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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Philotomy Jurament" data-source="post: 4838348" data-attributes="member: 20854">My favorite game store isn't there, anymore.  It was "FBN: The Fantasy Shop" (or maybe "Shoppe" -- can't remember), and was in old St. Charles, Missouri, down by the river.  It was in an old, old building.  The front displays along the sidewalk held a siege diorama with a castle and painted miniatures.  Inside, the front room was full of cool stuff.  One wall had D&D material, including TSR modules, Judges Guild stuff, Armory material, et cetera.  There was a case of minis, and more display cases of painted minis.  A rack of periodicals including Strategy & Tactics and other wargaming mags, Heavy Metal, Dragon, White Dwarf, indie/underground comics, and such.  Racks of new SF and Fantasy paperbacks.  Shelves of used paperbacks.  Shelves and displays with all sorts of wargames (Longest Day, Anzio, Blitzkrieg, Titan, Wooden Ships & Iron Men, Dune, Squad Leader, etc).  A front-room game table with a nice chessboard and pente board set up and ready to go.  All sorts of role playing games from a variety of publishers.  In the back were numerous tables for gaming, and also a private gaming room.  Farther back was a locked storage room, the water closet, et cetera.  On many weekends, some of those gaming tables were covered with terrain for micro armor battles, or with homemade chainmail, armor and weaponry owned by the local SCA guys.  There was a big mural on one wall showing a dragon, and captioned "Fly By Night" (obviously what the "FBN" in the name stood for).  We spent quite a few weekends hanging out, playing games, and browsing the front room thinking about all the stuff we'd like to buy (if only we had money).Down the street was an old record store with lots of cool vinyl, including rare imports.  We'd go in there to check things out, look at the cover art, and think about stuff we'd like to buy (if only we had money).  There was also a hamburger joint nearby that made awesome "greasy spoon" type burgers.  We'd get those to go in foam boxes (with fries) and take them back to the Fantasy Shop to eat while we gamed.  Down the street the other direction was an office supply store and newstand where you could by graph paper, mechanical pencils, and browse the "men's magazines" until you were chased off.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  Of course, none of this last part is about the game store, itself, but because of its location all that kind of went along with it as part of the "weekend game store experience" for me.Nostaligic haze of youthful weekends aside, I've never been to another game store that was quite like that one (or lived up to it) with the products they carried and the gaming space available.  It was a cool place.</blockquote>

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