29 Jul Open Game Night
If your last interaction with a board game was a tedious slog of Monopoly that ended with someone (not you, surely) up-ending the game board and walking away, let me invite you to try something else. Both the variety and quality of tabletop games have grown dramatically over the last decade. You have many, many more choices now beyond Monopoly and Clue.
Games as Stories
There are few things more powerful than a good story. In fact, I’d say that one way of understanding what a public library is is a collection of stories. Over the last two years, the Plainfield-Guilford Township Public Library has expanded it’s collection of board and table-top games. These games fit so well into the Library’s greater collection because – like great books, movies, music and our local history collection – board and tabletop games tell stories.
Some games are quite literally about story-telling (like Dixit or Shahrazad), some throw you into the middle of a grand adventure and invite you to finish it (like Scythe or Pandemic). Many of the games draw from familiar stories like King Arthur, Robin Hood, Harry Potter, classic Disney movies and more!
Learn a new game
So, if you’d like to experience the quality and range of our game collection but are not sure where or how to start, try Open Game Night! On the first Wednesday of each month, we gather upstairs in one of the Library’s meeting rooms, choose from a selection of our game collection and start playing! Sometimes, if we have a large crowd, we can have multiple games going at once! In the last few months, we have raced our bicycles a la the Tour de France, built cities while engaging in vicious political intrigue, and managed specialized parks for different varieties of bears.
Very often, the games we play are new to everyone, so don’t feel bad if you’ve never played! Open Game Night is a fun and un-intimidating way to learn a new game and meet new people!