Museum Exhibition - the final set up

Our Museum Boardgames exhibit in the Community Collections is up and running. Well, has been up and running for a little over a day. Therefore this post will concentrate on the last minute^H^H^H^H^H^H few days preparation and the setting up.

Melissa had contacted a few publishers and some local distributors about either promotional material and/or demo copies of games. Since we are planning on at between 8-12 demo sessions during the month we would prefer not to use our own copies if possible. The last school games night has shown that games can suffer somewhat in the hands of non-gaming children (and adults) who have not yet been taught that it is not good form to hold a card so it looks like a crumpled up tissue! A few things have been promised, a few are still in transit and a few have arrived. The ones in transit should arrive early next week and will be included.

The promotional material that arrived early included stuff from Don Bone for Sunda to Sahul which included a demo copy, spare pieces and some promotion boards that he had at Essen with him. We also picked up a display stand and a set of Blokus and some spare pieces.

Since Sunda to Sahul can also be played as a solitaire puzzle, we decided to do the puzzle and mount it on a board with some of Don's Essen material. Even though we had a detailed diagram of exactly where every piece went, it took Melissa and me around about two hours to put it together, and then Melissa had to glue the pieces to the board.

We had measurements of the various display cases that we had access to, so spent a while sizing potential candidates and logically grouping games together. Melissa then wrote up a bunch of blurbs to go with our displays which I printed off and got laminated.

Thursday night was finalising the lists and pulling out and boxing the games ready to take to the Museum, with Friday morning doing the ones we forgot on Thursday night.









Museum Ho - Good thing they had a trolley for us to unload things on to!

An empty cabinet waiting for games

A bunch o' games to be displayed

Starting to set up Power Grid

Finished setting up Power Grid and Big City in the background with their display cards.


Melissa set up Settlers of Catan, I don't think she was feeling very pro-red on Friday.

Union Pacific has more different colours of trains and bigger cards than Ticket To Ride so it got set up on display in the Train Games cabinet.

The Settlers case almost ready for sealing with normal Settlers set up and the rest of our Settlers collection, excluding 5-6 player expansions because they didn't fit. On the wall is the Sunda to Sahul display and some details about Settlers of Catan. We checked the things on the wall with a spirit level, so the camera must have been on an angle

Over here we have Shear Panic, Tier auf Tier and a bit of space left over for a special guest arrival who was not ready to be displayed on Friday.

There were complaints about the lack of Big City photos, so here is one for the record.

The bottom shelf of the display cabinet has die Nacht der Magier and Dicke Luft in der Gruft

The second shelf consists of Plus and Minus and Frank's Zoo on display plus a bunch of other card games.


The top shelf is bookcase games and almost bookcase games, games across history if you will. A full Alea bigbox set would look quite nice there, but alas we are a few short. There were a few others that we would have liked to put their including the Gibson's editions of Kingmaker and Escape from Colditz as well as the old Avalon Hill History of the World but the boxes are too big to play nicely with the others.

We were going to be getting a spare board for Shadows over Camelot for our wall mounting, but it hasn't arrived as yet. We hope it does, because we are not entirely sure how playable ours will be after hanging on a wall for a month :-)

Did we tell you that we have a very limited edition set of Trias?

After the setting up we, with the assistance of Alice from the Museum, put the covers back on the cases and carefully moved them back to the wall. Observant readers may notice the slightly different alignment of the big boxes of the Settlers family in this photo.

It took Melissa and I four and half hours to set up and install the games (there goes a game of Die Macher).

We are still intending for a selection of Scott Nicholson's videos to be showing, but the first DVD that was burnt had errors, so stay tuned.

If you are in the Melbourne neighbourhood, it is there for the month of September. Some more specific infomation including a map of where in the museum the exhibit is can be found here. The quick guide is through the entrance - turn right - up the escalators - turn left - turn right into the Australia gallery and it is in the back right hand corner.

Mmmm Meeples taste like...