to figure out a scaffolding, like, well, we want to start doing deck building. But what's a really easy deck building game versus one that's a little bit more complex. And also this is going to show you one of the difficulties with using board game geek is right now it pulled up all the games according to that criteria, and not a single one are in, are in print. Okay, there's one. Scenet. Disney is in print. But most of these are out of print. You can tell they have a shop on the side. If they'll usually show like the Amazon cost and the MSRP of the game, if they don't, it's a good chance that it is currently out of print. So I mean that is unfortunately one of the difficulties with using it. So you just go back tweak your search a little bit and, and give it another go. The other thing you can do is browse by games. And this will show you all the games. So there's almost 80,000 games in this, in this database. And this will show you the top rankings. And there's Twilight Struggle, Terra Mystica, Caverna through the ages. These are all very fairly complex games. They're all mostly in stock. You'll see how much they cost. They're a little bit pricey. I'd like to go through family games. And this will give you more gateway games, more approachable games to newcomers. And they should have an ability to, I feel bad about the complaint about my library's internet access connection. There we go. All right, so we have 1500 family games. That's a little bit better. And these will be games that are almost all in my current collection. So Seven Wonders, Stone Age, Pandemic, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Carcassonne, Small World, King of Tokyo. These are generally easier games. They're not as complex as some of the other games we saw. These are ones that are generally a good place to start your collection with. And I'm sure we're going to have, I think we have a question break. Questions, yeah. Yeah, sure. Does anybody have any questions? While we're here, does anybody, if you want to type into your questions section or go to webinar, you can do that or I can unmute you and you can ask your question that way. We do have a comment when you're talking about going to the gaming stores and stuff that Dave McStorff, who's the director here at our South Sioux City Public Library, says that they have a Su-Land Gamers group that comes to the library and teaches people how to play games. That's amazing. That is awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of times if you use meetup.com, which we'll talk about later, you can almost, you're almost guaranteed to find a local group that would be approachable about teaching games or demoing games. And on board game geek where you were, I think, is that where I've seen where there are local forums for your local area where you can see what's going on? Yeah, I don't use the forums that much, but yeah, they do have a pretty robust forum. Again, I don't use it that much only because it tends to be more hardcore gamers or more experienced gamers. Enthusiasts. Enthusiasts. Very serious, yeah. So if you're just jumping into this, I generally sort of avoid the forums unless you have specific questions about a game. In that case, when you go to the actual game, you'll find rules, questions, player aids. Right, yeah. Strategies, all sorts of stuff. Reviews, videos. We do have a comment about board game geek, actually someone who is also a gamer says a new version is currently in beta of the website, so hopefully it will be more friendly for new users. Yes. Great. I've heard that that was happening for a while. I can't wait. I don't know what my brain will do when I see a user-friendly version of board game geek. Are there cry or rejoice or both? Absolutely, I'm just scared. Now we have some questions. Go ahead. I would say there's so much good information there, but navigating that site can be really difficult. Yeah, I've had that. We do have a whole bunch of questions coming through. I wonder if these are things that you're going to be covering, like how many copies of games do you recommend for a game night? Do you circulate them? Do you let them leave the library? Must-haves, budget amounts, is that kind of stuff you're going to be getting into? Yep. All right, we'll hold some of the questions in, huh? Yeah, so those are the kind of questions that are coming in. So why don't we have you guys continue then and we'll see if any of this stuff doesn't get mentioned and we can definitely go back and make sure that anything you guys are talking about that you guys are asking about needs to be covered. Sure. All right, I'm going to discuss a few elements that make modern games different than the games that you may have played as a young adult or a child. Let's be in the background screaming. I'm playing an awesome game called Letters from White Chapel. I was playing Jack the Ripper, so maybe not appropriate to some, definitely a more adult theme on that one. So most of the modern board games have deeper strategy and more tactical decisions than you may be used to. Strategy is a long-term thinking. Strategy is more short-term decisions. For example, in the game Carcassonne, the strategic element is to decide which potential paths to victory a player may try to take. She may try to build larger cities, focus on farms, build really long roads, or even more broadly, she could plan on playing a defensive game or a nice game, building her own cities and roads and farms, or play an offensive game and attempt to block other players. The the tactical elements come from the random tiles drawn each round. As the game board changes, players will have to make quick decisions in order to solve smaller, more pressing problems. If you compare this to something like, I don't know, sorry, you have much less decisions, much less strategy or tactical decisions to make. So also it's a good thing to see how what you would prefer to play. Do you like planning ahead or do you prefer thinking on your feet personally? I prefer tactical games. I'm a horrible strategic planner, but I really like watching a game board change and have to switch my tactics. So a few games that would be good for strategy would be Power Grid, Dominion, or Agricola. And good games for tactics would be Dixit, Small World, and King of Tokyo. Later on in the talk I will show you some sheets I have for each of these games that you'll be able to download or peruse at your leisure, explaining each. Another attribute of designer board games is a wider decision space. A wide decision space provides players with more options, more choices, and more agency during their turn. A wide decision space creates a rich engaging and mentally chunky experience. However, a wide variety of options can easily overwhelm and intimidate new players, causing stress and frustration. So the more decision space you have in a game, the more complex the game likely is. The more rules you'll have to learn and know. So if people are used to board games with a single sheet of paper as the rules, most of these games, even the simpler ones, will have more than that. So this is also why it's important to teach, host, and explain some of these games. A few games that would be good for a small decision space. Incan Gold, which the core decision is, do you go or do you stay? It's a press your luck game. Forbidden Island, you have four actions on your turn. It's a cooperative game. You can either move, sandbag, or keep a tile from flooding, or collect treasure. Ticket to ride, you have one of three actions. You can take cards, lay down tracks, or collect more tickets to score points. So those are some that have a small decision space and they're also generally easy to teach pretty quickly. For a larger but still manageable decision space, you have games like the Manhattan Project, where you have a wide array of things to do during your turn. Stone Age, where you similarly have, you can collect different resources, you can build huts for points, you can collect carriages, a lot more stuff you can do, and also Takinoko, which is an adorable game with a panda, but you do have a lot of choices in those games. So, oops, player interaction. We're going to be discussing that a little bit more later on in the talk, but I think it's one of the more important decisions you have to make when you're developing a collection is how you want your players to actually interact with each other. It's something that may be overlooked. I'm going to keep on hitting that. See, innovative mechanisms. Game mechanics are the inner workings of a game. The engine under the hood that moves the game along. Game mechanics are broader than just the written rules of the game, but the rules will help realize the mechanics during gameplay. Some games are simple, with only one or two mechanisms governing how a game is played. Some more complex games have several different mechanisms blended together, existing separately, or even future new and novel game mechanisms that have not been used before. A good example is deckbuilding as a game mechanism. It is now used in quite a few different games, but Dominion I think was the one that was the first one to use it. So, when it came out it was a completely new game mechanism that people were able to interact with and designers to design new games around. It's also a good way of referring new players to games they may like. If they like a particular game that has a particular mechanic or mechanism in it, it's a good chance that they may like similar games to that. So, if someone plays a game called Sushi Go, which is a card drafting game, there's a good chance that they would also like Seven Wonders, which is a more complex card drafting game. So, narrative potential or theme. These are the story elements that provide the context for a game. If mechanisms provide a framework and sort of like a scaffold for how a game operates, the theme provides the color and fills out the game. Themes can be historical in nature. They can be nearly non-existent or just merely pasted on. They don't play a huge part in the game, or they can blend well into the mechanisms of the game to create an immersive experience. A good example is letters from Whitechapel, the game I'm playing in the picture. The mechanics are really simple. Jack moves around the board. It's a map of London that you are moving around secretly. The rest of the players are all investigators trying to hunt you down and locate where you are. It's very simple, but it's very immersive. If you're playing Jack, you're going to feel trapped and cornered as investigators sort of move in on to where you are. If you are playing as the investigators, you can definitely feel frustrated and confused if Jack is playing a particularly good game and moving out of your way. Okay, so just like pretty much anything we offer at libraries, not all players are going to like every game. Not all readers like every book that you offer at a book club. That's okay. You just need to find out what kinds of games your patrons expect and like to play and then try to choose games that go with that. Some games are going to be loud and boisterous and just go crazy while others are going to be more quiet and studious with everybody kind of looking at their pieces and figuring out what to do next. That's something to keep in mind when you're deciding what games you're going to put on your set list, your menu for board game nights. If you do in-house checkout, you get it from the desk and you're going to be sitting in the library with the game. Circulating is not that big of a deal, but a nice variety is good. We've already talked a little bit about social interaction. We're going to get into it a little bit more in depth now. I would say we'd stop for questions but I feel like we're going at a good clip. I don't know if there's any more so far. Yeah, I'd say keep on going and you're probably getting to a lot of the questions that they've been there and then we'll see at the end if we need to jump back to any of them. Alright, so like we've already said, social interaction is one of the biggest appeals of modern board games and how much and what kind of interaction is going to depend on the game. The first type we'll talk about are solitary games. They still have player interaction but it's really minimal. Instead of looking at what someone else is doing or trying to bump them off, players are focused on their own thing, whether that's building their own deck of cards, collecting a set, or some other kind of mechanic. It's kind of this alone together situation. You're competing for resources, goals, or time that can be rich, engrossing, and a lot of fun. They may not take the main stage your game night or be the things that get checked out a lot, but they are definitely a great thing to have. The next one here is friendly competition. This is my favorite kind of game. These games usually involve a shared board with everybody having their own objectives. The picture here is of ticket to ride, so you're trying to create routes with your color trains to get from one city to another in order to score points. You can obviously get in each other's way because there's only one board. Because you're sharing those limited resources or navigating that same space, you're trying to get there first. There's that sense of friendly competition. You're not out to get anyone. There's no player elimination usually in these, but your actions get in the way of somebody else, like claiming a route that would have helped someone complete a larger strategy and ticket to ride. So friendly competition, you see a lot of that, you know, strategy versus tactics thing as well. You may say, oh, I'm going to go this way. Oh wait, no, I can't. Now I have to, you know, think on my feet and figure out a different way to achieve that goal. The office will. Compared to friendly competition, you also have direct competition. They have that confrontation element and they can be viciously cutthroat. They can also be really intense and fun, but when playing in a library setting, it's good to keep a good idea to keep an eye on everyone just to make sure everybody's having fun. It's really easy to get, you know, these can get really intense. Players take actions that cause other players to lose and that's what makes these games so engaging. It isn't everyone's style, though, so it's a good idea to balance direct competition games with their direct opposite, which is cooperative interaction, which we'll get into. This guy's playing Small World, where you battle other players with fantasy races per control of a small island in order to accumulate points and win the game. It's a lot like risk only. It's, instead of having, you know, the entire planet Earth, you have this really small island and you have orcs and dwarves and elves instead of countries. So next is cooperative interaction. This is really unlike any of the other board games we've talked about, because instead of competing against each other or even competing, you know, to be the the person who wins, you're all working together to achieve a common goal. The game is pretty much in all of these cases trying to beat you. Either that's killing you off or, you know, making it so that you lose. The game itself is the antagonist, then. All right. I'm going to burn through a few game categories. These will be the type of games that you'll have in your collection. A lot of these will be pretty familiar to you, but let's start. Classic games. All right, so these are the abstract board games that most people are practically born recognizing and knowing. Games like chess or go, checkers, cribbage, dominoes, partizzi, some of your standard 52 card deck card games. These are pretty common. We have these in our library. We did not have these checked out, because most families have them in some form at home. We do have a lot of these games out for play inside the library, and I think a lot of libraries do that already. Party games. This is one of my favorite ones. This one is called Skull. As you can tell, it's got loads of skulls in it. We tend to think of party games as trivia games or simple dexterity games or games where you're pretty much embarrassing yourself in front of your friends or family. However, party games are usually ones that encourage social interaction throughout the entire game, rather than focusing on winning or strategy. They are distinguished from more complex games by a simpler setup, quicker to learn rules, minimal components, and accommodations for larger groups. All these elements are really good for games circulating through your library. With a simple setup, you can teach a game at your Cirque Desk to try to upsell it a bit. Quick to learn rules mean it's more accessible to people who haven't played games in a while. Minimal components means it's an easier check-in and check-out and less lost pieces, which I'll talk about later. And also, it's accommodating for larger groups. I find that a lot of the games that move at the library are games that play usually more than four people. So games where you can get a good six or seven people playing tend to be the ones that are more popular. If you want to know more about Skull, it's a really simple bluffing game. It's like a condensed poker. You're basically bluffing as to whether or not you have a Skull hidden on those little coasters there. It's also a good game to bring with you to bars, as you can tell from the picture. Gateway games. Gateway games are the core of our circulating collection. A gateway game is any game with simple rules, easy to teach, plays in less than an hour, and generally are good for attracting new people to the hobby and still engaging for people who have been playing games for years. These are games that can take the gaming experience one step beyond your standard mass market games like Monopoly, since experiences will vary across different people. Making a definitive list of gateway games to use for your library is difficult. Either way, if you're planning for one, these will be a good one to have the majority in. At this point in time, you can find a lot of these gateway games at Target, Walmart, Barnes & Noble. There's a lot of good online retailers. They're inexpensive, so compared to a couple of years ago, these are a lot easier to find. Filler games are a bit simpler. They're games that you generally play in between larger games. These are games that I also have in our circulating collection. I use these more for game groups. They have not circulated particularly well at my library, and although they are simple, they're easy to teach. They play fast. They have really cute cards and pictures like Sushi Go, but they have not been all that popular and I'll show you a little later why I think that is. That being said, if you want to convince people to get into board gaming, they're a good one to use at gaming groups to play fast or to use at a CERC desk or a reference desk to just demo real quick. Fake games, these are ones that are really good to set up in front of people. They're ones that when you see people playing them, you want to jump in and play as well. This is Scott Nicholson's category. They're very visually attractive, like the game Rampage in front of you, now known as Terror in Meeple City, because they probably got sued by whoever made the video game Rampage. It's a game that when you set up and people and you start playing it, you're going to stand up, you're going to cheer, you're going to have a lot of fun, people are going to walk around and wonder what you're doing. It's not a somber experience. These are also the ones I tend to play at board gaming groups in the library. And people will stop by and wonder what we're doing. So we put this section in with game categories, even though these can really be applied across the board. So a way to think about these is that games exist on sort of a scale between thematic on one end and strategic on the other. Thematic games are games that are more thematic, tell a story through the gameplay. We had the picture earlier of John playing letters from Whitechapel. They're incredibly immersive. People are going to be talking about that game. I love using that picture, because you can just tell that that was a moment, you know. They're going to be so immersed they're going to tell those stories. There are lots of different kinds of thematic games. There are fantasy ones, post-apocalyptic, science fiction, horror, and games that have a historical context. Like this one is bootleggers and letters from Whitechapel, which we saw earlier. On the other side of that scale are the strategic games. If in thematic games you're telling a story through the gameplay, you know, how the game is played, in strategic games you're using those mechanisms to solve a problem. There are often many different ways to win, and any theme that's applied is kind of just a dusting, you know. This is why the color or the cards are this color, or this is why we're using this type of art. Interaction is a lot more gentle. There's less direct competition, and more competition for resources or control of the board. Players are going to be more focused on their own little tableau or what they've got going on, rather than how they can get in somebody else's way or knock them out. All right. So I know we're going to get into game mechanics. I'm assuming that we're answering questions as we go here with just what we're doing. Like we said before, game mechanics are how the game works. It's what the gameplay looks like, what kind of actions the player take. They're the platform, sort of, you know, that under the hood thing, that the theme and the strategy and the social interaction are riding on top of. We talked a little bit about cooperative games earlier as a social interaction. It's also a mechanic. They're the games where instead of people playing against each other to emerge the winner, they're all a team trying to beat the game, which is trying to destroy them. I made the realization last night Jumanji, although it's fictional, is kind of the ultimate cooperative game because the game is literally trying to kill you. But some great gateway games for cooperative, the cooperative mechanic, are Forbidden Island or Pandemic. Forbidden Island, you're trying to get these treasures and escape the island before it floods. And Pandemic, you're all medical researchers and sort of the support team for that, trying to rid the world of four diseases before everybody dies. Real-time games are kind of a mad scramble. Most games are work on that turn-based mechanic that we're very used to when we think of traditional classic games. Real-time games, instead of working on that, everybody's doing something at once. It's that simultaneous action. Escape, Curse of the Temple is a great real-time action game. And there's a space theme one that the name is escaping me right now. John, do you remember it? Dice-Dool. Thank you. It's okay. Worker placement games involve getting your worker pawn usually like a little game piece to a resource or an area before someone else does because obviously only maybe one or two pawns can be in that space. You have lots of options, but if someone gets to something before you, you have to think on your feet to bounce back. Two great way, two great gateway worker placement games are Stone Age and Lords of Waterdeep. Lords of Waterdeep is fantasy-themed with the Dungeons and Dragons universe. Area control is basically risk. You've got a shared game board and whoever has the majority of influence in a particular area on that board gets some sort of advantage like in risk, you know, seven extra minutes at the beginning of every turn if you have Asia. Since this mechanic is based on geography, a lot of these games have either a political or military theme. Las Vegas is a great introduction to this, so is Small World. All right, Games Collections. I think it'd probably be a good time to maybe answer some of the questions that have come up related to this so far. Yes, absolutely. Let's see. Well, and this is actually something, what games are must-haves for a new collection? Like what's your top 10? I have a list of six at the end of this talk. Okay, perfect. All right, so look for that. How about a reasonable budget amount for a beginning of collection for a small library that serves about 5,000 people? The budget I had for my first wave was about $700, and that was more than enough. I think the seed collection that I will list at the end cost about $200, so you can knock that in half, and I think that'd be more than enough. If you end up, the circulating collection will move, and you'll rarely see them. The only reason I think you'd need more is if you wanted to have more gaming groups at your library, if you want to have more gaming events, then you tend to need maybe a better menu of games than just circulating. And we have a question related to that. For doing a gaming night, do you recommend multiple copies of the same game or just a whole bunch of different ones? I do both. I generally have a nice selection of games, and then I feature one game. So if the featured game was Ticket to Ride, I would have one or two copies of Ticket to Ride. I personally have two copies. The library has a copy, so I can get enough of that. Otherwise, when I advertise it, advertise the program and say we're featuring that game, I ask people to bring it in if they have a copy. Generally, one or two people will, and that usually gives me enough. If I only have one copy, then I'll have a lot of gateway games out there, a lot of filler games, and then I will offer to teach that one. So newcomers will have a game that they can be taught and feel comfortable, and then people who are more experienced have been to a few events or have played games for years, will bring their own or sit down with other people and play their own game. And then the list of games you're going to have, we have a couple of questions about wondering if you're going to have a list for recommendations for particular age groups, like certain games for teens, older, younger, I don't hear, but the games I recommend to start are family games and they're usually good between, I would say, eight on up. I mean, they're generally simpler, but I can totally recommend games for teens or types of games for teens. That was one of the specifics. Yeah, it was, do you recommend, I probably want to get teens involved in there. These were a good one. I would say social deduction games are absolutely the best. Those are games like, see, One Night Ultimate, Werewolf, Coo, Masquerade probably. Masquerade, yeah, totally. Bang the dice game if you don't mind, like a Wild West theme where you potentially are shooting people. It's pretty delight. It'll probably be fine. I mean, so you want games with a lot of social interaction. So those social deduction games, if you go to Board Game Geek, and search for social deduction games, you will find a load of them. They're easy to teach. They play large groups, and the resistance, and the resistance avalanche are another good one. They're inexpensive. They're easy to set up. The rules you'll learn pretty quickly. And throughout the game, everyone's going to be laughing, lying, bluffing, naming each other. So it'll be boisterous. And I think you'll find generally teams and young adults, and also adults. Oh, adults. Absolutely, yes. Resistance avalanche almost always comes out. And I haven't seen One Night Werewolf since we bought it like six months ago. It's been constantly being used. Yeah, it's great. And actually that's what a lot of our questions now that I've got left here are specifically about the mechanics of circulating the games. Do you let them move the library? Best practices? How do you... What about when parts go missing and all that kind of thing? All right. So is that... I can talk about. There we go, yeah. So cataloging. This was one of the biggest issues and concerns with the games is how we're going to catalog them. What I ended up doing and here I'll show you one of the games is roll for it. Remember when I was saying the smaller games weren't searching that well? I think this is potentially why. We loaded the front of the cover with labels. You can't tell what it is. You can't tell if it's fun. You don't know anything about it other than it has 30 cards, 24 dice, and rules. So I think these are good. I like having each of the games has an inventory list in it. I made these alignment sheets. I'll provide a link later. This goes into each game. It shows a description of the game who it plays, how many, and then gives a detailed inventory. Each of these items are bagged in the box. So for the train cars, there are 240. We have 45 in each bag. And then we have a bag with extra cards, our extra cards, cars. And then the cards are separated into bags as well. Basically every component is bagged up and labeled. The boxes then go on the shelf like this. We have them banded on the side. These are four-corner rubber bands. You can buy them at Staples. They're really good to keep a box tight. We originally had them displayed as in bags or dummy cases we would have out. The dummy cases were confused with video games. And no one was happy with that. And the bags, without actually seeing the game, despite signage, no one was really interested in them. They actually just wanted to know how to buy the bags. So the games go out on shelves, dedicated space or display space, front-out, so that the covers will grab you. And as soon as we did that, everything moved. Except for the little games ahead tags all over them. I'm trying to give it some of the tags on the back. To give people a sense if they've never seen one of these, the Sushi Go box is maybe four inches by six inches. Panic Lab is the same way. Panic Lab is not even really thick of a box. They're not very big. When you're using massive labels like that you can see there comparing the size of that barcode at the bottom. You can realize what size that is. That's like the covers of a book. That's how you sell things, catch their attention. If you've covered up the cover of the board game. Our best-circling game is Escape Curse from the Temple. I don't have a picture of it, but it's got a very Indiana Jones sort of action venture sort of feel from it. It's a complex game. There's no one to learn. It surks nonstop. It is easily the most popular game and I think a lot of that is the box art. So why not display it? The games surk for two weeks with one renewal. Missing pieces. Rare. I think out of the 100 games we have surking right now. One game, Citadel's is missing an action. And other than that we've had two pieces gone missing. A little token from a racing game called Jamaica. And I think a bit from Settlers of Katan that was easily replaced. So parts rarely go missing. One games are checked out and checked in. We have an inventory list. We have the bags. We count them really quick. We have everything there. A lot of the games I chose you can miss a few pieces and it won't make a huge deal for gameplay for beginning players. And then every once in a while I'll go through and count and make sure everything's there. But rarely does anything go missing. People have been really careful with the games that are circulating. For the one that you said you had to replace someone did actually ask us earlier if you do need to replace something or if you get like just one piece is missing or something. I go with I find games that have very simple pieces like Kingdom Builder just as these little house tokens for the most part. Those are easy enough to replace. You can buy those from a few online retailers. They're not that big a deal. I've also contacted publishers when stuff is missing and they've been really good. There are cards that are very specific to gameplay that you need and they've been pretty good with replacing them. Some games like Ticket to Ride actually come with replacement parts. Other than that it hasn't been too bad. They send extras to begin with as part of the game. Ticket to Ride does. They know something's going to happen. They know you're going to lose one or two cars so we have some extras there. But games like Carcassonne where it's mostly tiles and tokens that you use you can buy those separately. They're generally pretty cheap. Some just use wooden cubes. Those are also easy enough to find. But in the long run while I budgeted money for replacement parts I have not had to really use it yet. Nice. John, I do want to point out your games in your collection are holdable, correct? Yes. People can place holds. Ticket through holds has been Ticket to Ride. It tends to have a five hold cue on it at all times. Which means I never get to use it for board game events. This is donations from publishers. If you don't want to spend a lot of money I'm going to recommend a Facebook group to visit and they have a list of all the publishers. It's the League of Librarian Gamers. Yes, there we go. Everyone can see how popular I am on Facebook. I would join here. They have publisher donation contacts and you can open it up and it'll show you all the success we've had at other contacting game publishers and who will provide stuff. Some never respond. Some never respond and then send games randomly. Really good. I think the two I've had the most success with have been Rio Grande games right here. This is not my picture. When I contacted Rio Grande games I was working at messenger library in North Aurora. This is what they sent me. Some of it was really cool. I've never played pressure cooker. It has lots of tiny pieces but Monster Factory is amazing. This is what they sent me. One of the things Rio Grande wanted to know was at that point we only had a game night wanted to know if they would be available for circulation. They were really excited about that. When they sent the boxes stickers on them already this was a demo copy. Not for retail sale. I think two really good ones to start. If you don't want to spend much money at all you just want to try to get some free stuff really quick. I would say contacting Rio Grande and Mayfair games. Mayfair recently sent me a big box of stuff. They will send you stuff generally that they are unable to sell maybe because the box is a bit banged up or they will send you stuff that they've used for demos at conventions. Either way all the pieces are there everything is in good shape. You need to fix up the box a bit but you can pretty much grab them and get them out the door pretty quickly. I want to point out this is what we received at messenger library when we contacted them but I think Rapid City Public Library when they contacted Rio Grande games got a different collection. You never really know what you're going to get but they're generally going to be all usable good games. I didn't get raised for the Galaxy or Pressure Cooker but Dominion has been great. It's a really good game. It's like parkasone but building monsters. It's really cute. Piñata is a nice little two player game. Renaissance man I've actually never played. I don't have that one circling. It's really thematic if I remember correctly but yeah I don't know. I haven't played it either. Acquisitions. You have a few options I think. Let me get this back to acquisitions. It's getting a lot easier. I've tried to work through board game distributors and I've had no luck because you need to be a certified retailer in order to work through them. I'm still trying to convince a few to make exceptions for libraries because then you would be able to purchase at cost multiple copies and they would be able to if you didn't have someone on staff that was really knowledgeable about these games. Distributors have loads of people that would be able to recommend good games for your demographics. But as of yet I have not found a distributor willing to work with me. So that leaves me with either picking out games that are local at Barnes & Noble and Target which is generally pretty easy at this point in time. A few years ago it wasn't but now you can find a lot of good gateway games that I'm going to recommend there. There's also online stores that are pretty good. Cool Stuff Inc generally has a 20% discount off the retail price of the games and orders above 100 ship for free. So you can order and they generally have a good selection. It's a good possibility. I don't recommend Amazon because I've noticed sometimes prices on Amazon do not reflect how much you should be spending on these games. So if you have a friendly local game store I would recommend purchasing from them as well. However, you generally don't get good discounts from a brick and mortar store. It's good to support local economy and I love seeing game stores thrive but generally you don't get a lot of bang for your buck from game stores. We were able to in Aurora tax exempt letter though at our local game store. We didn't get a discount on top of it but we were tax exempt in addition to supporting and this is actually the local game store in Omaha. This is Spielbound and that's their open box collection. That's a very pretty game store. They're a game store and cafe and they are beautiful and if you're in Omaha you should go. Display. I already talked about this a little bit. They have a lot of cases. They did not work. We keep all of our games out for the public. They can play in the library or they can check them out. Either is fine. We had them in bags at one point time just for convenience and keeping everything together but people needed to see the cover. So at this point in time I have them all on mobile carts. Box top facing out. Cirque station. As people walk in if they're interested staff can really quickly ask if they have questions offer to demo a game. These games I have right in front the games in the pictures are actually all donations from patrons. After a while we started getting people asking if we can donate games as they donate books which is a pretty good deal. I would say about half these games are in the process of going into circulation. Munchkin, Guildhall, Eminent Domain the other ones I sort of leave out for gaming events. I guess were there any other questions that I didn't hit for gaming collections? Really not for putting together a collection but one that maybe relates to what you're getting into now about what advice do you have for starting a game culture in the library basically getting a program going. I'm sure we have board game aficionados in our community but we don't have any programs or games right now. How do you get started from... I would say you should first visit I'm sorry I'm skipping through your stuff. No, that's perfectly fine because that's what I was going to say. You really need I wish I could do a poll to see if anyone's used Meetup and you really need to I think I have a better example. The next slide is a detail of the actual event page, yeah. So this was an event at Collingswood Public Library where I was doing gaming events. I would have a monthly event, Playboard Games featuring this one I featured Flashpoint Fire Rescue which is a really awesome but somewhat fiddly cooperative game. It shows people who went I've never I mean has anyone ever used some library software for events and have people actually converse about the event beforehand and after? Probably no. Meetup is really good Meetup's goal is to facilitate community that's what they want. So what I do like this one Collingswood Modern Board and Card Gamers it's not Collingswood Library it's not Ben Salem Library I'm working with, it is the area. So I want people to play the games show up at our events eventually you'll start getting some regulars, you'll get some high quality volunteers recently we had one of our volunteers buy us a huge board gaming banner for display which was amazing, it's beautiful. We actually had somebody show up at one of our the game that's at messenger with a game that they were developing too. Oh that's really cool. They had a first run print of it so it wasn't just written on cardboard type things but it was effectively both promotional for them and kind of a beta test. This is how this works it was really neat. We can keep talking about Meetup, that's fine we can stay there. Because that's actually a really good place to start when you want to see what's already going on in your area there is a small cost for Meetup if you're the organizer if you want to create a group either for your area or your library and in Illinois the way we sort of got around that was our partnership with the local gaming store they already had a Meetup and there was already a Meetup group for kind of like a geek catch-all and they had game nights pretty regularly but they were in somebody's home and being a Meetup user and I just moved to Huntsville I'm going to be a little bit not quite so sure about going to somebody's house who I've never met before so we were able to as a participant or as a member of that Meetup suggest a Meetup and then if enough people say, hey yeah I want to go to that it'll show up on the page and so we were able to get some traffic that way as well. Okay so go ahead John I'm sorry I was going to say a good thing with Meetup is providing your attendees with some sense of agency after a while when we pick up some good volunteers I'll open up them to schedule events outside the library they'll schedule events at game shops or cafes or Panera or wherever but I think giving if you want to build a community providing a little bit of that agency is really really a good step towards it after I left Upper Darby Library where I had a game group it went on with good momentum for about two years afterwards with no library intervention like it just rolled on which was really nice to see so yeah simple answer Meetup build community at your library it is worth it Before you go on I just want to let everyone know there's a clock about an hour from when we started the show today but we will continue until John and Marty are done with their presentation and I know some of you may have to leave if you've only allowed an hour for our show as we normally do but we'll go until we're done and the whole thing will be on the recording so if you miss anything near the end you can come back later and watch the rest of the recording Go ahead guys John and I both started with games and libraries as opposed to a circulating collection so we can switch to the so these are guidelines the Meeple's guidelines John already said Meeple's are those little people tokens like you see on the shelf there and this is some good base rules for how to approach creating a gaming event at your library whether that's a monthly thing or a bi-weekly thing or whatever the first one is moderate and that's moderate don't play you're the host of the event okay it's your party you're gonna go there to teach and keep games moving at a good pace and also to just make sure everybody's having a good time part of that is having expectations of behavior and that's basically kindergarten rules you know it's pretty but you need to communicate those you don't have to come down hard and say hi but you know just make sure everybody knows that they're there to have a good time you want to encourage new players and experience players to interact and also I would say encourage all players to try things they've not tried before you want to provide a safe supportive environment for new players and you also want to challenge experienced players and that's what's going to keep them coming back as a female walking into some game stores at least you know when I was in school so you know a while ago it can be a little intimidating especially when they're those experienced gamers only type things where not everyone's playing a board game or if they are it's one of those really intense ones or that's that Warhammer thing or magic or it's it can be scary you know so you want to provide a very welcoming atmosphere you want to be lenient when it comes to mistakes and confusion especially people are learning these games you you're teaching you know be easy and last of all smile have a good time laugh like I said you're all there just to have fun I think the last one is the most important but I mean sort of cheesy sounding but I mean it totally we get so many people using the library who comment on how much fun it seems everyone's having in there and what we're doing and if they can join if it's an open program programs out in a open space in the library in a public space not in a meeting room and it was it was good until the point where we were having too much fun it was getting too distracting to other other patrons and yes I got yelled at by librarians it was amazing that's not a bad thing to have happen so I know I think the question there was the question of how many people to sort of plan for I generally had anywhere from 7 to 12 people each month John I think it's about 20 per event he has his events by weekly ours were once a month it just depends on you know when you're first starting out you know you're going to have less people I think I had 10 at our first event in Illinois I'll have to reach out to Saddlebrook and ask them I think they're having their first one this week so to ask them how many people they get but you know we're going to have a variety of games and we'll get into the game in you too and like we said before you want games that are going to play at least for people in up if you have a bunch of two player games you're not going to get the interaction you want so plan for I would say about 7 to 10 for your first and then you can kind of get a good gauge and you'll see you know people being friends they'll say oh I can't make it next next event but I'll make the next one after that and it gets really cool you'll get that core group of about 10 people at least we did John how big is your core group oh we get about I don't know I think five or six people who are regulars they come to about every event and then about half of the rest pop in now and again and then we get about four or five new ones like completely new and sometimes they don't come back sometimes they're just there for that one time I usually recommend having one staff person or volunteer per four people to start just to be able to teach games and that may only be for like the first event because once you get that core group showing up and if you're teaching a new game every time bring that game the next event so that those relatively new people will go I know that game I played it last time I can teach this game let's play this game over there and that way you get people sort of being self-sufficient in there rather than having to teach it at this point in time I don't need to be in the room I basically set up the stuff they show up I go back to working I do it a lot more when I can hang out in the room yeah and it'll definitely it'll get to the point where it basically runs itself kind of segue into promotions with that at messenger library we had that partnership with our local game store and we actually did we started our program in September and we had a little sort of like a frequent gamer card that we punched every event you came to for the four months into December and we had a $20 gift card to the local game store so if you came for each punch you had on your card for those first four events that was your name in a hat and at the December program we drew a winner and they got a gift card so that was a really cool thing to kind of establish that core group like keeping another reason for them to come back so yeah I also want to say this picture is the the first board gaming event at the Ben Salem Library this is two showed up oh the next one I had I had I think about 10 people show up so I mean it's worth giving it a few tries you know but yeah that was my first one as far as promotion goes obviously there's the traditional promotion you can do you know signage in the library we actually went out in Aurora to the colleges both the graduate school and the undergraduate school and posted things on bulletin boards there coffee shops we use the library Facebook page other social media accounts and meet up and like I said before we were lucky enough we had that partnership with the local game store because our library was really small they couldn't at that point justify getting their own meetup presence but we were able to sort of piggyback on some other people to get people knowing about our event and coming to our event there's also a way of I mean if you don't want to spend the money on your own meetup account it's not that much I mean we keep saying about it it's really not that much I think it's $80 a year for me right now but you can always if you find a local meetup group that has similar interest to what you're doing usually the administrators of that group are more than happy to put your you can suggest a meetup and if you get a few people to RSVB to it it goes public to everybody so really you can use it without and one of the cool things about meetup that we've already talked about you can add you can see here oh can you go back one John the add a photo here so before an event you know you're we're going to be playing Ticket to Ride if you already have a picture of Ticket to Ride that you know in progress playing or you want to sort of stage one post it up there and that's more advertisement for you and then obviously after the fact this is a great place to you know because the event doesn't go away this was you know from two days ago when I snapped the screenshot having those post event photos to someone can say oh hey that looked like it was a really fun time when are they doing it again and that'll help advertise you as well you can also embed video so I would usually embed a if the game I'm teaching is on is on Starlet Citadel I would in that video and everybody pretty much watches it and then comes in with an understanding of the game right okay so game menu or you know your set list what do you offer I generally feature one main game which takes the majority of the time and this is one of the things I use more game geek for as far as searching based on the play time you know 45 minutes an up kind of thing because you know you're only going to have the program for you know two hours or something like that and then you know I pad it with a couple smaller games you know whether those are technically filler games like farm again in there or just something that's not going to take as much time maybe it has a 30 minute play time as opposed to a 60 minute play time sometimes those games share a theme like gloom zombie dice and one night ultimate werewolf for Halloween it's a great lineup um but you know we I think the the plan for saddlebrook is love Boca which is an abstract game based on I'm trying to remember the city of a city architecture in a city in South America and skull which has that sort of day of the dead kind of feel to it and then panic lab so you know trying to tie in Hispanic heritage month but also having some fun too um the local game store you partner with or even just talk to maybe willing to give you a demo copy from their open box collection and even come out to help teach um so they're you know don't forget them as a resource if you can build that partnership one thing I do want to point out is you need to remember to scaffold when you're building your menu so if you've never in if you've never introduced a mechanic before you know you know players have never played a cooperative game start with something that's a little bit simpler um so maybe start with Forbidden Island or Hanabi if you want to do cooperatives as opposed to jumping right into something like Arkham horror or pandemic um start start simple because you're teaching you know and that's going to be something else that brings people back you know you you may feature Forbidden Island one one month or one week and say hey you remember for Forbidden Island this plays really similarly let's try that next all right let's talk about some games so the games that are going to be listed are the ones I have um as the seed collection for each of the branches in our system um so these are games you can find anywhere they've served really well at my branch so I'm expanding them to other branches um and they're ones that in our system we're going to have multiple copies of so if you have questions about which games have multiple copies these are the ones all right pandemic um this is a cooperative game I do recommend cooperative games for a starting collection and for game events because you can teach the rules while you play um if people are sort of if you're a little introverted or you're not really you don't you're not really big into jumping into heavy competition with strangers a cooperative game is a great way to get everyone together to play uh pandemic it plays in less than it plays in like 45 minutes plays for people one I guess one to four if you want to play it by yourself um and we're going to have uh six copies of this game um it's almost always checked out I never see it that okay uh seven wonders this one I is a great gateway game it's a little bit more complex than others um it's very it's um friendly competition I think it's very laid back um your uh card drafting and building a little civilization um in front of you to score points at the end of the game it's one of the ones that requires a few playthroughs to really get like you can learn the mechanisms the first time you play the second time you start picking up the strategy it it takes a little bit this is one that I have at a few branches I'm not giving it to each one but the current copy we have again I rarely ever see it it's definitely worth to have a couple of copies if you have a larger system or library at least one it also plays seven people as the name suggests which is sort of rare and really cool um one night ultimate werewolf great game for teens any of the werewolf games are great for teens um it plays a big group you can get a free app that will guide the game so basically you don't need to really host it you can just use the app along with it um it's a deduction game you got to figure out you're a villager or you're a werewolf and if you're a villager you want to figure out who the werewolves are if you're a werewolf you don't want to be found out um it plays in about ten minutes so it's quick it tends to be loud it requires maybe a somewhat animated extroverted group I've had this game sort of fall flat with with a group of introverts like myself um but whatever is what happens um it's a lot of fun also cheap it's one of the ones that we're going to have for a few branches it has expansions too right that it's you know add the role so daybreak yeah there's daybreak yeah so you can make it more more complex if people are getting a little right and I think you can actually add people like it plays a large number already but if I remember correctly if you have the expansions you have more roles so you can see some of the tokens here there's the werewolves to one side but then you're a villager and seer and I think one's a traitor I can't remember them all but it adds more roles well yeah exactly it's cool it's cool the resistance and the resistance avalan another social deduction game a small box plays a relatively larger group I think it's a two to six three to six players um it's a great game for teens and young adults um it's fairly simple to learn same concept sort of as in werewolf where you are um in the resistance or a spy um and you got to figure out who's who another good one for teens sushi go um so if you're thinking about doing seven wonders um sushi go is a good one to start with it's a very simple and I have to say adorable card drafting game or pick and pass as as I guess they're calling it um it's a lot of fun you're basically collecting different types of sushi adorable faces in order to score points at the end of the game it plays a good amount of people it's inexpensive it's it's it's currently in print it was it was reprinted it used to be hard to find now game right games I think it's um it's a good one also I think I saw it at Target recently too like I saw it in a really weird way I think so um but I remember being oh my goodness they have sushi go so it's a good one I would definitely check it out it comes in a nice little tin beautiful um this I guess is the one that sort of started it all yeah I could say that it is it's certainly okay so uh I think it's now called Katan right with an exclamation mark oh yeah I think people refer to it as Katan I mean the settlers of just gets dropped off a lot so I call it settlers I'm just yeah um it's it's the granddaddy of modern board games um it's one that we're going to have at each of our branches um I really really like it it's easy to teach you will if you get even just a few people who are someone experienced with modern board games at your groups it'll be there um there's a lot of expansions for it so you can always um add a little bit of um diversity to it um if you'd like there's historical version there's a lot of stuff with Katan so we're getting granddaddy but it's I do want to point out not it doesn't really jive with everybody um just just you know it's awesome and totally at it but just not everyone's gonna love it as far as game nights go you know sorry it's also it's also a little pricey for um I mean I think the order the copies we got are about 44 bucks um so a little bit much um but it will move people will know how to play it it's a good pick oops forward Carcassonne another one of those granddaddies I think it's like the trifecta you have settlers you have Carcassonne and you have uh ticket to ride yeah so Carcassonne really simple uh tile placement game we're gonna have one at all of our uh branches it has a lot of tiny little mini expansions you can purchase um so if you want a little bit more complexity after a while you can add a few of those to it as well um it's great for searching because if those meeples there's a little there's a meeple there's a meeple if they get lost they're really easy to replace if you lose a few tiles it really doesn't affect gameplay that much um so it should have a good long shelf life Splendor this is a newer one I've actually only played this one time but I've heard so many people love it and people would bring it constantly to our board gaming events um and you are basically collecting gems to purchase cards to score a certain number of points at the end of the game it's very not competitive I mean it can be a little bit but it's friendly it's very easy to learn it plays really quickly it's got nice big chunky discs that come with it um it's another newer one that we're picking up this one you may not find at target or I don't know you probably find it at Barnes & Noble I'm not really sure but you should be able to order it online really good one and this is another one that's going to all the branches Ticket to Ride another one of those yeah it's so Ticket to Ride you are gaining points by building connections between different cities on a map it's a good gateway game it's very easy to teach there are lots of different versions of it too like the base game is the United States but there's one that's what Nordic countries there's an Asia one there's all kinds of different maps Nordic countries plays two to three people so if you wanted a smaller one that plays quicker that's a great one that's my favorite one there's Europe that has a few extra mechanics to it so you can get a few of these or just all the base sets it's very popular I like it you'll find it at target good game to pick up and from the same designer that brought you pandemic you have Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert Forbidden Island is one of my favorites it was one of the first modern board games I played it's one of the more popular ones it's a great simple cooperative game it plays great with kids it plays pretty good with teens it plays good with adults it's super easy to teach if you want something a little bit more difficult and complicated Forbidden Desert is the same basic mechanic but with a lot of added stuff to it and it's a lot more intense I don't like I'd rather you can't really drown in Forbidden Island but you sure as heck do die oh it's easy it's so easy to die in Forbidden Desert I don't like dying there great games they come in nice pretty teens some people hate teens libraries should just love teens because they look very nice and people always pick them out I have not seen Forbidden Island in six months I think it's still there I should check it just gets served pretty often oh go ahead it's also a good one for game groups yes I was going to say when I scaffolded cooperative games at messenger we moved to Forbidden Desert and then we did pandemic because it's just a great scale on that you were talking before about pieces and I know both of these have some really unique pieces you can see on the title palace and hallowed ground on Forbidden Island on that picture those little icons are actually pieces in the game those have not gone missing at all have they on yours and they're also not really needed for gameplay if they do go missing replace it with something else I mean if you really had to these are the same people that make sushi go game right and they've been pretty good with replacement parts if needed they've been very they've communicated really well I like to think the best of people and I know that's hard to do when you work in circulation sometimes but you know what people know that this goes together nine times out of ten I think even more than that you're going to get everything back together especially when there's little specialty pieces it was one of the biggest concerns was all my pieces are going to be missing left and right and I have not seen it everything pretty much comes back people asking questions there's like at least four different people that typed in questions wanting to know how do you keep track of the pieces what about missing pieces what do you do when they go and it's a concern obviously you know I lose pieces to games in my own house but I would say definitely inventory the pieces in the box that's important bag every separate piece make sure it's inventoryed on the bag so people can put the right amount in there I think helping out people as much as possible and putting everything away works other than that I haven't had much difficulty if you really want a quick way of checking in if you have a very good scale at your library like a postage scale yeah if you weigh it before and there's have that weight there and when they come back in weigh it make sure that it's pretty close and it's good to go back out we do that at the few branches that actually my branch has one of those and I've done it a few times it works but I haven't had pieces go missing that much anyway but at least I'll tell you if something big is gone we don't charge for replacement pieces which is another question any pieces that do go missing I just locate and I have budgeted for some extra pieces and also I think publishers are generally pretty good at sending stuff at a low cost I do replace for I do charge for destroyed games so if someone, no one has done this but if someone spilled coffee on the board or if the cards came back completely torn up um patron would be charged for the replacement cost of the game but for something like I mean Forbidden Island it's gonna cost you 12 bucks so whatever it's not that bad oops that was not what I wanted to do alright I guess are there any other questions I know we went over time awesome I hope people are still here there oh yes actually most of the people have stuck around with us thank you so much a few people didn't have to leave and said sorry I got to go and whatnot but yeah does anybody have any last minute questions do you want to toss in before we do wrap up this episode I I do want to show this these are the alignment sheets that I made for the each game in the collection so if we could link to that somewhere sure yeah send me that link and send me your slides so I can put them up with a little recording absolutely yeah these technical services will not let me put in a new board game without making one of these sheets so if you have them already it basically has everything they need to get it into the catalog catalogers yep John when you say when you say alignments I want to point out and I know it's on that slide there's actually you align them with was it curriculum standards for your local yeah I did with I aligned each game with local and core curriculum standards I did that because I was expecting some a little pushback that I didn't actually get but it was good to be prepared if people ask you I don't know why why does a library have games you'd be like because these games teach kids to be awesome not only can you link it up with the curriculum standards that you know are applicable to your community but you can also use the search institutes developmental assets and needs inventory which basically is you know things that adolescents and children need to you know become awesome adults and they link up so well with that I'm sorry I love the search institutes thing it's really cool we say you know these are for kids and teens but obviously anybody's going to benefit from that positive social interaction so we do have a question that did come in I think this is more what is the website you mentioned earlier that will send the library sample games I think there's just the one well there's a list on the library and gamers Facebook on the Facebook group but you had mentioned there is a list of publishers that have been contacted for games and the positive or negative result and that link will be included out in the recording so you'll get the access to that I've already put it in our delicious list there and we just have one comment Lori is on from Omaha here and she said actually Saddlebrook's first game for grownups is tomorrow night so if you're in the area get head over there and she'll let you know Marty how it goes awesome thank you Lori thank you awesome good job well hey it's in her hands now and yeah it's going to be awesome I have every faith in that so it'll be good and we actually were able to partner with Spielbound a lot for that we went and got to try it we weren't sure what we were going to do as far as our game menu goes and so we were able to play a couple things and make that decision and they were really supportive and awesome so hope that continues if anyone has other questions you can always contact me if you join the league of librarian gamers I try to be pretty active there so you can totally ask questions to a whole bunch of people that know a lot about games and libraries and they will be able to help you out yep they're really awesome that group is really awesome and supportive and just all kinds of great ideas so I guess we're good with questions yep