The Mimic Monthly – April 2024
Hey Folks! Here’s a brief summary of this month’s Mimic Monthly: Morsel Games are starting up big and we need players! Creative workshops are also starting up at the store. A selection of new games we’re excited for from some friends we made at the convention last month. Some card game schedule updates at the bottom! Okay let’s go now: Morsels are kicking off! We’re hyped to start the Morsels exchange this month! If you haven’t heard, it’s a way to earn prizes by running and playing in Roleplaying Games at Mimic’s! Full details here. Please register in advance for these on our Events calendar. We need players to populate these games! We’ve already got a bunch of local GMs already on the schedule for a variety of RPG games throughout April! April 5th 6pm Monster of the Week 6th 1pm Beginner Dungeons & Dragons 6th 6pm Delta Green 6th 6pm Dread RPG 12th 6pm Mothership 13th 6pm FIST 13th 6pm Alien RPG 19th 6pm Wildsea 20th 2pm Old School Essentials 20th 6pm Girl by Moonlight 20th 6pm Alien RPG 26th 6pm Call of Cthulhu 26th 6pm Thirsty Sword Lesbians 27th 6pm Star Wars: Force & Destiny May 27th 6pm Star Wars: Force & Destiny For more information and to Register in advance (we highly recommend this) go to our Events Calendar and search “Morsels” Creative Workshops! Alongside the Morsels games, we’re going to start having some Tuesday workshops related to Roleplaying Games but also a great arts & crafts time for all ages. April 2nd 6pm – Miniature Painting WorkshopApril 9th 6pm- Character Creation Basics (Dungeons & Dragons)April 16th 6pm – Miniature Painting (Again)April 23rd 6pm – Terrain making We’ll be looking to add more workshops on more days such as RPG map drawing made easy, world-building and more!For more inforamtion, head over to our Events Calendar and search “workshop” for more information or to register in advance. Some new games we’re excited for! Toasty Toasts is a lightweight and quick competitive card game about building toast sandwiches and screwing up your opponents’ sandwiches. We met the creator at the GAMA Expo and loved it! A slam dunk of a board game if there ever was one. Wyrmspan builds on the beloved gameplay of Wingspan with oh yes a huge stable of fascinating species of dragons! Another card game we saw at GAMA, Worldbreakers is a really versatile living card game set in 13th Century Asia. Compete to build a powerful Khanate or play the solo campaign against the invading forces of Marco Polo. There are a variety of ways to play, including a draft format! Finally, Mausritter is a new Roleplaying Game of mice and magic! Rules-light, fast and accessible for all ages, the Mausritter core box has all the components to jump into the game straight away! Commander players are all FOOLS For our hit Magic: The Gathering Commander League, April is April Fools All Month! Not only are Unfinity cards legal for this monthly season, but newly certified Junior Game Commissioner and known neighborhood card jock Leo is cooking up some wacky new achievements guaranteed to knock your inner sleeves right off! Update Leo insists I also mention that all “Un” sets are also available such as unlimited unbelievable unsubmersible uncomparable unicorn undefeatable uncontainable unconscionable unpreventable and undertale. And also a bunch of other things he listed off too fast so message him on discord @lilviathan to ask him all about it. Other Card Game News! Our Flesh and Blood rotation is changing. The new rotation is First Thursday (4/4) – BlitzSecond Thursday (4/11) – DraftThird Thursday (4/18) – Precon BlitzFourth Thursday (4/25) – Classic Constructed Also, our Digimon Locals will on the first and third Wednesday at 6pm. The other wednesdays we’ll treat as an Open House! Yu-Gi-Oh will have an open house the second Wednesday and a Local the fourth Wednesday. Lorcana open house second Thursday and Local fourth Thursday. That’s all for this newsletter! I am currently writing this instead of going to Jae’s family’s place for leftover Easter ham and she’s getting mad at me lol. Peace, and hit us up with any questions at contact@mimicsmarket.com -Jay
Mimic’s Morsels – Token Exchange for RPG Events
GM Scheduling Form Players’ Interest Form The Basics Introducing! The Mimic’s Morsels exchange. This is an ever-evolving prizing structure for in-store Role-Playing Games intended–like an engine–to drive activity in the local roleplaying community for new and experienced players alike. Here is the short of it: when you play in, or “GM” (to lead the game as Game Master) an in-store roleplaying game, you collect Morsel tokens (pictured right, not final), and exchange them for prizes and other perks. The tokens are designed with a hole to be kept on a string, and we’ll have alternate color/material variants to represent 5 tokens and 10 tokens like different colored Rupees in Zelda!) We’re testing designs with wood but are also considering different colored acrylics. Along the way, players can chase some meta-game achievements on a sort of “bingo card” that on completion enters them into a raffle for a more valuable prize. The Details Now, for more details – Players pay $10 to attend. Reservation for seats will be available for purchase in advance on our website. We expect games to be at least two hours and accessible to players of all experience levels, with pre-made characters available. Players will be capped at 6 per game so it can fit on one of our long tables. Players will receive a concessions voucher for $3 for drinks and/or snacks from the store (during the game or anytime). At the end of the session, players receive 2 Morsel tokens for playing. From the Game Masters’ perspective: GMs do not pay to attend, and are rewarded with two Morsels plus one for every attending player over 3 players – up to 5 tokens for a 6-player game. As for the raffle, GMs are automatically entered after GM-ing two games. We will have a community schedule for GMs to arrange their games and a form for players to submit games they are interested. That way we can help GMs run games that players will attend. See the links to the right. GM Scheduling Form Players’ Interest Form The Goodies Now the fun stuff – Please see the list of prizes below. We will be adding and changing the prize pool continuously so please tell us what you’d like to see here! 1 Morsel – Any Single Die 5 Morsels – Free Game (does not give concessions voucher or Morsels) 8 Morsels – Any RPG Mini under $10 10 Morsels – GameMasters Guild Acrylic dice set 10 Morsels – $5 store credit 10 Morsels – $15 off any RPG book(s) 12 Morsels – Any Phunny-brand plush of RPG creatures & monsters! 16 Morsels – $25 off any Dirt Cheap Dungeon terrain kit This is a fine place to start with some good stuff to chase, but what else could we have? What’s like…a BIG TICKET item for a really serious GM to grind for? Achievements Bingo for entry into a Raffle And here is our first set of achievements for the first raffle cycle! We plan on cycling in and out new achievements over time. Please offer up some ideas! They should be decently challenging and encourage interesting role-playing experiences. They’ll be arranged in a 3×3 grid for bingo-style stamping by staff. Ideally it should take players at least two games to complete a line. Thanks for Playing! – Redeem more than 1 Morsel (center square) Planeskipper – Play the same character in two different worlds I’ll do it Myself – GM a game Potlucky – Bring snacks for the game. GM’s Choice – GM suggests a challenge based on the game system you’re playing Indie Revolution – Play a game with a zine involved! Tools of the Trade – Participate in a creative workshop at Mimic’s Expand your Horizons – Play any game that isn’t Dungeons & Dragons or in the 5e system Custom Creature Culture – Play with a mini you have painted yourself. The first raffle prize will be a set of Bump-Metal dice from Gamemasters Guild! The first cycle of this bingo system will end once we have ~6-10 completed bingo cards (this will help us gauge if the raffle should happen about monthly, quarterly, etc) and the more activity we get with the Morsels system, the bigger and bigger raffle prizes we can plan in the future. Pre-empting some Questions If you’re still reading this far, you are probably interested in the nitty-gritty of this or have a question hopefully we can answer. I can’t call it a FAQ because nobody has asked questions about this yet. If you have more questions, want to get involved or any other reason to talk to us, send an email to contact@mimicsmarket.com! Why charge $10? We have been focused on free-play games in the store, which has had some problems with player commitment to attendance. We want these games to be taken seriously as a form of community entertainment experiences. The fees compensate GMs for their service with an accelerated rate of tokens. That way, we get more GMs, we get more games, we all play more RPGs together! The store does make a percentage of revenue to pay the rent that is a requisite to offer the space to play these games. We had a whole big spreadsheet calculating how many tokens to give out for how many games, towards how many prizes with what value, and does this totally hemorrhage money from the store?? And it appears to be financially stable! How can I farm more tokens? We know our community is gamers and that gamers figure out how to game out any system for maximum efficiency. So there’s only three ways to get tokens. Playing in games gets tokens, GM-ing games gets tokens faster. The third way, the only way to get extra tokens is to create a good community here. Staff will have a set budget (per raffle cycle) to give single tokens at their discretion to players and GMs that are excelling as members of the
The Mimic Monthly – March 2024
I haven’t forgotten about this! In the first week of March, Jae & Jay are attending the industry conference GAMA Expo for a bunch of seminars, networking and to demo and see presentations on up-and-coming games. Watch our Instagram and Facebook for updates and pictures. Thank you to Famine and Jaq for stepping up to hold the fort while we’re gone. The store is open and events are on as usual! Open Roleplaying Games this Month This month there’s a bunch of opportunities for folks to come in and join a roleplaying game. They’re all great opportunities for people new to this type of game, with pre-made characters to play and GMs happy to teach. There’s also a variety of different games for experienced role-players to find something new! Ongoing Games Every Tuesday 5-9pm local Game Master Dan has an ongoing large-group Dungeons & Dragons game. Starting March 2nd and every other Saturday there will be a public game of Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers League from 2-6pm in the store, ran by Julien. Great for drop-in-drop-out players. Starting March 14th, Sir Maynard will start an ongoing campaign every Thursday at 6pm — the Longfelt Explorer’s Society. One-shot Games Drop in March 6th for a home-brewed game of Root RPG styled by Gamemaster Nick into Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. For an absolute ground-floor beginner RPG game, Jay is running a game of Mazes, an RPG with zero math. Testing new Card Game Locals Alongside our usual Pokemon (every Tuesday) and Magic (every Saturday), we’re expanding our Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Lorcana open-house evenings to host some locals in the latter half of the month. Digimon — March 20th, 6pm Lorcana — March 21st, 6pm Yu-Gi-Oh! — March 27th, 6pm These will be conducted by Jay who is learning bracket construction and is not a certified judge in any of these games, so we’ll rely on the knowledge and experience of our communities for assistance. ALSO Flesh and Blood event rotations continue every Thursday at 6pm March 7th – Draft March 14th – Precon Blitz March 21st – Classic Constructed March 28th – Blitz Late Patty’s Day 21+BYOB Saturday March 23rd, starting at 5pm, Mimic’s is becoming a 21+ only space for a BYOB game night. As in the past, we expect our community to be well conducted so we can stay good neighbors in Bloomfield. All of our game library will be free to play, we encourage folks to consider RPG one-shot games to run with drinks, and we’ll all have a great time! There will be a $10 corking fee. More stuff on the Calendar! For more details and most importantly Free Registration in advance, please see our calendar page for all events! And check it regularly! We’re always adding new events that might not have gone in the newsletter, and we have weekly Board Game Nights, Friday Night Magic drafts, Warhammer demos, maybe even some arts and crafts workshops once we get back from the convention! Calendar Cool, it’s time for me to go finish packing for the Expo. Thank you for reading, be good to each other and especially yourself. Hopefully I didn’t forget anything, or that when I eventually realize I did, it’s negligible or correctable. That’s all you can ask for you know? Peace! -Jay
The Mimic Monthly – January 2024
New Year, New Mimic’s, but it’s the same Mimic’s so don’t worry Do people still wear glasses with the year number on them? What would that be like for this year? Is the zero one round lens but the 4 is like a triangular lens? It’s just not reasonable. We’ve only been open 4.5 months but boy howdy it’s felt like a full year getting Mimic’s up and running, so I’m counting this as our first year roundup. We’ve already grown so much. Our stock of products is denser and more varied and it’s become a nightmare to organize. Our events started with one shaky, confused Netrunner tournament and now we’re having tons of open RPG games, weekly magic drafts and format tournaments, a Pokemon League. We’re starting to really ramp into Warhammer events. What else? We finally got Lorcana cards! We put in shelves and tables and a neon sign and ramp, and we’re looking forward to a big lighting installation in the next week! We’ve made so many friends and had wacky times and learned valuable lessons about–I don’t know–being honest with our feelings? I’m just so grateful we were fortunate enough to bring together people and have the opportunity to accumulate this community around the store as a vague centerpoint. It’s the people that come and play the games and care intensely about the games, they are what has made this come together at all. Bloomfield has been the perfect area to settle in and grow the tabletop gaming scene. There’s tons of enthusiastic, warm and friendly people here and every day more folks are finding out about us. Word is still spreading and the tabletop scene is still growing! I could gush for another couple paragraphs about everyone we’ve met and the comunity we’ve formed. Thank you everyone, for everything. January Events! I don’t have much else to say for this newsletter. I’m sure once it warms up and we get growing we’ll be very hyped to write here about tables we’re going to have at big events and festivals or cons. Something like that But for now, it’s another round of events! Changes this month Magic format-rotating tournaments moved to Saturday evenings, FNM is still draft-focused Commander League is back! Starting on the 7th, every Sunday Now that we’ve got Lorcana, we’ll have some Open Play nights every other wednesday just to start building steam. Warhammer on mondays, we’ll alternate Mini Painting meetups and Kill Team Demos weekly. Plus on the 20th we’ll be pushing the tables together to get some full-size maps! So see if you can prep a 2000-point army for that! Not much else to say this time. I think we’re all pretty worn out by the Holiday Season busy-ness. Shouts out to Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse entering the public domain. It’s an election year, that’s gonna be something. Let’s all have a nice rest for a while. Stay warm, folks! -Jay Mimic’s Market4707 Liberty AvePittsburgh, PA 15224
The Mimic Monthly – December 2023
Hey Folks! Is there a cool name we could make up for followers of Mimic’s? Let’s brainstorm it for the new year. Things have been going well with us since the last newsletter, our hires have been excellent, we’ve geared up for the Holiday season with sales and specials and hopefully some fun events that will bring us together as a community all schmultzy and holidays-like. So let’s unwrap some newsletterrrruggh. December Events! Friday Night Magic is rotating, Pokemon League is taking off. Monday is shaping up as our mini painting and wargames night. Saturday TTRPG Socials will be buttressed by Jay running RPG demos in the evenings. More and more of our community members are stepping up to generously run public games all month! It’s a great time to take a shot at any games you’ve been curious about. But the main event we want to highlight for December is our Longest Night celebration. Based on the holiday from Night in the Woods, it’ll be a community potluck party and food drive where we’ll also be playing some kind of story-telling game centered around drawing your own constellations and creating mythos around them. Please consider attending and contributing! Other than that, the events flier is below, and more events and details are on our website! Events Calendar Holiday Sales and Bundles and such! We’ve got a bunch of extras and freebees for the holiday season! Games make great gifts and are literally one of those things that brings people together to have fun. We can’t list all the things here in the newsletter, but what’s great is I made a little graphic for it! Also, we’ve made a little 2023 Gift Guide doc to give some recommendations and ideas for gifts (and a lot aren’t even games but other gifts!). Remember the Sears Wishbook? Circling everything? It’s like that. Gift Guide 2023 Also also, in the store we have Wishlist sheets! If you really have no idea what gift to get someone, just have them run around the store taking note of everything they like! Piece of cake. Also also also, we still have Advent Calendars for Pokemon TCG and Foam Brain Dice. Don’t think just because the first is over you can’t follow the Advent Calendars. Even if a week has passed already, that’s just one big jackpot of stuff to catch up to the date! Or in January, like the cards and dice don’t spoil after December lol they’re still good. Lighting Strikes! Is this a news item? We just got some track lighting and will hopefully have it installed before the holidays just tank every appointment and schedule lol. Get ready for extreme visibility on all our books and such! That’s it for news. I could like, talk about all the new products we get in for the newsletter but there’s so many of those and I think it’s kinda crass. We’re finally getting some Digimon and soon One Piece cards in. We should be locked in for the 3rd wave of printing for Disney Lorcana so that’s finally happening! Got some better paint supplies like wet palettes, speedpaints, stuff like that. Everything’s always changing and improving. We learned a lot over the last few months and a bunch of stuff is falling into place. OH SHIRTS and TOTE bags are being printed! Simple MM logo and all but you can rep us out in the world. Thank you everybody for the support! Looking forward to 2024 and hopefully the rest of my life full of building out the community here at Mimic’s Market! -Jay
Mimic’s Market Gift Guide 2023
The Mimic Monthly Nov2023
Not only did we never get around to writing a newsletter for October, but we’ve found our September one didn’t send either. SO, we’re still doing newslettery. A lot of news to go through. New Faces on the Mimic’s Market Crew Please welcome Famine Watson – She/Xe (left) and Jacqueline Clyde – She/They (right) as our very first seasonal sales associates. They’re both immensely knowledgeable and passionate about games and will allow us to expand the capabilities, skill-base, and actual hours of operation at Mimic’s Market! Wow open three months and already hiring people, our lifestyle as Business People is so real now. Hours Change As of Monday Nov. 6th, we’re expanding hours and unlocking Monday! Monday-Thursday: 12:00pm-9:00pm Friday-Saturday: 12:00pm-10:000pm Sunday: 12:00pm-7:00pm November Events Should be an expandable image, but if you can’t read that, why not get a look at everything on the– Mimic’s Market Events Calendar Weekly standards, Beginner-friendly Roleplaying experiences, and Caverns of Ixalan this month! Blood on the Clocktower returns as a monthly game every 2nd Wednesday! Please register on the website for anything you plan to attend, it helps us keep a head count to prepare Events Calendar A Library..for games? That’s right folks, if you haven’t seen it yet please check out our Games Library! All games are $5 to rent and play in-store, and for a different rental price relative to the size of the game, you can take it home for a week! Or just wait until Thursday Board Games Night when it’s all free to play in-store anyway. It’s just a great way to try out games without really committing to them. We’ll also soon be adding some Tabletop Roleplaying Game books, some starter decks of popular Trading Card Games to learn with, and even a Starter Set for Warhammer 40K: Kill Team! Yes, this is your sign from the universe to try out a new game. Games Library Other Patch Notes for Mimic’s Market v1.4.2.1 We had a big post the other week about all kinds of policies. Here’s a TL;DR but do consider reading through the post for clarity. Play Space – free space as usual unless there’s reservations or events. Reserved is $5/person/4hrs. Get in touch ASAP if you’ll be late or cancel a reservation. Board Games – Library on the website, can rent to take home (price relative). $5 flat rent to play in store. Thurs board game nights no rent fee for in-store. Card-on-file for out-store (security) Trading Card Games – More variety on rotation for FNM post-Ixalan. Tues rotations to focus on diff games thru the month with discounted boosters. Roleplaying Game – Looking forward to Adventurer’s League and Pathfinder Society, are looking for volunteer GMs. Play & Learn to onboard new people. Sat is our RPG Socials day, come in and read our books and chat about plans with other people. Find GMs/Players, build the community! Other Policies – Any food allowed so long as the store stays clean. Public bathroom is public, not yours at home. Tell us if we have to fix, resupply or clean anything. Code of Conduct – Shouldn’t be glib about this in a tl;dr. Please read fully. There’s honestly so much to put in a newsletter but I’ve got to keep it broad-strokes. We’re gonna learn Kill Team, we’ve got fun snacks like Dango for people to try, we had the Halloween party and it was a great time that taught us we need more backup tables at the store. We want to do so much here and with any luck, we’ll have a long time to make some of those happen. -Jay Mimic’s Market Cards & Games 4707 Liberty Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15224 contact@mimicsmarket.com
Store Policies Update 10/18/2023
Thank you to the everyone in the nascent Mimic’s Market community for all your enthusiasm and involvement over our first two months open! We also thank you for your patience with our changes and stumbles in procedure as we learn how to run a proper game store. After two months, we would like to formalize our policies and pricing for store activities. Please be aware this post has no pictures, just dry informational text. There is however a condensed tl;dr at the bottom of the page. Play Space Policy – Free and by Reservation As always, we want Mimic’s Market to be a public space for people to feel welcome to sit and play their games freely. Play space will continue to be available at no cost insofar as it is not occupied by a group reservation or one of our events. Please refer to our online events calendar or contact us in advance to see if there will be free seating available on a given day. If our store seating is full, we have friendly relationships with Caliente Pizza and Yinz Coffee nearby. Patronizing these local businesses while playing in their space will keep both Mimic’s and our gaming community in good standing with them! To reserve play space will cost $5.00 per person for a period of four hours. Payment is collected at the reserved time, to make the reservation is cost. This is not a strict time frame, and we will gladly let groups go late to finish their game with no additional charge. If there is another group reserving the space next however, there will be more pressure to conclude quickly. We understand situations can change, so please contact us as early as possible if your group will be late or need to cancel a reservation. If we are not contacted and the group arrives late for their reservation in excess of 1 hour, we will charge a fee of $15.00 to hold the space empty. Two hours into an unfilled reservation, the reservation will be considered void and the space returned to public use. Again this is in the case the group does not contact us to report late attendance or cancellation. Board Game Rentals You can see our rental library at www.mimicsmarket.com/game-library. There will only be one copy of each game in the library available for rent, so please contact us ahead of time to see if a game is available. This hatchling selection comes from Jae & Jay’s personal game library as well as some popular games from the store. If there is a game you would like to rent that is not in the library, tell us and we will take a copy out of stock to add to our library! All game rentals for play in the store are a flat fee of $5.00. You can also take a game home for a week-long rental period. The fee for a weekly rental scales with the purchase price of the game and is designed to recoup the cost of the rental copy over several rentals. We require payment information on file for out-of-store rentals. If for any reason a game is damaged beyond use or is not returned and we are unable to reach the renter after 48 hours, we reserve the right to charge the full price for a replacement copy in the library. Given these changes, we no longer charge in-store rental fee for board games during our Thursday Board Game Nights. All available library games are free-use on Thursday nights. Trading Card Game Event Rotation We are always experimenting with different structures for card game events, looking to strike a balance on frequency of events for players to plan around while letting energy for a certain game or format build up for bigger but less frequent events. Regarding Friday Night Magic, I’m sure some of you have been burnt out of drafting Wilds of Eldraine over the last month. We have plans to alternate weekly between drafts and popular formats like Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Pauper, etc. We do not have a set date we’ll start that structure and are looking to incorporate all feedback. Please let us know what formats you favor. Commander free-play and League over the weekend are unchanged. Dan is currently drafting the second season of the League. Tuesday nights, we are looking to alternate between focus on other card games on a monthly basis – Pokemon→Yu-Gi-Oh→Flesh and Blood→Metazoo. The store play space won’t be exclusively for the specific game that night, but it will give the respective communities one night per month to focus on. Tabletop Roleplaying Games We set out for Mimic’s Market to focus on tabletop roleplaying games and we’re working to keep that as our top priority. As I’m sure you can imagine, the variable games and systems, weekly continuity structures and vagaries of the GM role makes RPGs a more complex type of game for which to arrange public events – they’re more conducive to discrete friend groups. We are working on getting integrated into the Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer’s League and Paizo’s Pathfinder Society, both continuous games designed for players to be able to transfer their characters from our game groups to other participating locations anywhere in the country. If you or anyone you know might be interested in volunteering to GM for Adventurer’s League or Pathfinder Society, please let us know and we can discuss. Some upcoming RPG events will be listed as “Play & Learn”, casual games run by our staff to teach new games and systems to people both new to TTRPG and existing players looking to expand. They’re designed to be very beginner-friendly, and will include a “crunch” level to describe how much they’re designed for tactical gameplay systems versus freeform improvisation. Play & Learn events will cost $5 per person, which will be returned in store credit after the event. To incentivize Game Masters to run public teaching and pick-up