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 games, we will pilot a system where we offer GMs the pooled $5.00 attending player fees as store credit. We will promote these game events on Discord, our website calendar and social media channels, but it is also partly the responsibility of GMs to populate their games. We cannot guarantee any minimum attendance, and will inform GMs if two or fewer players have signed up so the GM can consider canceling.
This does not apply to established tabletop groups with regular players. This is designed to attract new players and introduce the hobby of tabletop roleplaying games to new people and introduce new systems to existing TTRPG players.
Also, Saturdays will be our RPG Socials. We encourage players and GMs to come in, read through any of our books on display and start talking to each other about games you would like to run and make arrangements. If there’s free space available, we will gladly print out character sheets and provide pencils and name tags to play! This does not affect bi-monthly GM Workshops.
Food & Drink Policy
We currently have no restrictions on outside food and drink until such a time as A Big Spill forces us to reevaluate. The cleaner our store stays, the more liberty the community will have to eat and drink in the store. We encourage our community to patronize local Bloomfield eateries and will gladly recommend some of the great options nearby. At the same time, purchasing snacks and drinks from us will help keep our store in good health for a long future here. Please let us know what snacks and drinks you would like to see at Mimic’s Market!
Bathroom Policy
Please be courteous in the bathroom, keep our space tidy and return the toilet seat down after use. Inform staff immediately if the bathroom is in need of any cleaning or refiling of soap or paper products.
Updated Play Rules, Code of Conduct
Preserving the welcoming and accessible environment of Mimic’s Market for all players is our #1 priority. To that end, we expect tolerance of all peoples as a matter of social contract. If an individual is intolerant, the contract is broken and Mimic’s Market cannot tolerate the presence of said individual.
We do not excuse poor sportspersonship. If a game has stopped being enjoyable to the point a player lashes out, it is the responsibility of the player to resolve that internal conflict outside of the store.
Any individual has the right to refuse to play with another individual. Game Masters have the right to eject any player for their conduct.
Our Code of Conduct applies equally to the physical store as well as our online community spaces.
Hiring for the 2023 Holiday Season
We are looking to hire our first part-time employee on a seasonal basis. We expect the employment period to last from November 1st 2023 through January 30th, 2024, and we will evaluate by January 7th if this position can continue beyond the seasonal period. The hourly wage rate for this position will be matched to the rate of Jay and Jae’s salaries – something we intend to continue as a moral precept of Mimic’s Market.
Without revealing too much of our hiring goals, we are looking to hire someone who is enthusiastic for a wide variety of games and willing to learn more. We are also looking to cover a bit of a blind spot in the games community Jae and Jay have – knowledge of products and experience conducting events related to Magic: The Gathering as well as judging a variety of events such as draft and standard.
If you have sent us a resume or cover letter in the past, we do have it saved. However, legally speaking, previous employment inquiries and submitted resumes have to be considered unattached to this position since it’s right now we are formally hiring for it. If you want to apply for this specific position please inform us directly as of now so we can ensure you receive a formal response.
Tl;dr
- 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. Tues rotations to focus on diff game communities thru the month.
- Roleplaying Game – Tryna start up 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, socialize.
- 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.
- Finally getting around to hiring a part-time hand for the holiday season.