Virtual Variety: From Online to In-Person!

Lindy Liedl from the Rice Lake Public Library returns with her monthly column on all things virtual to help you connect with your teen patrons!

Our screen + snacks set up. 

Over the summer months, we successfully transitioned our virtual Teen Game Nights to in-person gatherings as programming opened back up. Our virtual game nights during the school year are pretty simple: we meet over Zoom and play a different video game each week together. But, in person, we could provide snacks and tabletop games as an option as well! 

Before starting in person, I asked our teens to suggest tabletop games over Discord for us to have available. They loved Taco Goat Cheese Pizza and Spot It! especially. Other options were Giant Uno, Apples to Apples, Guess Who, Stratego, and Battleship. Next year I want them to try Giant Jenga.

 

Teen playing Taco Goat Cheese Pizza.
(Teens censored for their privacy).

Snacks are always appreciated of course. We had fruit cups, capri suns, cheese sticks, chips, and apples. One hiccup was a couple of kids having fructose intolerance, but once they let me know what snacks they could have, we were able to provide them.

 

Our videogame of the week was projected from a staff computer onto a large screen, and teens brought their own devices to play along to Jackbox, Among Us, and Minecraft. We do have some library laptops in case they forget their phone or tablet though. When we didn’t have enough players for Among Us or Jackbox, they laughed a LOT playing Gartic Phone instead. A bonus with this game is that one player, unable to attend in person, was able to take part in Gartic without having to hear everyone over a virtual call. I just shared our Gartic session link with him over Discord. 

We even gained a couple of newcomers by meeting in person! Hopefully, as we transition back into virtual game nights for the school season, we’ll bring those new kids along so that they can keep hanging out and playing games with others their age all year ‘round.