Hello! 

First of all, thanks so much for being here! It's a whole new experience at backerkit and I'm excited to see how it goes. One of the features here is this discussion thing! I loved when Kickstarter had their streaming feature, which made it super easy to get to know people and hopefully this will provide a similar experience. 

Anyway! It's launch day and this is the first microgame I've launched in quite some time! My first design was actually a microgame and it's been too long, as I do really love how portable and easy to teach that they are. 

What do you like about portable games? Do you have a current favorite? 

Personally, I carry around about 20 microgames most of the time. I have a ton of Button Shy wallet games, some of the Pack o Games, random prototypes I'm working on, and usually a few others! The latest one I tried was Death Valley, a Button Shy spatial tableau building game with some really great art! 

Also, if you don't know me already, I'm Carla and I run Weird Giraffe Games! You'll also get to meet some of the rest of the team during this campaign, which should be great fun, as they're all amazing! 

Can you believe it's the final day for this campaign? It felt like we just launched and yet so much has happened since we did. Not only have all if you amazing backers helped us hit our initial goal, but we've pushed above and beyond unlocking 8 promo cards now. Can we make it to 9? One more day of sharing this campaign to your socials might get us there, so spread the word.

Throughout this campaign the team has taken time to introduce themselves and you've had a chance to learn about what each of us do here on the Weird Giraffe Team. I was asked to jump on and do one myself, so here i am. 
I'm Justin known as @PlayGamesSpreadJoy online, and I am the Booth Manager for WGG. If you've been to GenCon, Origins, or even PaxUnplugged the past few years you've likely seen me at the booth or heard a friendly howdy as you passed by. I've been helping Carla and WGG since 2019 at GenCon when Fire in the Library made it's big debut. I had a great time that year joking about how it was the "hottest" game at the con and egging people on to continue to save more books from the burning bag during my quick demos of the game, Starting there and seeing where the game has brought us with this pocket size prequel set in the Fire in the Library story has been a joy to be a part of. 
These days you've find me streaming with the team most Monday nights on the WGG twitch channel, answering questions over on Board Game Geek, or prepping for whatever convention is next on the horizon for the team. I would love to meet all of you amazing supporters some day, so if you ever make it to a convention we are at please come by the booth to say hi. We typically even have prototype copies of upcoming games like Explosions we can show off. 


Todays Question: Favorite Push Your Luck Game Experience?

Push-Your-Luck games always seems to invoke a level unknown risk that leads to exciting outcomes (or unfortunate failure) that seem to bring players back for more. Fire in the Library and now Explosions in the Laboratory give players those opportunities for experiences when everything seemed to work out perfect or even it might seem nothing could go right. Either way, we remember those games and they push us to want to try again to attempt to replicate the good times, or even improve on the unfortunate ones. 
Maybe its from Fire in the Library or another other push your luck style game, but we want to hear those stories of how someone's luck went from bad to worse, or maybe even hit it big to win a game. Those games we just can't forget and will remind us of the fun we've had playing are the stories we want to hear about and share.



Justin 
Play Games Spread Joy

Woohooo we have made it to $6000 and we unlocked another promo card for our Promo Pack!!! 

The team is so excited that we have this amazing opportunity to create the crossover promos! 

Do you have any ideas?  Share them with us!

So one of the things that's been joked about is how a whole series of these could exist, most recently on a stream from The Full 42 that Corey Andalora (designer of Explosion in the Laboratory) was on. Explosion in the Laboratory utilizes everything from Fire in the Library in unique, new, inspired ways, and that includes the name!

So, what other terrible events or potential catastrophic events can you tie to locations? Perhaps the Explosion in the Laboratory leads to the Fire in the Library which then leads to the Flood in the Basement where you have to save something else entirely from the basement of the library. Or something else led up to the explosion, like the Dare in the Cafeteria where you up the stakes against one another to come up with the most ridiculous challenge (like, idk, an explosion in a laboratory!)

Greetings fellow tabletop gamers! My name is Jess, and I have been invited to give a little introduction about me and what I do with WGG.

I’m a Woman of Color content creator, living in the Pacific Northwest US. I live with my husband and our two fur babies (a dog and a cat). I stream board game content on Twitch on my own channel and as a part of the Tabletop Live Network - a collective of streamers from around the world that play tabletop games live on stream. We have grown a lovely community during the pandemic and hope we can continue the love of board games for many years to come.

I own my own business, Community Connection Gaming, which strives to provide a welcoming space to the board gaming hobby. I have a wonderful couple in the Seattle area that supports me and CCG in our continuing mission to provide these spaces, and our community has grown to be over 600 people online! We are very fortunate to be in this place.

I have worked in the gaming industry helping with in-person and online conventions, and hope I can do the same here with Weird Giraffe Games. Carla and the rest of the staff have been amazing at providing a fun working environment, even if we're all working remotely from different parts of the country, heehee. I will be attending PAX Unplugged next month to meet with content creators and share the upcoming games and stuff from WGG, so if you're planning on attending the convention and are curious about what's to come from WGG, please schedule a meeting with me!

I think that's about it, but if you wanna know more, just ask me!  :)
Happy Gaming!
- Jess

One of the central mechanics of Explosion in the Laboratory is the combination of primary colors: yellow, red, and blue. These three primary colors are three of the four colors on the lab cards where you'll get chemicals to mix compounds, with black as the fourth, which is a unique chemical in the game.

These three chemicals can combine with one another to create additional colors! For example, if you have a beaker that's half-full with a yellow chemical and you add a red chemical, you'll get orange (the best color as far as I'm concerned)! The same happens if you have a beaker that's half-full with a red chemical and you add a yellow chemical. Combining colors is pretty freaking magical really when you think about it! ✨ Meanwhile, blue and yellow make green, and blue and red make purple! That's why there are three beakers that slowly build toward the ultimate explosion and end of the game, because they're these three colors! :)

With that said, what's your favorite of the seven colors in the game? There's blue, yellow, red, black, orange, purple, and green! My favorite is absolutely orange 🧡 but I know that purple 💜 and green 💚 are also colors that are beloved by the WGG team.

Also, you get bonus points if you tag yourself as one of the colors! I think I'm red, myself. I'm super valuable under the right circumstances, but if you're not careful I'm also rather (emotionally) explosive 🤣 

Libraries are freaking magical and no one can ever tell me otherwise. I know this'll make me sound heckin old, but back in my day we didn't have interwebs, so we had to go the library to get most of our info and a lot of our free entertainment (aside from, you know... actually just going outside and playing). And it wasn't just that libraries were these epic places where you could get books you wanted, they also often had activities! And even if you were a kid you could sometimes get your own library card!!! How amazing is it for, like, a 10-year-old to have their own card and be able to check out the books (even if their parent had to be right there approving it)??? Ugh remember when we WANTED to be grown-ups?

ANYWAY that's enough digressing, I'd love to know about a library experience (or multiple!) that you remember. It could be good or bad or just absolutely wild!

For example, here are a few of mine:
📚 When I was a pre-teen (I think?) one time someone brought in a huge snake (a boa constrictor maybe?). Most of us (including me) were freaked out and refused to touch it, but some of us did, including my sister! 
📚 I remember when I moved here to Indiana, I hadn't been in a library in a LONG time, and it blew my mind that the library in a nearby town had a huge selection of movies and music and even TV series and stuff. Then it blew my mind even more that the one here in our tiny town had quite a lot of movies too!
📚 In Jan 1993 (I googled) Czechoslovakia split into two countries: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Why does this matter? Because in that same school year (so within the next few months) in geography class I had to do a report on "Czechoslovakia" after all of us drew random countries from a hat or box or whatever. This was waaaaaaaay before Google, and our encyclopedias were obviously out of date since it had just happened, so it was SUPER FUN trying to find any kind of info from books or newspapers at the library for what the heck to write. 

About a week ago, we sat down (remotely) with Corey Andalora, the designer of Explosion in the Laboratory, to discuss and play the game with him on the Weird Giraffe Games Twitch channel. One of the things that came up was the idea of a theme song! Shuffling ("shaking") the cards in Screentop led to numerous shake-related songs like "Jump in the Line" ("shake, shake, shake, señora"), "Hey Ya!" ("Shake it like a Polaroid picture"), and others.

So, what theme song(s) do you think of when it comes to Explosion in the Laboratory or Fire in the Library? Does "The Final Countdown" come to mind when the library is about to burn down? Does "Master Exploder" play in your head when you think about getting that second red chemical? Maybe the whole catalog of My Chemical Romance is just bouncing around the whole time you think of Explosion in the Laboratory, and then Fall Out Boy takes over once the explosion has happened?

You get bonus points if you can tie a favorite of yours in even if it's not obvious! For example, I love the song "Like A Sword Over Damocles" by Trivium, based on (you guessed it) the sword of Damocles, a metaphor for impending doom and something catastrophic practically bound to happen. That sure sounds like an easy tie-in with Explosion in the Laboratory to me!

I'd love to hear your thoughts :)