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