It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye

“Winter is the season for board games.”  –B.L. McCloskey

I tend to agree with the genius that penned the above statement.  Who doesn’t love to sit around a table with friends or family, laughing and taunting one another in the spirit of friendly competition?  Over the holiday, I played gin rummy in Alabama, Settlers of Catan in West Virginia, about a million rip-roaring games of checkers with my friends’ brainiac little girl, as well as a Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana jigsaw puzzle and a topographic Wheeling, West Virginia map puzzle.  By the way, I don’t think jigsaw puzzles count as board games, but it didn’t stop me from taunting and jeering my fellow puzzlers.

As you might guess, the Library has myriad books on board games, like the Oxford History of Board Games,  New Rules for Classic Games with rules that breathe new life into games you might be sick of, as well as R.C. Bell’s Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations.

What you may not know is that the library can be a destination for playing board games.  You could bring your own, but if you have an ID card, you could borrow one of ours!  The First Floor has several sets of Monopoly, Uno, Scrabble, and playing cards (tournament anyone?) as well as chess, Trivial Pursuit, Boggle, and Rook.  The Teen Department has too many to list here, but I’ll give you a few: Settlers of Catan with the Seafarers expansion pack, Cranium, Apples to Apples with expansion pack, Risk, Balderdash, Set, Mancala, Ticket to Ride, Voltage, Phase 10, Gloom, Backgammon, Upwords and many, many more!

So approach the Ask-a-Librarian desk and tell ’em Bonnie sent ya!!

–Bonnie