I'm Opening a Game Store this Saturday

[el-remmen]

I haven’t had an actually “friendly” LGS in nearly 30 years (long gone and I don’t live in that town anymore anyway) and threads like this make me miss having one.

I’ve got two stores not far from me. One that is friendly but their focus is CCGs and sports memorabilia and has minimal RPG stuff and little interest in ordering more and another that while mostly focusing on Warhammer and other mini skirmish games has more RPG stuff but the owner barely murmurs hello to anyone he doesn’t already know nor really responds if you try to strike up a convo at check out. So yeah, not what I’d call friendly.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Board games really take up a LOT more room than RPGs do, no matter how much one tries to spotlight RPGs.

Of course, but they also show up on a shelf much better than any spine-out book will. The RPGs on the floor level shelves should be around eye level in the displays wrapped around the current all-RPG island, with a similar footage of large, slower selling boxed games shifted down to floor level on the island. They can't fix the cramped space, but they could sure make the product easier to see. It would also reduce the traffic flow problem they get with people having to sit on the floor to look through the RPGs, which blocks people trying to get past them.

The space is really tight, enough so that the store isn't fully wheelchair accessible - not that you could reach the comics on the second floor in one anyway.

Yeah, okay - I have no defense for this. That's just lazy.

Some of it's crowding and a weird layout so there's no obvious spot for new releases (and the best there is is tied up with board games, which are a major cash cow), but a lot of it is two-three employees who cover different days and have very different priorities and work ethics. So, combination of laziness and left hand not knowing (or caring) what the right is doing.

To be fair to them, that's because metal figures are near impossible to get from distributors.

Oh sure, they're dying out fast and rarely worth carrying even when a distributor gets some in. The few big US metal casters that might be worth dealing with directly are largely historicals, which are hopeless to stock around here. We're just the right distance from the big Pennsylvania cons that what market there would be just saves their money all year and binges at Historicon or Fall In where the selection and deals are better. The little metal casters are boutique figs, rarely offer a worthwhile retailer discount, and are specialized enough they're impossible to justify.

The only exception might be North Star, who have okay wholesale rates and carry a wide range of genres and periods, but even with them you'd mostly be wanting an account to reliably get Frost/Stargrave plastics (which regular game distributors suck at stocking) and (since North Star sells online themselves) you wind up competing with them and their occasional sales. Access to their metals would just be a bonus, and not something that would move reliably or in large amounts.

My observation about lack of metals in store was largely a consideration on how much things have changed in the twenty years since I was in retail. Back then you'd be cutting your throat not to stock at least Reaper and GW, distributors kept stock on hand even for fairly small metal ranges, and plastics were mostly the province of GW as yet. Much quirkier market back then. Heck, at one point I was selling solid numbers of the 3.0 era Chainmail range and (for the few months it existed) White Wolf's Trinity Battleground range, of all the unlikely things.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Heck, at one point I was selling solid numbers of the 3.0 era Chainmail range

Wow, now that you mention it, I remember selling a LOT of those. They've been gone a LONG time, though!

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Wow, now that you mention it, I remember selling a LOT of those. They've been gone a LONG time, though!

Over twenty years, almost twenty-four. WotC canned the game the same year (and almost teh same week) that it won Best New Miniatures Game at Origins. It was a bit of a PR debacle really, like they didn't care about the award at all. They replaced it the next year with the D&D Minis Game with the prepaint figs, which eventually had an enormous model range. I never cared for those rules much, whereas Chainmail was really quite clever about the way it handled command control (for lack of a better term).

The Chainmail figs were dirt cheap on clearance in mainstream mall stores all over the country for almost a year afterward. Massive overstocks in the more mainline parts of the pipeline. Earned WotC a fair some of ill-will at the time.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Over twenty years, almost twenty-four. WotC canned the game the same year (and almost teh same week) that it won Best New Miniatures Game at Origins. It was a bit of a PR debacle really, like they didn't care about the award at all. They replaced it the next year with the D&D Minis Game with the prepaint figs, which eventually had an enormous model range. I never cared for those rules much, whereas Chainmail was really quite clever about the way it handled command control (for lack of a better term).

The Chainmail figs were dirt cheap on clearance in mainstream mall stores all over the country for almost a year afterward. Massive overstocks in the more mainline parts of the pipeline. Earned WotC a fair some of ill-will at the time.

Yup. I remember all of that. I played both games, too, back then. It's hard to believe now that there was a time that we had so many of the commons from the first bunch of WotC-made pre-painted plastic miniatures, that we used to sell goblins for 25 cents a piece.

Do you remember Dragon Dice? Late 90's TSR dice game? I found mine recently in the back of the store.

You know I've been in business a LONG time when I can do that! (I also remember when the Pokemon Card Game came out with its first set and 2nd Edition D&D put out its "revised" black-covered Core Books, far or less when D&D 3e first dropped!)

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

...we used to sell goblins for 25 cents a piece.

DDM was in a gap period where I wasn't behind the counter anywhere, but I remember the FLGS was selling commons in random bundles of ten for a dollar, packaged in opaque plastic bags for that real "collectible lottery" feel.

Do you remember Dragon Dice? Late 90's TSR dice game? I found mine recently in the back of the store.

Yep, that was another moderate success around here at first but faded fast with just a few adherents holding on. Same goes for the Spellfire and Blood Wars CCGs. Given the way TSR's random efforts sold around here (at least at first) it was kind of surprising when they suddenly started having dire financial problems. They seemed to be doing fine even if they couldn't get anything to stick for long.

Incidentally, if you didn't know Dragon Dice is still available through SFR Inc. They even released a few new things past the point of acquiring the game from Wotc in 1999. Not sure how active they are at this point, but the site's still up and the store appears to be well-stocked. It's one of those odd nostalgic survivors that it cheers my heart to see so far into the future, much like the way you can still buy the Over The Edge CCG through Atlas or the Shadowfist CCG from the fan company that took it over from Z-Man.

My earliest behind-the-counter memories goes back to a very part-time gig as counter monkey when I was 19. The store at the time was one of the first in the US to stock Games Workshop's WFB and 40K minis, and the 6mm Epic figs were just coming out. They were a very different company than today's corporate behemoth, and sent a couple of the big name VIPs (Chambers and Johnson IIRC - at the time they nobodies to me) around to demo 1st ed Space Marine to us. I remember going to the diner after we closed and listening to them talk about future plans. They wanted to expand the plastic Rhino kit into a bajillion different vehicles, one of which was supposed to be a "pickup truck" thing with an open back designed to carry a dreadnought into combat. Never did get that one, but they were sure enthusiastic about it. The corporate profit-above-all mentality hadn't taken hold yet, of course.

 

[thirdkingdom]

Adrian Barber, who does art/cartography for the gaming stuff I write, just sent me a map he drew of Sabre.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I haven’t had an actually “friendly” LGS in nearly 30 years

I haven't had a game store at all in nearly. The nearest store to me is over an hour away. I haven't been in a gaming store in over two decades.