Zack Garcia, teen services librarian for the Camp Verde Community Library, is a huge fan of Magic: The Gathering.
He has made it a big part of his job, holding a weekly game at the library with the teenagers he oversees. A longtime fan of the Verde Valley Comic Expo, which has been held for the past few years through the Cottonwood Library, Garcia wanted to do something similar at the library he works at.
He spoke with his boss, Kathy Hellman, and his friend Jan Marc Quisumbing, who runs the comic expo, and now Garcia’s favorite hobby is becoming real with the Verde Valley Game Con coming to the library on Saturday, Nov. 9.
Garcia sees the convention as a chance to introduce attendees to all sorts of fun new hobbies, from Magic: The Gathering to Dungeons & Dragons, Monopoly or Settlers of Catan. He hopes that it will distinguish itself from Verde Valley Comic Expo and Prescott Valley’s Fandomania by giving participants a chance to interact directly with the games and with others at the convention.
“I want, on the day of, everybody who walks through the door to find something for them,” Garcia said. “Most people play games, or have played games, or have a favorite type of games, and I want them to be able to come through door and find something for them, whether that’s something that they grew up playing and are very familiar with, or whether they discover something new.”
“All it takes is the willing- ness to have an idea and the support to carry it out, and I think Zack is going to have a successful event that will be great for the community,” Quisumbing said.
The library has partnered with Game On, a store in Prescott, which will be providing a game library for participants at the event, allowing attendees to try out any of the provided games with friends or even strangers. Josh Fohrman of Game On said that he sees it as an opportunity to introduce a whole new set of potential gamers, teaching them that there are games beyond Monopoly and Clue and hopefully finding new customers in the process.
“Games are a great way to get people to interact with each other socially with folks they might not normally hang out with,” Fohrman said. “So it is a really good way to bring everyone together: Teens, adults, others — all of them to have a good time under one umbrella — and games are a really good bridge to do that.”
Garcia sees the event as an opportunity for people beyond the usual demographic of gamers and try something new. He pointed to how many of the players at the weekly game nights at the library break with the stereotypes of nerdy boys and girls playing Magic: The Gathering and jocks playing Dungeons & Dragons.
Some of those teen players will be helping to run the event, as members of the library’s Youth Advisory Council will be serving as Dungeon Masters for the Dungeon & Dragons games played. All proceeds from the event will go to the YAC, which Garcia hopes will allow them to travel to events like the League of Arizona Cities and Towns convention, which the teens visited this summer, without relying on town funding.
In addition to the games, the Agenda food truck will be serving the participants with a game themed menu. Garcia said that, without knowing how many people would show up, the library was keeping food options limited in the first year. But he hopes that if this event is a success, it will become an annual convention, with more and more visitors and vendors.
“Hopefully, if we do well this year, we’ll attract more vendors and become bigger and better,” Garcia said. “I want us to grow each year.”
Correction: The print version of this article mispelled Mr. Garcia’s name. It is Zack, not Zach. It also mistakenly called the Verde Valley Game Con the Verde Valley Game Convention.
