Our next board game competition
by Benjamin Sprague 4 months, 2 weeks agoHello all,
While I haven't had time to share details of our past event, I figured I would at least post some info here as we get our next competetive board game event underway.
Our third Tabletop Challenge will be held Saturday, October 19th. I'm hoping to hit 30 players, but will have room for at least 40 thanks to some format changes. Instead of having one round of games to qualify for the championship table, which leaves 3/4 of players out of contention for the best prizes, we're going to try three rounds of games with points awarded to players based on their finishing positions. That way, the third round may be just as important as the first, to keep players invested until the end.
We have a Google form set up for registration, where players can select 3 or more games from our 10 offerings, and then we'll figure out how to seat players over the three rounds.I've actually been trying to do this in testing with some AI assistance and the results have been.,.. interesting. I'm leaving out Wingspan (I know, I know) and Catan from our last event because they took FOREVER to finish. Instead, we have 10 games to pick from instead of 7, with what I think is better variety: 7 Wonders, Cascadia, Carcassonne, Canvas, Dominion, Splendor, Ticket to Ride, Kingdomino, Sagrada, and Azul.
Points will be awarded on a 7-4-2-1 or 6-3-1 scale for 4- and 3-player games, respectively. In the event of a tie, well, we'll have a solution for that by October lol. Sudden death match of some sort.
Thanks to generous event sponsorship from Adventure Games of Oshkosh and Boardlandia of Appleton, we're able to again offer several gift cards and fantastic game giveaways.
Event details can be found here:
https://riponlibrary.org/events/tabletop-challenge-iii/
Hey Benjamin!
Ooooh, this is a SUPER valuable overview of how to design and facilitate this in other library spaces! I really look forward to hearing how the October event goes. A couple of questions:
This info ROCKS, my friend; I am so grateful that we can borrow from your leadership and expertise!!!
~Chris
Hi Chris,
Making the connections with event sponsors was born of necessity and a sense of "well, the worst that can happen is they say no!" My wife and I had been frequent customers at Adventure Games, which definitely helped break the ice in terms of helping support our programs here at the library. Our initial game collection here at Ripon was also sourced through their store. Boardlandia was more of an accident - with an extremely limited budget for games and events, I just started reaching out to various publishers to see if they had any sort of program in place to help libraries / nonprofits and see how things went. Many were unable or unwilling to donate - and I understand that, there's not much of an incentive for Days of Wonder to send us free games when they can't keep things in stock the way it is. A few publishers, though (including Rio Grande and Hachette) made considerable donations to our collection. I think it was while shopping for our yearly additions to our in-house library that I realized Boardlandia was Wisconsin-based and reached out to them. They kindly and generously donated several games to our collection and additional games for prizes at our summer family gaming event, and now for our October event. We've had great feedback from both businesses and hope we can continue to grow our gaming events.
I would be happy to share what we've used behind the scenes, though it's mostly designs in Canva and our Google form for registration.
Poster template
TV / FB ad template
This is TERRIFIC outreach info/guidance; thanks, Benjamin! :D
~Chris