Lyndonville has lots of delicious places to eat, although none are within walking distance of the grange hall. Because of this, Green Mountain Gamers will have some different food offerings at Spring Meltdown. Green Mountain Gamers will provide the usual sodas, chips and coffee. Instead of snack cakes, we will change it up and provide brownies and donuts (and maybe another homemade sweet). All of these items will be sold at our usual, very low price of 50 cents each.

At lunch time, a variety of cold cuts, sliced cheese, bread and condiments will be put out for you to assemble your own sandwiches. At dinner time, pizzas will
be ordered to provide a warm supper. A sandwich or a slice of pizza will cost only $2 each! We hope that these food offerings will help you obtain sustenance without cutting into valuable gaming time.

So come to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont for 12 hours of gaming! There will be a huge variety of board games to choose from, perhaps a role-playing game, and two Magic: the Gathering tournaments! If you want to pick up the latest and greatest game or some new Magic cards, you will be able to buy them from Dark Tower Gaming of St Johnsbury, Vermont or from Triple Play Games of West Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Green Mountain Game Days are always free. To help offset the cost of organzing these days, we do ask anyone who can to please make a donation (suggested $5) at the door. If you make a donation at the door, enter your name into a door prize drawing. The Spring Meltdown prize is a mystery, donated by Triple Play Games.

For more info, please visit the Green Mountain Gamers website. Read about Spring Meltdown and then join the forum thread conversation.

We hope to see you there!

Additionally, Triple Play kindly pledged a door prize to Spring Meltdown. And it’s a mystery door prize, to boot. Whatever the plunder may be, it will become the belonging of one lucky attendee of the Meltdown.

Spring Meltdown happens April 21st at the Lyndonville grange, from 10:00am to 10:00pm. For more information, including how to enter the door prize drawing, visit the Spring Meltdown page. Join in the conversation on the forum thread, or RSVP to the Facebook event listing.

March 4th^[1] has become an unofficial gaming holiday of sorts since it was first discussed in 2002. Think of it as a time to say thanks to the people in your gaming life who make things possible. That might be your actual GM, the person who expends the effort to build a campaign and herd the cats to get people at the table time after time. It could be the early adopter, the one who’s always buying the latest hotness direct from Essen and printing out sheaves of player aids and cheat sheets to help everyone learn. It could be the boss terrain builder who ensures your figures play on something nicer-looking than a bare tabletop.

March 4th took on a new dimension of significance in 2008, when Gary Gygax passed away on that day. As co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and figurehead of the hobby for years, Gary left an indelible mark on role-playing and gaming.

Say thanks, get them something nice, do them a gaming-related favor — show ‘em you appreciate the effort and time they put in to making the hobby better for everyone. Some businesses, like DriveThruRPG, use the weekend as a sale opportunity, so there’s all sorts of interesting digital products for sale there.

Thanks to The Escapist for the encapsulation of the day’s history.

^[1] As in “March forth!”

• Magic: the Gathering sealed deck tournament. $18 entry fee buys 2 packs each of Dark Ascension and Innistrad, land provided. Should begin by 10:30-11:00am. Minimum eight players needed to make a sanctioned event. Prizes provided. Run by Dark Tower Gaming.
• Magic: the Gathering standard constructed deck tournament. $5 entry fee. Uses the standard constructed environment: Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged, New Phyrexia, M12, Innistrad, and Dark Ascension. Tournament starts at 4:00pm. Prizes provided. Run by Dark Tower Gaming.

Green Mountain Gamers is excited to continue the trend of hosting more organized gaming, first by the Book Garden in Barre, and now Dark Tower in Lyndonville.

Gamers doing what they do best at Winter Weirdness.

Those who remembered last year’s Winter Weirdness game day might have had lousy travel weather on their mind in the run-up to the 2012 event. In spite of weather advisories the night before, the driving was fair and Green Mountain Gamers had their biggest turn-out ever, with over fifty people flocking to the Church of the Good Shepherd in Barre, Vermont for a day of tabletop gaming.

Rick of The Book Garden presents Steve with his gift certificate prize.

Rick Powell of the Book Garden arrived mid-morning to vend games and host some afternoon Magic: the Gathering. Eight players coalesced for a draft tournament that stretched into the evening. Rick also kindly donated a $50 gift certificate to the Book Garden as a door prize for Winter Weirdness. Everyone who donated to Green Mountain Gamers was eligible to enter for the door prize, which Steve Petruzzi won in the drawing.

And speaking of donations, Winter Weirdness attendees were so generous this year in giving to support the event that Green Mountain Gamers is able to make a $200 donation to the Church of the Good Shepherd. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the effort!

It was non-stop board and card games throughout the day. You can glimpse some of the games played in the pictures below. To give you an idea of the sheer range of kinds of games played, some of those played that day include A Game of Thrones, Ora et Labora and Secret Tijuana Deathmatch.

It all made for an excellent day of gaming in central Vermont. From Barre, the Green Mountain Gamers move on to Lyndonville for Spring Meltdown on April 21st. Hope to see you there!

There are a few set-up steps we’ll walk through to get the bookmarklet set for use. Go behind the jump for the whole process.

Navigate to Your Profile Page

First, log in and go to your profile page by clicking My Account in the toolbar at the top of the page, or on your avatar wherever you see it on the site.

Below your display name, user name and most recent activity update is a link reading “What about adding a bookmarklet in your browser bookmarks toolbar ?,” as seen in the picture to the right.

Using the Bookmarklet to Share Content

Now, whenever you want to share a link in your activity stream, you can do so with a couple clicks. While looking at the page, picture or whatever you want to share, click on the bookmarklet in your toolbar, menu or wherever you put it.

A small window will pop up looking rather like the one to the right. You can edit the text to your heart’s content. Certainly replace “[your content here]” with some interesting commentary of your own, but you can also shorten the text in the link, which is by default the title of the page to which you’re linking, add some mark-up to make it pretty and everything else you can do in an activity update.

When you’re done, click Post Update and the link will appear in your activity stream as an update. Done!

This walkthrough will live in the How to Use This Site Section under Sharing Content, so check there for the latest version.

Andrew supervises the rail barons at Winter Weirdness 2011; the crew of Battlestar Galactica schemes in the background.

Even with less than two months to go, it feels a bit odd to talk about something that happens in 2012. That year has always had the ring of the future to it, and now it’s just around the corner.

Go boldly with us into that future as we return to the undercroft of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Barre for Winter Weirdness 2012. The forum thread is already hopping with folks suggesting games to play, like A Game of Thrones and King of Tokyo.

Additionally, the Book Garden will run a Green Mountain Game Day’s first ever Magic: the Gathering tournament. Capacity runs to 16 participants with a $15-20 buy-in per player.

The Book Garden has also kindly donated a gift certificate to be awarded at Winter Weirdness. Everyone who makes a donation at the door — half of the total proceeds of which goes to the Church of the Good Shepherd’s food shelf — may enter in the drawing. The Book Garden is conveniently located in downtown Montpelier on State Street for central Vermont’s gaming supply needs.

Winter Weirdness 2012 happens January 14th from 10:00am to 10:00pm at the Church of the Good Shepherd on Washington Street in Barre, Vermont. Visit the Winter Weirdness page for directions, updates and more.

Elsewhere, The Escapist has updated the Adventurer’s Atlas of its Young Person’s Adventure League, which is “The Adventurer’s Atlas is your guide to the best role-playing adventure games for young people, a sort of road map to other worlds where you are free to explore as another character, a tour guide of places to go and people to be.”

If you have children, are you doing anything particular to teach them the joys of the tabletop hobby?

The Vermont area gaming community stepped up to contribute to flood relief as well. Matt Golec organized a charity Geeklist auction — ending tonight! — to generate money for the Red Cross. Triple Play of West Lebanon hosts a Flood Benefit Game Day on September 10th, collecting donations and holding a raffle to also go to the Red Cross.

Inspired by their example, Green Mountain Gamers is holding a fundraising drive. We will match dollar for dollar donations sent via Paypal to greenmtngamers@gmail.com, up to $100, making a potential total donation of $200, to the Vermont Food Bank, which contributes to post-Irene disaster relief needs.

The drive runs for seven days, from September 7th to the 14th. If you haven’t already made a contribution to Vermont flood relief, this is your chance to do so. And please help spread the word; the more people who contribute the better.

Spread the word about this to all your game-playing friends, wherever they may be!

Find a wordier version of this post here.