 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. You can always watch our recordings later at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show where you can see and access all of our recordings. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think may be interested in anything we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. We are the state library, so in other states it might be the so-and-so state library. So we provide services to all types of libraries in Nebraska, public, academic, K-12 schools, corrections, museums, archives, basically if it's a library, we provide services to that. So on our show, you'll also find things covering all those types of libraries. So you should be able to find something for you and whatever you're interested in, or whatever library you work at. We do a mixture of things in the show, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, really our only criteria that it is something for libraries. Something cool libraries are doing, something we think libraries could be doing, products or resources that would be useful. Sometimes we do have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on and do things that we're presentations about things we're doing here in the commission or in the state. We also bring in guest speakers, and that's what we have with us this morning. This morning with us is George Bergstrom. Good morning, George. Good morning, everyone. And he is joining us from the Indiana State Library, and he's going to talk to us about board games. Yay, one of my great loves, when we were doing our tech test for the show, I showed George a big shelf bookcase full of board games I have at home that my husband and I play. But they can be used for many things beyond just having a fun evening. So I'll hand it over to you, George. Take it away and tell us all about how to use our board games in the library. All right. Well, thank you very much, everyone. Good morning. As Krista said, my name is George Bergstrom. I am a regional coordinator for professional development with the Indiana State Library. And I may or may not get into what that entails as we go along. But what I'm going to talk today about is engagement with soft skills, using board games at the library to engage patrons and improve their career readiness. So one of the joys of working from home is I only have one monitor, and so I just see my slides. So hopefully you all can see the slides. Maybe you can see me. I am getting better at it. Awesome. I could be able to. I can see both of us. Yeah. Perfect. I am getting better at virtual presentations, but I still prefer being in front of an audience. So I just want to thank you. Absolutely. So I wanted to say at the start that I don't mind questions as I go. I sometimes talk super fast. So if I am going too fast, let Krista know and she can let me know. I also could get stuck on a topic and talk about it forever. So you can give me those warnings as well. But if I go too fast, that will leave plenty of time for questions at the end. And the last time I did this with some folks in Indiana, we did have a great discussion at the end. So with that being said, here's kind of what I hope to go over today. A little bit about defining the need, some board game mechanics discussion, lots of examples in action, and then of course some resources and questions. And this slideshow will be made available on the site after today's presentation. Yep. I should mention, yeah, when we do our recordings, you'll have access to the actual recording we're doing here and then slides. And if there is ever any handouts or interesting links too. And actually before I jump into the need, I'll just kind of give a really, really quick introduction to myself. I started in public libraries in 97. Back then, lots of them had board games. But my perception was that not many librarians were happy having board games. And both the library I worked at and others I had talked to kind of made me or left the impression with me that many libraries were sort of phasing them out as just a pain to maintain, etc. State and public libraries till around 2004 made a transition to academic libraries. And while I was in an academic library, in 2006 was the first games learning literacy symposium in Chicago, and our dean sent a ton of faculty to that. I unfortunately did not get to go, but they all came back excited and the dean was interested. So I was able to do a little bit of work with games in an academic setting and was able to go and present in 2007, where I did meet Scott Nicholson and Jenny Levine, who I believe a few months later, that would be when they had the first National Games Day. So as I was putting this together and looking at timelines, it all sort of clicked to me. I've worked at several academics since obviously at that first one, I didn't really do a whole lot with games in the classroom. But at my most recent academic library position a few years ago, we did a lot. And so this picture and many of the examples we're going to get to later are from using board games in the classroom. But then, of course, a couple of years ago, I started at the State Library in Indiana. With COVID times, we have started our own virtual games roundtable in the state. And then just last year, I was elected to be the Treasurer of ALA's Game RT. So we'll have some stuff from that as well. OK, so defining the need. Especially in an academic setting, but I can see this working in public libraries as well. We hopefully either overtly or subvertly try to help our patrons and our users learn and get ready for their careers. And one thing that the Society for Human Resource Managers has done, like almost all professional organizations, they survey their users, right? And almost every year, they come up with HR execs and professionals saying that new hires are generally great, but that they need improvement in their soft skills. So this is just the executive summary from, I believe, it was the 2016 report and kind of highlighted in their own words there. But really just in the bullet points are these are kind of the most common soft skills that most HR executives identify year after year as something that new hires could use to improve upon or could do with some strengthening. So things like collaboration, which of course is teamwork, communication, critical thinking, leadership, and problem solving. Oops. And as any of us who are gamers know, you've got to do an awful lot of those things as you play and engage with games. So before we get into the next section, we're going to go ahead and take a quick pause here. I've got a couple of questions for you. Yes. So we're going to do all three of them right now. Yeah, you can just go up. Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Here is the first one. When I'm in person, I go on your screen now. What type of library are you from? Go ahead and check the bottom. When I'm in person, I like to adjust on the fly. So this is as best I can do in a virtual setting. And if you do say other, go ahead and type into the questions section. What other you are? Yes, please. I can see I can see the results coming in at the moment. And I know some people are checking there. So open up your question section and type in there. I'm going to go for a couple more seconds here. I think it has many of you voting. It does also tell me what percentage of our attendees have voted, so I know. Let's see, for the others, we've got a couple of things coming in. You're a grad student, a grad student, MLS and Special Collections. Another person currently in college for library sciences. A tribal college library that serves as an academic and public. Wow. Doing everything. My current supervisor worked on a reservation for a couple of years early, early in her career. And then Department of Correctional Services. Yeah. And I'm not in a library, but it used to be in a public library. Help manage website content and manage records. Cool. All right. Let's close this poll and share its answers to start with. Can see we've got mostly public, 61 percent public. 13 percent academics and 26 percent of those other. No school libraries today. Nobody from a school, K-12, right? They're in class or being virtual or being virtual. Yes. And then that's fine. They'll watch the recording later. Yes. I hope so. All right. Now let's go on to the next poll question. Do you have board games in your library? Yes. No. Optimistically, not yet. Lots of yeses. Awesome. Good to hear. So we're getting a little of everything. Yes, no, and not yet. There's only one more question after this one. I don't make sure I get at least 80 something percent response back for these. Yeah. Oh, not yet has overtaken knows. Yay. People are thinking positively about this. That's awesome. I will spoil it just a little bit for those of you saying not yet. You're lucky because I have a few lessons learned. All right, this one. So more than half people, 58 percent. Yes. Nineteen percent. No. And 23 percent of people not yet. OK. That's with 82 percent of people who are attending right now actually answering. And then our last question is if you do have the games, board games, how are you using them? Programming, gaming events, circulation. Actually, checking them out or other. And once again, if you choose other, our poll system here doesn't let you type your others into the poll. Type in your questions section and let us know what you are doing with your board games if you're not doing programming or circulating them. Or if you're doing both, you can let me know that as well. You should be able to. Yeah, you'd be able to check more than one. I made this one because it could be. It could be both. You can check more than one. Cool. But yeah, let us know what you're doing, if it's something different or combo. Yeah. Mostly programming and game events make sense. I know circulation is still I see librarians talking about it. How? And I'm sure we're going to get into that. How do you do it and make sure it works and everything comes back and everything? All right. Now we have some comments coming in about what people did to have and during their games. Great pre-COVID. We only circulated them inside the building, but once things clear up, we hope to expand to allowing them to be circulated outside the building. Another person says we kept them in the youth services department prior to COVID-19. Oh, awesome. This is a person who's in the tribal. We're going to keep an eye on this one. We have created free language games that help the community learn the language. That is awesome. You should totally share that. Oh, yes. All right. So let's get more people. Let us know what you guys are doing with your board games if you if you have them. Someone else says we have Zoom Roblox and Zoom Pokemon in youth services, but no gaming events since March. So they're doing them on Zoom. Yeah. Yeah. And we have an in library use only shelf in normal times, not now during COVID, hoping to submit a circulation proposal this year. Awesome. All right. Let's close this poll. Probably everyone who has games has answered and share our 62 percent people doing programming and gaming events, 24 percent circulation and 33 percent doing other interesting and creative things. Awesome. Yeah. All right. Lots more people talking about what else they're doing. Zoom Jacks, Jack box event with staff and students. We do Pokemon and game night on Zoom. Ah, pre COVID-19 kids just played games when they came in. And now since COVID-19, we circulate puzzles, but not games. Sounds good. Right. You should be able to now continue with your slides since we're done with all the polls. All right. Yeah, cool. All right. I hope that was helpful. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that does help. So before we talk about the engagement and the career readiness stuff, let's talk just a little bit about board game mechanics. So board game mechanics for those who are unfamiliar with the term or maybe less familiar with board games is really just an industry term for the broad picture of how the game plays. Most games are going to use more than one mechanic. In fact, most games probably use two, three or any number of mechanics. Typically though, one of those mechanics will be more dominant in the play of the game, and then they'll have some number of secondary mechanics. And for those who know very little about games, I'm sure we all know Monopoly. And so my easiest example, especially if you're talking to non-gamers, is to Monopoly is, at its core, a roll and move game. You roll the dice, you move your piece. Right. But there's also set collection. You have to get the right combination of properties in order to do well. And there's also a little bit of economics underlying in the game. You know, when is it a good time to buy the property? Do you have to sell or mortgage properties and things like that? And understanding the mechanics involved in a game can tell you quite a bit about the soft skills that might be practiced, enhanced, brought out with the play of that game. And that, in turn, of course, helps you plan for programs or other marketing or promotion of this type of idea. So let's just talk about a couple of core mechanics. A game that employs area control, we can think of games like risk or act as an allies. In these games, you have to think critically, obviously, about when it is the right time to make your move and how much you want to invest of whatever resources the game employs to try to maintain or obtain control of the area and what are the benefits in the game itself for that? Strategy. Exactly. So your critical thinking is big here and, of course, problem solving can come in if you have either lost control or are trying to get control and you have to figure out what you need to do to get there. Games that employ a cooperative mechanic. So for these, think of things like the Forbidden Series, Forbidden Island, Forbidden Desert, et cetera, Pandemic, Magic Maze, and many others. This is actually one of my favorite mechanics because competition is not always the best in our household, so when we can work together, it's great. And in a cooperative game, the players are working against the game itself and so you've all either win together or lose together. In this type of game, you're almost always gonna enhance your communication because you all have to talk to each other or work together. You're probably gonna develop leadership skills, teamwork. You will most definitely use critical thinking and problem solving skills as well. And this was kind of the hot mechanic. There were a lot of games that came out with this mechanic starting around 2007 or eight, I think it was when pandemic first came out. There were a few prior to that, obviously, but that one really took off. Yeah, so there's lots of examples out there and you should find plenty that will work in your setting. Another mechanic is what's called roll and write. And I like to think of these games as Yahtzee on steroids. So if you think about normal Yahtzee, you're really solo playing with just people sitting around you. On your turn, you roll the dice to your thing and you have no interaction with the other players and what happens on their turn other than rooting against them, of course. But in a roll and write game, the active player does some action, usually rolling dice, makes decisions based on those, but all of the other players can usually get a secondary or a slightly lesser benefit off of that person's role. So you're almost always engaged with the game itself and hoping that people roll things that help you out in your game and, of course, hoping that you don't roll the stuff that will help your opponents on your turn. And this is possibly the newest mechanic du jour. Again, there are dozens and dozens, if not a hundred at this point, roll and write games out there. Someone says, I love roll and writes. They often translate well to virtual settings too. You can easily do that especially now. You can print and play those sheets and or your patrons can do it at home and either you can roll the dice and everyone can do it. Just going around the table, yeah, they're great. So Quicks, Bloom, again, dozens of examples here. Imperial Settlers, I think has a roll and write version. And yes, I have seen a lot of good things about them and ways to take them virtual. Another mechanic is worker placement. So again, lots and lots of examples here, Agricola, Carcassonne, and many others, where on your turn, one of the main things you're doing is placing a limited number of pieces to obtain the ability to perform some sort of action or to get some resource or whatever. And then it's removed from the available actions or whatever for the rest of the players on that turn. So there's, again, a lot of critical thinking involved, a lot of problem solving. If in Agricola they've gone on the wood spot and you really need the wood to build defenses, you gotta figure out what you're gonna do. And on this guide, and I'm gonna see... Worker placement, I think, is my favorite, one of my favorites, Lords of Waterdeep and all its extensions is. Oh, yeah. So here is a lib guide that I had built for the last academic university I worked at, listing those three or four and a whole bunch of others. And of course, I go through examples of what the mechanic is, how it might work, and then some of the games that you might find that have that mechanic. And of course, the soft skills that you might promote or that might be improved or enhanced when using those games or games in that style. Okay. This actually answers, I think, a question we actually got right before you started going into this, but I was gonna wait and see if you did, but I just wanted to address it. So I wanted to know, board games defined by the board itself, and obviously, like Monopoly or Clue, and obviously not, even though that's what we call them, no, you know, Yahtzee Domino's card games, those are, should we call them tabletop games instead, maybe, nowadays? Yeah, I suppose it depends on your philosophy. Tabletop is a growing term, I suppose. At least I think it's starting to grow more. I think of any games that you play around the table in the general board games, but there are plenty of people in the hobby slash industry that probably wouldn't. And we're gonna talk about a few here in a little while, our more traditional card games. Just the deck of cards is what you get, but because they're more than just a standard deck of playing cards, and the rule sets and the mechanics are a little bit more in line with other board games, I sort of put them in the board game sphere, I guess. But again, that is very much up to the interpretation of the person. Right, I don't know why it's not going back to full screen, but that's okay, we'll do. Oh well, so some examples in action. So what we are seeing here around this table is some students playing a game called For Sale. For Sale has two phases, and this is one of the games, obviously that I was very successful at using in a classroom. In the first phase, they are bidding on in an auction style properties. So the cards are labeled one through 30, obviously the higher the number, the more perceived value it has, but you take your turn bidding some number of your little chips there, which represents your money, and highest bidder wins that high property. But the real critical thinking part comes in when you choose to either bid or pass. If you have passed without making a bid, you just get the lowest valued property in the tableau there in the middle for free. If you pass after you've made a bid, you get the lowest value card left and spend half of the bid that you put in. So if the person whose shoulder we have right in front of us on the left, if he bids a thousand to start the auction and everyone ups it by a thousand as it goes around, when it comes back to him, the bid from the woman with crossed hands there has, she's bid 4,000. He can either choose to keep raising his bid or he can choose to drop out. And so by dropping out, he would spend half of his $1,000 bid, but the game doesn't have 500, so he has to spend that thousand and he gets the lowest value property on the table or he can up the bid and it keeps going around and around. So at the end of it, you have a hand of cards that represent those properties, one through 30. In the second phase, some similar cards are laid out, but they are checks and you secretly choose one of the cards in your hand and then everyone reveals simultaneously and you get the check value associated with where you are highest to lowest in order. So again, if the darker check shirt here in front of us, if he used one of his lowest properties that he had, he would likely get the lowest check value and once you're out of cards and just have checks you total it up and over as the most money has won. Really simple game can play really fast. Obviously there are some hard skills in it like math, but there's an awful lot of soft skills in it. The critical thinking of when to bid and pass and when to use a low-valued property or a high-value property in the second phase. There's a lot of sort of social interaction and the auction mechanic itself. Are you trying to bluff people out of things? But the other fascinating thing about this one because it was done in a classroom setting and these were business students, I heard an awful lot of terms as they were playing like return on investment and some others that were probably things they were discussing in class that they just naturally connected to the game. So if you can pick a game that has a theme, however loosely that theme is that ties to other things you might be programming around or other concepts you want to sort of heighten or raise discussions about, it can be kind of a powerful tool because they will usually subconsciously internalize and whatever it is. The other good thing about this example and we'll see a couple of more from the same professor is because these were business type students and he was a marketing professor, he always wanted to have an extra layer of incentive layered into any time I came in and used games in his class. So typically the winner of the game would get some sort of free path on an assignment. So if we're in an academic setting you can work with faculty to build in things like that which foster engagement and immediately make them think harder about the game they're playing. If you're in a public library setting obviously you can switch that over to library swag. You can switch that over to entries in a drawing. There are lots of ways you can sort of take that concept of incentivizing the play or just incentivizing coming to the program. Gotta be sneaky. Yep, gotta be sneaky. In this second example, on the left we have a game called No Opportunity. This game was actually designed by a high school teacher and a full 36-week curriculum was designed for it for entrepreneurship. Now I've obviously never used a full 36-week curriculum because I was only doing this in college setting but same professor, there are lots of ways on here you can incentivize it. Now on the downside this game is just roll and move and you randomly hit those colored blocks and draw cards from certain decks and things happen. So it's maybe not the best game mechanically but what those colors represent and how you interacted with the cards was pretty fascinating. And you see the sort of balance sheets that the students have in front of them. So each color represents a phase of the entrepreneurship cycle. And so when they hit certain cards it might just randomly say something good or bad happened jot down this number on your balance sheet. So again, a lot of hard skills around math and other sort of business related concepts in this game. There were one set of spaces. I think once your business was ready to go global which you can just barely see there in the middle sort of the first half of the game is domestic and the second half is sort of global. So all the stakes are raised and obviously in the global section some of those squares allowed you to bet on the futures of the markets you were going into. So that was interesting. But finally, and the reason why I like this game the most is there are some squares on that board that force the player to make an elevator pitch. And this is how we tied it really well with the class. So instead of just making it random and maybe none of the students would have to give that elevator pitch we actually made it required. So even instead of landing on the square it was just when you passed the square you had to give the pitch to the class. And each one was tied to a different part of the entrepreneurship cycle. So defining your business mission maybe or how you would pitch yourself to investors or whatever. And of course in the game it was just a random die roll that determined how much money you got from that successful pitch. But again, that's pretty objective. And so to make it more, or that's pretty subjective to make it more objective the professor and I sort of acted as the sharks on Shark Tank. And so we determined how well they give the pitch and then assigned a value to that pitch. So that's another way to sort of take away the randomness and the subjectivity in a board game and maybe add a little bit of look for that place in the game or maybe something that's just determined by a random die roll. And if you can have the players do something tied to the theme of whatever the program is or whatever skill you're trying to improve upon I have seen some pretty good results from that. And then on the right that's sort of a more holistic view of what we saw at the very beginning which is forbidden desert. And forbidden desert as I briefly mentioned at the beginning is a cooperative game. For those of you who've played this or other cooperative games especially by this designer you know you can lose pretty darn quick. Oh my gosh. Yeah, games are typically only 15 to 20 minutes on the short end and maybe an hour on the long end. So I thought of course we can do these in the classroom in a four hour time block. Boy was I wrong. These students it was mostly international students so here's one challenge. If you are dealing with non native US audiences be aware that board games might not be as universal as we think they are. The first time I went into one of these classes most of the students were Indian and most of them had never seen a board game other than like chess. So that was one hurdle. But again that quickly died down the more and more times we did this. But another thing to think about depending on how you're using a game is the analysis paralysis and or the discussion that can go into it. Maybe because it was a classroom setting and they assumed it was somehow being graded. Maybe because they were not native board gamers but I believe the first time we did this it took almost the entire four hours to play this game. Wow. Now part of that. That's my discussion and negotiation going because yeah we have forbidden desert, island and sky don't want to talk about sky. That was a painful but they can be very quick. Oh yes. They go very wrong. Oh yes. But they can be longer too and it is a lot of negotiating with everyone and I can see discussing especially I don't know how many people you had playing this one four or five. Well that's it. So this very first time we had a couple of comments so in that four hours obviously is me doing some amount of teaching the game. I had assigned some YouTube videos some sort of instruction for them to look at. I don't know how many did. The professor had asked them to look at the lib guide I had created for it. I don't know how many did. So there was basic explanation of the game. Also because this was the first time I had worked with this professor and this game in a classroom we took a game that really should probably only be five player maybe six player and we actually had I believe there were 14 students in the class and at the time we only had one copy of the game and she just wanted to have them all participate. So how we did that and this was fascinating for any of you academic librarians is sets of two players were a department because this was a business class. I had the IT department of whatever whatever whatever so you had six sets of two students that were each department. They were controlling one character and so they had to make the decisions together of what their person would do. The other the remaining two students one was like I'm maybe the high level boss and the other was like a middle manager type role. And so the two students would discuss it say this is what they were gonna do. I think she allowed others to make contributions or something like that. And if there were disputes the middle manager was supposed to come in, analyze it and either pass judgment and say go do this or that or take it up to the 14th student who was kind of like the Uber boss. So there was a layer in there that was not normal to a board game. But I can see that's a really good way of translating the game into something in real life something they can actually yeah. Because this is a lot of negotiation and of like if you do this, then I'll do this and then this will happen and then we won't die. You know. Absolutely. So this had a ton of communication. It obviously had some teamwork although probably not as much as they should have had. It had not enough leadership and we can get to that if we wanted to dive into this one although I looked at the time, I might not. But there were a lot of very good and very bad things about this first version. Next time I did it much better still kind of long, but much better. And by like the third or fourth time, I believe we had finally negotiated it so that one group was playing desert and one group was playing island. So we at least had it closer to one to one. For people who are unaware of this style of game, you have a set of actions that all players can perform on this board. So exploring the tiles, moving the sand some stuff like that. And then each person, each player or in the case of this first example each team of two has a special role and they can do specialized actions in their turn. So it's got a lot of really interesting mechanics built into it that translate well to those soft skills. Okay, there's our pandemic example. This one went much, much better. And again, you can even sort of see the leadership developing in this picture. And they are thinking pretty critically. It was still longer than a typical game with pandemic. But again, part of that was the teach and part of that was maybe the cultural differences. One thing I did learn by the time I started using this one and maybe some of you have done this sort of thing is that we did a partial teach. I kind of explained the overview of the game. I gave them the actions everyone can do. I helped them with their special and talked a little bit about the mechanic of putting down the new disease cubes. But I told them when they hit the first epidemic card to stop and bring me over to explain the next part. So if there's a game you're using that you can do that sort of partial teach method I would strongly encourage that. Especially if you've got multiple games or lots of tables of people doing things. And of course, something I was never able to do in an academic setting that you could do in a public library is I would have volunteers to help you out if at all possible. And then of course, in this last example we've got Catan or settlers and Catan or settlers whatever you choose to call it. And this as well as one other game we used a lot was great for negotiation. So all kinds of soft skills involved here. Okay, so one of the things that most of these examples probably pointed out is games can be difficult if the players don't know a lot and or you have a limited timeframe. So one thing I would do differently is I would probably switch to games that play much quicker. So I have not used any of these in a library setting but obviously several of these games have the advantage of being much faster play. You still have several of those key soft skills that can be implemented or sort of enhanced upon. And most of them if you'll notice are quiet. So if I was doing more than one game at a time I would definitely look for games that maybe aren't as exciting and draw you in as even though I love them as a pandemic or another cooperative that are sort of heavy on theme and really draw you in because they can get noisy. So that was another thing I learned. Okay, so it looks like we're kind of coming in. I want some time for Q and A so I'll just quickly go over some of these resources. The one I do want to highlight the most and the one that I wish I had read before starting any of this was Scott Nicholson's Everyone Plays at the Library. So for those of you who don't have games yet I would encourage you to look at this if at all possible, interlibrary loan whatever you need to do. The way I started was I somehow convinced the right number of people in the right order that, hey, we should buy board games because it would be cool. And I'm pretty sure I can use them either in programming or in the classroom or both. And I just started buying games, which is really fun. But the collection as it is now there and I'm not, I'm assuming they don't use it nearly and I didn't get to use it a ton because we had these problems but longer play games, games that probably needed more knowledge of board games and mechanics and therefore were harder for non-gamers to pick up on. And when I tried doing programming, I just assumed, hey, let's put a whole bunch of games out and hope people come over and look at them. And we usually had very little interaction in programming. And one of the things Scott does a great job of in that book is he talks about purposely thinking about your program or class or whatever before you start collecting. So there's a section on audience and how that might influence the games you buy for the collection. There's a section on events. Are you gonna do really focused events where one game is played or are you gonna do sort of the free and open events which is what I tried. And he highlights some of the challenges that I did not realize and hopefully that advice would have helped. Another great book there, a little bit more towards the academic side but Andrew Walsh is the librarian's book on teaching through games. And that's less on traditional board games and more just on games and game-like activities to use in the classroom. So that would be, I would assume work with school librarians or teachers as well as academic librarians. All right. A couple of other resources. Obviously this is a very tiny list as most of you probably know but on board game geek, if you have not done it already there's a great advanced search feature that lets you search slash filter by mechanic. So if you are thinking about centering programming around those soft skills or helping in either directly telling your players that they could improve these skills or whether you just are trying to sort of sneaky to get those in, you can either check the mechanics and find games that match it or a bunch of other stuff. Probably people are better at that than I am. Another great site is Meeple like us. And I have used this one a little bit. I'm relatively new to discovering it but they do a great job. It's a much smaller number of games that are featured, talked about but obviously they do a great job for reviewing a game based on accessibility. So color blindness, reading level, components and how various accessibility issues may or may not have challenges with games. And then of course learning games. There are as I think I said tons of sites and YouTubers out there who do this but a couple that I have found very library-friendly especially if you're pointing your customers to them are of course Watch It Played and Game Night. Watch It Played is much better at rules explanation. Game Night typically does an entire playthrough. So if you wanna see how a game plays or if you have a patron or someone interested who wants to see a play you would wanna look for a Game Night or a similar site. And if you just want rules explanations I would look to Watch It Played or again some other similar site. That's just the advanced search screen as it is now and I'll just point out, oops, on the bottom there by category, mechanic and subdomain. So I don't know what they mean by category and subdomain but they are very interesting and allow for some pretty interesting filtration of the tens of thousands of games that are in the database. So if you haven't used it, I think it's a great tool to sort of look at a game before you decide to bring it into your collection. I follow board game geek just for my own knowledge of like, we play a lot of games and I see lots of posts about things. Just to figure out what kind of game is this? When is it coming out and reviews too? So it has people who are signed up on the site can say, well, we played it in this work or this didn't work and how many people we played with and lots of like first-person experiences. And I've not used it much yet but I've definitely started seeing people highlight the fact that there are forums for questions about rules on PGG. So if you are questioning of a rule, all right, so that's the end of the slides. If there are other questions, I will happily take them. Yeah, we do have questions. Yeah, go ahead and type in your questions, everybody. We've got at least more than 10 minutes and 15 minutes left in the show. So you get plenty of time to get all your questions asked. Let's see what we got here. First question, I'm a public librarian. I am a public librarian, specifically a special needs resources librarian. I work with children and adults with special needs. There's a lot of call for us to help with job preparedness such as providing volunteer opportunities. How'd you go about using board games for this specific patron group? Sure, so what I would probably do is whether you survey the patrons that you are helping serve or whether you encourage them to do this on their own, I would start by learning what job skills are critical to the roles with which that individual is looking to go for. And this is, you know, not even board games, this is just general career stuff, which is another area I've done a lot of work on. So an easy way to do that, of course, is to look at job ads, to follow the careers of people that are in a field you hope to get into, learn their backgrounds. And once you have an idea of the types of skills that might be important to that particular person or that particular user group, then you might want to look at whether it's that resource guide I've put together or whether it's just thinking back on the skills that were identified. So if it's a job or a role that needs a lot of communication, and this might really tie into at least some of those special needs, is that you might want to look at games that foster communication, especially in a non-competitive way. I am now blanking on the name of the game. I will hopefully be able to remember it and or look it up and send it to Krista and she can add it with the resources. But there were a couple of really interesting games that came out two or three years ago that worked very well with autistic children. I believe they had a hand of cards that represented maybe emotional states, I want to say, probably through sort of cartoonish animals or whatever sort of non-human representations. But anyway, I don't want to go into too much just in case I'm remembering incorrectly. But the idea of the game of course was very similar to, oh shoot, and now I lost the one it matches with. Anyway, it was, oh right, apples to apples or something like that where the active person reads out something and then the rest of the players have to match what they think their best representation of that thing is. And then of course there's, I don't remember if there was voting or not or if there was just the active player choosing which one they think is the best. Again, I don't remember the exact details or like Dixit or there was another one. Anyway, so games like that but tied to emotions. And I don't remember if it was specifically designed for autistic players or if it was just, hey, this is a great game for that audience. Happens to be working very well for them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So figuring out what skill they might need to improve upon or learn about and then either through BGG or some other tool, learning about games that use a mechanic that might help strengthen that particular skill would be the first way I go. And then like I say, again, people like us does not, I don't think identify games that are good for a particular ability or disability. That's not right. Anyway, they don't necessarily pick a game saying, hey, this is good for them. They will just highlight if a game has issues that might make it hard for people with certain accessibility issues. That's what I was looking for. So I would sort of pair that one from the skill side or what you want the people to improve upon and then also matching that with people like us or some other resource out on the web that might identify either good or bad matches for that particular audience. So it makes sense, yeah. All right, here's a nice general question. Which board games have you felt worked best to play at public libraries? Sure. My, as I said at the beginning, my only public library experiences was very, very late 90s, early 2000s when my perception is they were not a big thing. So I have not personally been around a public library setting where they are played in today's sort of modern times. But I work with a lot of public librarians who do. And obviously like anything public libraries, it's partially going to depend on your public. So many of the ones I work with right now are biggest with role-playing games. And in that sense, you're probably just providing a space oftentimes. But you might also provide books and other materials. My inclination again is a game with good table presence will bring in non-gamers. So a game that has very big colorful, fancy components might bring non-gamers over just to say, hey, what's going on over here? A game that elicits enthusiasm from the players, assuming you have a space enough that it's okay that the group can get a little bit louder might be great. So, you know, code names, just one other sort of more party games can oftentimes bring that kind of excitement in the building. Or if it's heavy on theme and it does really get people immersed in it, that can oftentimes foster really positive views of the library itself and the event. Yeah. I think definitely we said the beauty of the key is, I mean, what works good at one library might not work for your people. So the start, I mean, it can start in one or two ways. Just survey your community. Hey, we're thinking about doing board games. What do you guys want to play that you might want to come here and do at the library or do together? But you could also, if you know of a game that you are really good at teaching to other people, maybe it's a way to start. Say, you know, if you are very passionate about it, to say, you know what, I have these couple of games, I've played it with my friends and I know it's easy and fun and quick to get anyone to jump on it and be able to play. Then, you know, start with that possibly too to at least get people's attention. And then say, okay, I taught you this one, great. What do you guys like to play? Do you want to do something else? So, yeah. Absolutely. And there's nothing wrong with starting with classics that are maybe not so hard to teach. So, having Chester Checkers, having Uno or Monopoly, it will bring people in. Yeah. Get them with something, you know, get your attention or something, they know. Yeah. Let's see here. So we're talking about choosing games and someone to take this in here and actually went to it and says that Meeple, like us, does have a recommender tool on their page where you can set the parameters you need for various accessibility areas and get a list of recommended games. And I went to it here, I went to, here we go, Meeple, like us, and they do have this, and it is in beta. So, and it comes with this screen here, you got to go down there. Yeah, because that feature was not there the last time I visited. So, it's... Yeah, so this is something new that they've got here. So, you could potentially use this, it was looking for bug reports on any of these things that you may be interested in and limit your search to those kinds of games. It doesn't say when they do this, but yeah, so they do have this beta option here. So, with Board Game Geek or this one, Meeple, like us, either one of them, you could find games that would fit whatever your needs are. Yeah, and there are plenty of forums and groups out there. I personally don't do much on Facebook, but obviously there's the League of Library Gamers. There's other gaming groups on all the socials who will be happy to help. Yeah, that's one that I am part. Yeah, League of Librarian Gamers looked that up on Facebook and you find other librarians who are trying to do stuff with all sorts of games, or games, online game, whatever. So, I just have a comment here. Let's see, back when you were talking about the mechanics, they give them mechanics, Humble Bundle. This is a page, Humble Bundle, where you can buy things at whatever amount you want to, and it says online, and it says they have an Asmody Bundle with a number of digital versions of games incorporating a lot of those game mechanics. Humble Bundle, you can buy games, you can buy books, digital, comic books, all sorts of things. So, that might be something to look into if you're looking for virtual online games that you might want to play, but anyway. All right, anybody have any other questions? We just hit 11 a.m. Central Time by my clock, but if you have any questions, we can ask them. We will not be cut off just because it's hit the top of the hour. Any last minute, desperate things you want to ask of Georgia, anything you guys want to share about games you've had success with at your libraries, if you've been, for those of you that have been doing this, go ahead and type into the questions section. We should have one comment, someone says, thank you, great webinar, good job. Well, thank you. And so, yes, this is that People Like Me site, and they do have, as you can see, a Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all the social medias. All right, so I can't see if you guys are typing, so I'll just, we'll wait and make sure we don't miss anybody, but this was a great session, George. I'm so glad we got to hear, I mean, like I said, I'm a big gamer, my husband and my friends and I board games and online video games and console, all of them, but all those soft skills and things that you just kind of do and don't really think about is, I think, that's an important thing to get into. Like you said, Scott Nicholson's book really talks about that, and he's one of the pioneers of gaming in libraries from a long time ago, I know. And I think when you're trying to do more than just, oh, it's just for fun, that in anything in libraries, plan first, don't just jump on something because it's the next big thing, with no planning's place for what you're gonna do with it once you get it, because it may be a complete failure if you just get some board games, put them out and then nothing comes of it, well. Yeah. Oh, and I know circulation was the thing. People have probably heard this. I have heard that one option is to weigh the game before checkout and after checkout. Sure. I have never tried it, but I have also heard that that can be a little problematic due to committee changes. Oh. Think of all the cardboard and paper in most board games that if it's humid when you check it out and not when it comes back, the weight might be different and therefore you might think that things are missing. And they're not. And they're not. Or just, I would think just the sensitivity that you would need in a scale to detect the difference of a few critical components. So the one thing I will say about circulation is I have always wanted the collection that I developed at the academic library, I had hoped to circulate. We never did while I was there. I'm not sure if they have done that since, but don't be afraid of losing pieces. Most of the game publishers will replace pieces within some amount of reasonableness. Obviously with 3D printing and with digital versions of components that are out there, you can create, replace them if you need to. And if you just can't quite find a way to replace those one or two essential parts, obviously you can keep the remaining components for other games or other types of programming. I mean, game design is now becoming a bigger thing and having leftover components from a game that you just can't use anymore, whether it's just worn out or whether you lost the critical piece, you could allow patrons to use some of those other components for designing their own games. Get creative with something else. Crafts, you could use them for, who knows. Exactly. Yeah, many of these board game companies, publishers, we're not talking about giant multinational, they're small independent sometimes and they are very willing to work with you. They are passionate about their own game and if you break something or lose something they're like, oh yes, we'll send you up the great customer service and they love supporting libraries and just spreading the word about their games and what they're doing. I've heard a lot of people have great success with that. And also for people who have never circulated games before, one of the big fears is, well, if the pieces go missing, what happens? Oh my gosh, what if they don't come back? What if they steal things out of it? And people who have been doing this for years, you know, five, 10, 15 years, however, the majority of what they say is things don't go missing, people bring them back. People, your patrons will self-police and they want to be able to play this game again and they want other people to be able to play it. So they will do their damnedest to make sure everything comes back, nothing gets broken and if it does, they'll say something or whatever. So for most of the concerns and worries about, oh my gosh, what if we don't, you know, it doesn't come back or anything, not really as much of a problem as you might be predicting if you've never done it before. Get over that hurdle and just go for it. Yeah, and to follow up on that, another thing is I once worked in a library that had been forever no food and drink, et cetera type policy. And a new supervisor came along and they're like, nope, we're open to everything. You spend more time and effort and therefore resources trying to police your patrons than you would cleaning up minor spills and maybe having an item or two damaged by the very rare times. Now again, that was an academic setting where you had much different controls over your patrons that theoretically if that rare thing occurred and they did do too much damage to an item, I suppose you had a lot easier time putting holds on records or whatever as a student that were more enforceable than maybe you do with the public. Again, it's been a long time since I've been in a public library, so. Well, there's ways to keep, make sure they're responsible for what they've done. But in the majority of your users in a public library are using it because they love the library. Exactly. And they don't want to damage it. You do have the few, you know. Yeah. Just how they are, but in the majority of them, they want to be, keep the place they like to use nice. So they'll be careful. They'll put a lid on their cup. They'll, I got my coffee, my computer here, but I got my lid on. Right. And the corollary to that one is the traditional, if it's not weighing the game, it's having an employee count the pieces and that the amount of staff time you would use doing that is far more expensive to the library than just letting it circulate. And if a piece goes missing, then you follow through with again the publisher or whoever. What most likely happened is the next person that checks it out will discover, wait, something was missing that we needed in Belk when they return it. They'll say, hey, when we got it was missing this thing. So we didn't do it, but it was gone. So you might want to figure out some way to replace that because it was necessary for playing the game. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't necessary piece, but yeah. Absolutely. Right. Doesn't look any other desperate questions have come in. Just a few thank yous, great webinar, great resources. Hopefully we'll get more people going, buy more games for their libraries and doing some more programming and educating people and getting these skills learned, whether they know they're learning them or not. Yep. So thank you everybody for being here with us this morning. Thank you so much, George. I'm so glad we're able to get you on the show to talk about board games and using them this way. We've had quite a few shows on Encompass Live over the years about all sorts of aspects of using board games, but not this particular one. So that's great. Gonna go back to our main page here. As I said, Encompass Live, if you just Google Encompass Live, the name of our show is the only thing you'll find on the internet. Nobody else has allowed to call themselves this. So you'll come up with our PageR, our archives page. These are our upcoming shows, but I was gonna show you our archives are right here. This show is being recorded and will be posted here to our archives should be by the end of the day tomorrow. I should have it all done. I'll be the top of the list here. The most recent ones come up at the top and we'll have a link to the recording on YouTube and a link to George's slides and his Google. George, you can send me a link to that so I can link to it with all your resources that you need in there. Everyone who attended this morning and registered for today's show will receive an email from me letting you know when it's available and ready to watch. While we're here on the archive page, I'll show you there is a search feature here. You can search through our archives to find anything else you wanna look at. Let me just do that while I'm here. Yeah, all these some things that mention board games. Library programming, digital literacy, all sorts of things that you can find in our top in here. But what I'll show also is we have, you'll notice we have a, you can search our full of show archives or the most recent 12 months if you want to just find current recent shows. That is because this is the full archives of Encompass Live. I'm not gonna scroll all the way to the bottom of this because that would be huge. Encompass Live premiered in January, 2009. So we have over 10 years worth of archives here. So when you are watching an archive show, just pay attention to the original broadcast date. They're all dated because some things will stay in the test of time, some topics, book lists, how to run a board gaming tournament, things like that. But some things will become outdated. Information will be no longer be good. Links might not work anymore. Web pages may have worked, resources or services may have changed completely since we broadcast the show. So just pay attention to the original date. But we will always keep our full archives up here as long as we have somewhere to host it right now being on YouTube. Yet we're librarians, we keep things for historical purposes and archive them. So they'll always be here. Just pay attention when you are going through our archives. We do have a Facebook page for the show. I've got a link here and here it is over here. If you do like to use Facebook, give a like to us over there. We do reminders, just a reminder about blogging in today's show. Meet our speakers. So if you do like to use Facebook on Twitter and elsewhere, we do Twitter, Instagram. We have a hashtag and comp live, a little abbreviation. So look for that anywhere. It will be talking about what we've, we're doing what we got coming up on the show. So here's our upcoming shows. I'm working on more finalizing and confirming things for March where you'll see our March calendar get filled in here. Next week's show, it is the last Wednesday of the month. So it is pretty sweet tech day. The last Wednesday of every month is Amanda Sweet, the technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission comes on the show. Talks about something techy. So if you are a tech person or interested in tech, this would be the one, the show definitely to keep an eye on. And next week, she's going to talk about making green screen videos using free and low cost tools. A lot of people are doing videos with all so many things being online and remote and people getting much more comfortable with going looking for information and resources on and training on Facebook pages and online. So she was going to talk to you in about how to do that next week. So please sign up for that show register for that one and in your other future shows we've got coming up. Well, you will see you on. Thank you so much, George. Thank you everybody. And if we have barking there, I was going to ask earlier, you have company. She took off. Ah. That was Penny. Always loved. Nowadays we have lots of pets on in our shows. But thank you everyone. And hopefully we'll see you on a future episode of Encompass Live. Thanks. Stay warm.