Mr. Monopoly has a monopoly on Monopolies!

First look at Monopoly: Omaha Edition

Mr. Monopoly arrived in Omaha on October 30th for the unveiling of the official Monopoly: Omaha Edition game board. The board was revealed during an event at Baxter Arena with Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert, University of Nebraska at Omaha Chancellor Joanne Li, representative from the game manufacturer TopTrumpsUSA, and volunteers from Spielbound all in attendance! In the Omaha-themed game, classic properties are replaced with beloved locales, including the Missouri River, the Old Market, the Riverfront, NFM, and us! Yes, Spielbound has a square on the board!

Mr. Monopoly outside Spielbound!

Mr. Monopoly then drove downtown to visit us at Spielbound on Halloween morning. We were able to get some fantastic photos with him in our board game library. What’s that saying — “never meet your heroes”? Well, we’re so glad we met this one – no matter your feelings on the actual game – there’s no doubt that Monopoly is one of the most well-known board games of all time. Most importantly, as board games are our mission, we are so honored to be featured in this one. If you’d like to play it, it’s in our library, or you can own it for $44.99 through our sister café store here.

Mr. Monopoly next to Spielbound's iconic mural

In 2012 we started Spielbound through hosting pop-up game nights around Omaha - a time when the public was invited to learn and play many different games our volunteers had set up at several tables. It's 2024, our cafe has been open for 10 years, and we're celebrating it by bringing GAME NIGHTs back! The first game night is Tuesday March 19th 2024.

Board Game Nights every third Tuesday!

Come play games with old friends or make new friends! Or join a demo being led by one of our awesome volunteers! No cost to play, we just want more people to learn these great games. Let us know if you'd like to teach a game, too, as our community is built upon fantastic people volunteering to teach, catalog, and help in our mission of providing all people the challenge, art, and fun unique to the world of board games.

Contact Scott O'Dell ([email protected]) if you want to volunteer for this new monthly event.

This story is the tale of Cretaceous Rails, a game whose beginnings started not in the Mesozoic Era, but with the Spielmasons of Spielbound. Players travel back in time to the Cretaceous period, build a rail network, and take time-traveling tourists to see their favorite dinosaurs in the wild. Local designer and Spielmason Bryce Ann Journey created, and play tested the game during the Tuesday night Spielmason meetings. All the hard work paid off and the game will launch September 26th on Kickstarter. Keeping it local, the game is being developed and published by another local Spielmason Alex Wolf of Spilcraftgames, while the artwork was done by local artist Graham Burkum. Alex commented that “This game is being published as a direct result of playing it at a Spielmasons’ meeting.”

Bryce Ann, Alex, and some others recently traveled to the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, OH to promote the game and launch. This included a banner in the main walkway that was visible to everyone that came to the convention. The game was demoed to convention attendees garnering lots of acclaim for gameplay, theme, and components.

Spielbound is excited for Cretaceous Rails and if you would like to get more information on this quick-playing mid-weight Euro game you can subscribe at spielcraftgames.com.

Cretaceous Rails: 1-4 players, medium weight Euro, 30 minutes per player

Travel back in time to the Cretaceous period, build a rail network, and take time-traveling tourists to see their favorite dinosaurs in the wild. After going on safari, tourists can relax at your resort where they can enjoy your latest and greatest attractions, including the dinosaurs you have on display.

This quick-playing mid-weight Euro game utilizes an innovative dual-action worker placement system, route building, and resource management. It’s a race to exploit the resources of the Cretaceous jungle and use them to build the optimal combination of attractions for abilities and scoring.

January - Warren Zdan

Warren is one of our first volunteers, cataloging games back in 2012, and was our first volunteer of the year - so you’ve seen his name on our walls. He continues to help provide game demos, catalog games, and be an important part of our volunteer community and after ~3 years of not formally having volunteers recognized, we were grateful to reboot our wall of volunteer honorees with his mug.

February - Laura Morse

Laura lives in Council Bluffs and is an Underwriting Assistant at Lincoln Financial Group. She spends free time gardening and reading - her back yard is full of vegetable garden beds, fruit trees, and native flowers. She and her husband Travis have three dogs. Patchwork and other polyomino games are her favorites, as well as anything with a great theme. Laura volunteers cataloging games and demonstrating games with Travis.

March - Travis Mock

Travis Mock is originally from small town Nebraska but now lives in Council bluffs IA

He has worked at FedEx since 9/2015. He got into board games early in his life the game that really got him into the hobby was Hero Quest. He believes that the best part of teaching games is seeing the joy on the other players' faces when they really start to understand the game.

He loves that he gets to share the hobby with his wife Laura who also enjoys board games. Some other hobbies he enjoys are gardening, traveling and cooking.

And introducing for April - Ben Hollowell

Ben has been a volunteer at Spielbound for over 8 years. He often spends his volunteer time repairing and restoring the broken games that need the most love, which is always very appreciated by all of us here! An avid Retro and PC gamer first and foremost, he still enjoys playing various board games, such as Terraforming Mars. Ben is a bit of an animal whisperer, and is loved by pretty much every pet that encounters him. He and his wife live with two seriously good-looking cats, Hup and Laszlo, who both fit and sit inside the lid of the Isle of Cats box..

Spielbound had the pleasure of being highlighted by local NPR station, KIOS, and their host David Koesters in their new segment "KIOS Profiles". David spent a couple hours interviewing volunteers and patrons in our library in March during our monthly game cataloging/repair night and captured audio with people playing games in the background. We love getting the word out on our mission and having our volunteers speak for themselves on why they love making Spielbound such a successful community center. Check out the full audio and transcript here and reach out to our volunteer coordinator, Jess Kent if you'd like to get more involved.

Thank you all for making this such a successful event! While we hope that this will be an annual event, this is our second time since 2019, and we're learning and improving with each time. We had over 800 people stop by and collect puzzle sheets and over 100 that submitted correct answers within the 3 day event, March 24-26, 2023.

While much has changed in the past 8 years between Spielbound and Spielbound Board Game Cafe, we are proud to still be able to provide you with an ever-growing game library and fantastic drinks/food/setting to make play fun! We're celebrating all month long with the return of weekly trivia, pastries, Labor Day game sale, Player's Log for the #SpielboundChallenge, new drinks, and more! We're also hosting more game demos, other events, and will be at Nuke-Con - we need volunteers and participants! Follow us on social media for updates and we are back with a monthly email newsletter you can sign up for far below.

Give me “Biggest Playable Game Library in North America” for 3000!

We’ve been busy during much of 2021 getting our library back in service, catching up on our backlog of donated games (we’re far from done), replacing some games that have a bit too much wear, and rotating some into our archive while we add new titles to our red and black shelves.

But today we’re celebrating reaching 3000 games in our library!!! To be fair, we actually have many more than that, but we only officially count a game in our library when it’s been cataloged and properly added to our online library page.

And the game that has the honor of being our 3000th? One of the best games we’ve ever played – Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. This was donated directly from Cepholofair Games this fall as they visited our collection. While this was easily one of our favorite games of all time, we weren’t sure if it should be in our library. First, this game takes a long time to play all of the adventures and scenarios (around 50 hours or so), there are a lot of little pieces, maps in the booklets, and 4 important miniatures. Because of this, we’ve put it in our Protected section of the library, which is reserved for those with a membership to our library. This way you can try it out, or play regularly, and count on it being in near-pristine shape each time.

We have made the changes to our outdoor mural on 33rd Street and are excited to build up our library to revisit the #SpielboundChallenge in 2022 with new and fun ways to participate.

Thanks to all the volunteers and people who continue to make our library the foundation for the rest of our outreach programs – Play On!

Our updated mural showing 3,000 games!