For quite a while now, the Library’s youth and family engagement department has had a non-circulating board game collection for teen and youth gaming.

When the Library won Kanopy’s Adventure Never Ends contest in 2023, it sparked the collections department to add games that the public could take home.

The soft launch of about 200 circulating board games started on October 11 at two branches: 85 games at Plaza and 90 at Waldo.

“These behave just like a book,” says Diana Platt, the Library’s senior virtual resources librarian. “You can check them out for three weeks. You can have them held at a different location and be transferred.”

The tabletop games selected for the collection are “high interest and top-rated” – and ones that can be played in under three hours.

The main criterion, says Platt, has to do with age.

“We wanted to focus on games designed for adults,” she says. “They may say nine and up, or 12 and up, but the intended audience is adults, even though anyone can check them out.”

Other considerations included size – games that would fit on Library shelves and in transit bins – and cost (all games cost less than $100).

Games were excluded, says Platt, that “required you to use up material in the playing of the game” or “ubiquitous” titles like Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, or Chess.

But classic games like Ticket to Ride are in the mix, and new ones discovered at Gen Con, the tabletop gaming convention.

“At Gen Con, I got to play a game called Stalk Exchange, where you are building a portfolio of flower bulbs on a ‘stalk’ market that grows in value over time,” Platt says. “And then at the end of the play session, the highest rated bulb has a crash, like the Tulip Crash of the 1600s.”

“It’s a really fun game,” she says, “that anybody can pick up really easily.”

Matthew Scrivner, a Library collections associate who works in cataloging, also learned about new games at Gen Con that are now in the Library’s collection.

For example, Broken and Beautiful is a game about Japanese pottery. At the start of each round, players acquire bowls, cups, and tea jars, or sell works in exchange for gold (to pay for repairs).

"And what is broken becomes more valuable in the scoring at the end of the game," he says, "if you have managed to repair it."

Scrivner also suggests Gnome Hollow, which he describes as “an adorable and beautiful game." Players are gnomes who collect and sell mushrooms at the market "to gain gnomish treasures like bottle caps and shiny things.”

As the Library was making plans, the collections department met with other libraries and gathered ideas about vendors and best practices.

Circulating board game programs at university and public libraries, such as St. Louis County Public Library and Lawrence Public Library, served as models.

Platt says, in this pilot stage of the Library’s program, they’ll be assessing “what’s going to work best if we did take this across all the branches, if it is going to be a popular thing.”

So, she says, feedback is always welcome.

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