A new feature for game nights.

This week as a new feature of our game nights, I experimented with offering free games to the attendees. The concept is simple. I have a bunch of games on a table and anyone can take them. The only limits are that each person take only one and consider donating to the group if they do so (doing so is in no way mandatory).

I fell that I can give; not just an item; but an experience. Also, as i posted in the past, I feel that gaming – as a hobby – is dying. We only have a few products holding up this entire hobby financially. As a step towards strengthening this culture as a whole, we’re gonna have to throw off the shackles of what’s holding players back from joining. Unfortunately, one of those things is the costs behind gaming. As a fairly staunch Capitalist, simply giving away things rubs me the wrong way, but I still don’t feel that having to choose between leisure activities and life essentials is all that great. Especially in an environment where people are struggling to pay basic bills like rent. I look at all the games in my collection that have never been played and think, “couldn’t someone else actually play that?” If I’m honest with myself, I only bought most of these it because either someone told me to, or it looked cool.

It used to be that complexity, difficulty, and stigma were the gatekeepers for board gaming as a hobby, but more and more we can add cost to that list. Do you realize that a large premium game cost twice as much as my water bill these days? There have been entire companies set up to defeat these gatekeepers. There are even an entire class of games termed “Gateway Games” designed with the idea of drawing people in.

I do have a vision for this though. As we move on, it’d be the ‘bees knees’, so to speak, if I were not the only one contributing to this. If game group attendees were to treat this as a trading post of sorts while not expecting specific reciprocation; we’d have quite the library. In the end, I’d like to see a sort of library, but instead of books, there’d be games.