The Origins Game Fair takes place about this time each year, and it’s a great convention worth attending, particularly if you’re interested in the tabletop games side of the industry. It was last weekend, so you’ve missed it for this year, but if you’re a gamer and a librarian, you need to have conventions like this on your radar, regardless. While not as big as something like GenCon, Origins is still one of the two gaming shows I would always make a point to attend in times past. I missed Origins and I won’t make it to GenCon this year, despite initial plans to the contrary. I hope to make it to both, next year.

For 35 years, Origins has been run by the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA) and almost all the manufacturers in this niche of the gaming market show up, often showcasing their newest products. (It makes a good one-two punch of publicity to launch a new game at Origins and follow up at GenCon on the buzz generated.) It’s a great place to check out games old and new, experiment outside your normal gaming habits, give games a test drive with the producers — often with the designers themselves! — showing you how a game is played. For a convention that draws some 15,000 people, it’s very personal and can be a lot of fun.

But I didn’t talk about Origins in enough time for you to attend this year, so why bring it up now?

Each year GAMA’s creative arm, the Academy of Gaming Arts and Design, awards their "Best Of" for material released the previous year. GAMA’s own website hasn’t updated this information, so I’m going to point you to the Critical Hits blog as one of the many sites listing both the nominees and the winners of this year's Origins Awards.

There are a lot of takeaways for you in that simple listing. I could wish Critical Hits had embedded links to all the games and the manufacturers listed but I’m going to trust in your “leet reference skillz" to hunt down what catches your eye. I’ll link a few I’m specifically talking about.

The first thing to note is that, while I say “niche” above, I’m not talking about a small number of games or game types. Look at the categories! Have you even heard of play by mail games before (commonly abbreviated PBM)? A lot of it is more about play by email now, but the principles are the same — players fill out turns for games run on distant computers, with the results mailed back. It’s social and competitive as players use phone and email to negotiate cooperative or competitive strategies between turns. Because games are asynchronous and turn-based, they could be readily adapted to a library setting. Have your players stop in once a week, gang the turns together, and make the results available from you.

Note that this year’s PBM winner, Hyborean War (from Reality Simulations Inc), is set in the world created by Robert E. Howard for his Conan stories. I know two other nominees also have literary tie-ins, with The One Ring Legends module by Harlequin Games being part of the Middle Earth PBM. Starweb by Flying Buffalo Inc includes the Berserker class, licensed from Fred Saberhagen’s science fiction tales.

Speaking of writings that might appear on your shelves, note the fiction awards. Let me amend that to “fiction that should appear on your shelves” but probably doesn’t. Arguably, the biggest publisher listed is Wizards of the Coast, the folks responsible for R.A. Salvatore’s The Pirate King. You’ll have to look into your purchasing protocols if you want to pick up some of the other material, but if you have gamers in your libraries, these are books they’re going to want to check out and to read.

Something else they will want to read — and you too, perhaps — are the non-fiction books related to games and gaming… and again, there's a literary connection there. Award-winning book Tour de Lovecraft: the Tale by Ken Hite (Atomic Overmind Press) is from another small press publisher but carries solid credentials of literary criticism laced with sheer delight in the works of seminal horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. (You have his works in your collection, at least — don’t you?)

A game based on a comic pulled off a surprise upset in this year's awards. The game community is all abuzz over the Mouse Guard Role-Playing Game (Archaia Studios Press) trouncing the much-anticipated and deeply revised 4th edition of mainstay role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Your gaming community will recognize D&D if you're preparing to start a role-playing club, but you might in truth have better luck with something like Mouse Guard if a series like Brian Jacques' Redwall books get a lot of circulation in your system. At least, take the time to take a look instead of just going with the game that has the highest profile.

If all this is too nerdy, too game-geeky for you, there are still awards for Children’s, Family, and Party Games. Look at the also-rans, the nominees that didn’t win, because those titles point you toward games you might want to hunt down and give consideration to picking up. There are lots more good experiences to be had in libraries that go beyond, or in addition to, the regular video game events. Academic library? Look at the Historical Board Games for support of your history curriculum.

One thing to realize about all these games and books and award-winners is that they are, or are about, what Brian Mayer calls “authentic games” in the Games in Libraries podcast for May 2009. They may have educational content, they may have literary relationships, they may be part of a niche market of games you’ve never heard of. They may also be strange in form or presentation, and they might look suspiciously like print-on-demand or even vanity press, but they’re what real hobbyists play, play with, and read.

Not everything will go well in a library — you won’t be setting up a three-month long Napoleonic miniatures campaign, I’m quite sure — but if you can find the right people in your community, I bet you could have a great library event introducing people to painting miniatures. Maybe a hobbyist can demo how to make dioramas, or you could simply put up a (closed and locked) display cabinet of historically-accurate miniature figures of Saxons or Romans, or soldiers from WWII or Napoleon’s own. Link the display to history books applicable to the era in question, and see if you can scare up an old copy of H.G. Wells’ Little Wars while you’re at it, the book that started the whole concept of miniatures wargaming. You have to love the subtitle: "a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books."

Game On!



(Some disclaimers are due here: I am a Lifetime Member of the Academy of Gaming Arts and Design upon being inducted into the Academy’s Hall of Fame at the Origins show held in 1996, and I spent some years working for Flying Buffalo Inc, which runs the Starweb play-by-mail game mentioned above. I drew the map art on an early version of RSI's Hyborian War -- decades ago, literally -- which to the best of my knowledge is no longer in use.)