Date	Open	Close
Fri Dec 20th	3:30 pm	11 pm
Sat Dec 21st	11 am	9:30 pm
Sun Dec 22nd	11 am	9:30 pm
Mon Dec 23rd	Noon	10 pm
Tues Dec 24th	10:30 am	7 pm (maybe later..call)
Wed Dec 25th	Noon	???
Thurs Dec 26th	2 pm	7 pm

The great battle—Face to Face, not face to screen this year! Thanks for supporting Local and our good excuse to do so….(swapping discounts for what counts) 
I know how hard it is to continue to make the choice to support local, particularly in the face of online places that end up selling things for often close to what we pay. And I really wanted to thank you for it.

Replacing Savings with Givings:
We decided to try and do something to make it easier to feel good about that, and are continuing our Givings vs. Savings approach this year.(For those of you who don’t know, what we are doing is for every 50 bucks someone spends, we get to put 10 bucks to a game to go into the giveaway box.  The world is full of people who had to leave abusive situations in the middle of the night with their families and not much else, with too many folks who lost everything in fires, or with just folks who barely have enough to scrape by, where a little random kindness goes a long, long way.)  From now till the end of the holidays, we will be gathering games for the Alameda Woman’s shelter.  When people need to get out of dangerous situations, they grab the kids and some clothes and go, they don’t wait to grab toys and games.  But when they are out, they have kids that are scared and displaced, so if there was ever a time to find some ability to get your mind off things and connect and laugh a little bit, that is it.  It’s one of the places where a small bit of random kindness can have a huge amount of impact.  We aren’t gonna be able to be cheaper then the online folks, but we can absolutely be kinder. 😉

Investing in Face to face (vs face to screen:
As we find our kids (and ourselves) getting more and more drawn into the siren’s call of the screens, it requires more and more effort to establish the patterns of seeing the smiles in each other’s eyes, not the emoji’s of them, of actually LOL (you know laughing out loud is actually better when it’s, well, out loud.).  I know I own a game shop, and my job is to sell games, but the real reason I like it is because games are a great excuse for people to connect with each other.

For parents, the sooner you can establish the regular game night, the more it will weather through the great cell battle to come.  And a big recommendation on my part is that you get a bucket/basket and make a big deal of dropping your phones in before you start. (set up an auto-response or send out a message to those trying to get through to you that you are offline except for emergencies during that time.  It’s the best way to model that there are times when it’s ok to let the flow of social media know that you are out of touch for a little bit.  It will pay off later.)  We have a bunch of games that are co-op…i.e. everybody together against the game that are good for different ages playing together.  And one of the best thing is one of the Legacy games.  These are board games that actually change with what happens every-time you play, so instead of “what will we play tonight” it becomes “what is gonna happen next?”.  A lot of these games work great for couples too.

We don’t tend to stock a million games, but we are pretty careful about the ones we pick and we have a number that we are putting in the spotlight this year that we stocked up on.