August Grand Gaming Melee

Have you spent your summer lying on the beach, drinking beer, watching TV, and otherwise letting your brain have a well-deserved rest? If so, it’s time to get that lazy brain off the couch and brush up on your gaming skills! Come to Arlington Central Library for a refresher course in games ranging from quick and simple to long and complicated to borderline unfathomable. Bring games you want to play, or come without games and play what others bring. There will be board games, card games, dice games, tile games, and just about every other kind of game that can be played on a tabletop. If you see a new one you want to try, there will be plenty of people eager to teach you.

Playing an entire day requires some sustenance, so please bring something delicious to share. Cookies, crackers, and pretzels are popular options, as are sodas and juices. Some people bring doughnuts, cupcakes, or other substantial sweets; these are always appreciated and disappear quickly. Healthy snacks of vegetables occasionally appear, and the people who bring them often get the opportunity to take them back home again. Waste not, want not!

AN EXTREMELY IMPORTANT NOTE: While the library offers us open arms, it does not offer us an open refrigerator. Due to remodeling in the building, we no longer have access to a kitchen. If you bring any drinks or foods that should remain chilled, you must bring a cooler for them. Your host – as always – will bring a couple of coolers filled with freshly brewed iced tea and excellent store-bought lemonade. Undoubtedly there will be demand for more drinks than he can carry, so a few attendees should heed the call of the thirsty.

If you bring something else to drink, please provide cold storage for it. You may want to coordinate such an effort with your fellow players to supply maximum variety of beverages with a minimum of containers; feel free to post comments on this page for this purpose. Food and drink will be deployed on the stage at the front of the auditorium to separate it from the playing area.

Official start time is 10:30am, but you may arrive as early as 10:00am to help with setup. Cleanup begins around 4:00pm (or whenever you decide that you can’t squeeze in one more game before the end of the event). The librarians appreciate our vacating the auditorium by 4:30pm, and by “appreciate” they mean that our compliance determines whether we’ll be invited back for another Grand Gaming Melee.

Arlington Central cleanup instructions:

• Place all trash in the bins provided. Make sure that no scraps of paper, cardboard, or food remain on the floor.
• Leave the tables and chairs where you used them. The next group can deal with setup the same way we did.