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Guilford Library Has All the Pieces for Board Games

Board games, for most people, are probably associated with memories of laid-back family get-togethers, centered around somewhat tired, familiar sessions of Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit, with rules that are barely followed and players more focused on personal grudges and trash-talk than winning.

The Guilford Free Library is trying to change all that—except maybe the trash talk.

For the past couple years, Teen Services Librarian Sara Martone has been experimenting with various types of tabletop or board game nights, and has recently settled on introducing brand new games every month, an idea she said that has helped the program grow exponentially with Guilford’s board game enthusiasts as well bringing in more people interested in the wide world of board gaming.

“We get people of all ages,” Martone said, “we get families—dads bring their kids. And teens come, so [that’s] really cool.”

The kind of board games and tabletop games that Martone has been introducing aren’t the kind most audiences are familiar with—games like Candy Land, Sorry, The Game of Life, or Risk. A new culture of gamers, spanning age groups and backgrounds, has risen from an international board game boom, driven by smaller companies creating games that often offer fantasy or sci-fi landscapes for players and task players with everything from building railroads across an alien planet to caring for a panda in feudal Japan.

In Guilford, Martone said she has found a healthy community of these folks, who are willing to expand their horizons but who have also developed a keen appreciation of the type of experiences these games provide.

“The majority are people are already into the tabletop gaming,” she said. “And then we get some people who are just into playing games in general; they want to learn new games. It’s a mix.”

Some games can be intimidating for new players. Rather than just rolling dice and moving pieces around the board, many of these games involve things like resources-gathering, diplomacy, and negotiations between players, or calculating multi-faceted outcomes for various choices.

Martone emphasized that people who are brand new to a game or these kinds of games in general can still show up and learn to play in the course of a single evening. No one is expected to know what they’re doing right from the start.

“We lean toward games that tend to involve a little higher thinking and strategy...They’re definitely more strategic, and for slightly older audiences,” said Martone. “A lot of the games we pick are probably [for] ages 8 or 10, but definitely more fun, too, for...older people.”

Martone said the choice to play new games every time has actually made the program more open and enjoyable for both new players and experienced game-heads. Because nearly everyone is learning the intricacies and strategies of a different game every time, the experience becomes one of joint exploration and adventure rather than an awkward clash between vastly different skill or experience levels.

“It becomes a learning experience you do together,” Martone said. “And then you can go home and do it over and over again...get the game at home, and keep playing. And then it forms a bond.”

Though many of the games are competitive—Martone said that even the timeless “quiet rule” of libraries hasn’t always been able to prevent some good natured shouting and celebrating—the library also selects cooperative games. Martone’s next selection, called Pandemic, falls into that category.

“It’s a pretty popular game...We had already owned it at the library,” Martone said.

Cooperative games offer a slightly different experience, and can be more relaxing for some, Martone said.

Martone said as interest has grown, she has considered introducing “a tournament-type thing” with certain popular games, or possibly expanding to include the extremely popular, but more competitive card game Magic: The Gathering. Conversations about that are still in the preliminary stages, Martone said.

The next game night, featuring Pandemic, will take place on Wednesday, Dec. 18 at 6 p.m. at the library, 67 Park Street. For more information, visit www.guilfordfreelibrary.org.