NGD THE BIG DAY: Awake early, but feeling strangely at peace. Try to get family members to place nickel bets on attendance. I guess 138, but nobody bets me. I really think everything will be fine. Continue setting stuff up at library until 10 A.M. meeting of volunteers. Go over all activities with all volunteers and tell them that the goal is for only the really tough questions to get to me. They can all direct people and answer questions about any gaming station. Give everyone yellow duct tape tags that say NGD and tell them to add whatever they want to them. Mine said: Tina/Boss! My husband's said: Stan/Gopher. All volunteers get busy setting up their own stations and helping to get board games to table and enlarged rules posted.

Two Mormon missionaries walk by and I suddenly remember accosting them a week ago and asking them to host Pictueka! They said yes -- but I guess I forgot (or lost the sticky note.) I tell director that she is free to help anywhere.

11:00 comes and the library fills steadily with people. Before long, bands have formed and Rock Band remains busy all day. Most of the day there is a good sized audience. Some trouble with the projector/sound equipment configuration, so Stan the Gopher goes home and hauls our T.V. back. As soon as it is set up, it is in use and remains busy until program end at 5:00 P.M. Super Smash Bros. gets busy and station volunteers keep track of best scores which will determine our team in live tournament, which starts at one o'clock our time. Eli posted "The Saga of the First Ever National Gaming Day" He captures the intense ups and downs of the day beautifully.

Hot dog meals sell and sell at the circ desk. Library customers of all ages are good natured about all of the noise and the people. One report of a cranky customer. People learn about and play Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: the Gathering, Yugio. They play pictureka! because we more or less make them. They have to have a stamped hand to play video games and the only way to get stamped is to play Pictureka! To their surprise, most of them enjoy the board game a great deal. There is one little boy, the director's nephew, who plays Pictueka! most of the day. He's so terribly good at it. He beats adults, teens, other kids. Every game or so, someone tries to get him to think about playing something else for a while. Everyone who plays gets a Jolly Bean free cookie card. The Jolly Bean has sent over a basket of lovely giant cookies so that players can redeem their card in the library if they want to. We run out of cookies fast. (The Jolly Bean was swamped at 5:00 with cookie card redeemers!) 119 people played Pictureka!

I've taken up more than enough blogspace so I'll cut to the chase: This program exceeded all of our expectations. We will be participating next year, and hope to see many Idaho libraries listed on the GT System leaderboards when NGD 2009 is done. Dylan Baker of Ada Community Library and I are talking about doing some casual library vs. library Super Smash matches, and I'm also talking with Heather of Flagstaff Public Library to do the same. What if we all got really comfortable with live gaming over the next year? What if we helped other libraries get the practice of gaming tournaments, and took the time to reach out to gamers? What if the West DOMINATED the East on December 14, 2009? What if IDAHO turns out to be a gaming force to make libraries all over the U.S. want to beat us? I had no idea how to do any of the gaming/technical stuff before this program. Yet, with great support from other libraries, we managed. Not only managed, but Jerome Public Library made it to the Super Smash Bros. national finals!

At ten before five o'clock, we tell the remaining 59 people that they are playing their last game of the day. The count for people in the library throughout the day was roughly between 200 and 300. Not bad when you consider that we only had ten days to prepare. Clean up. Go home tired and satisfied.