The Ultimate Gaming Store

[DDK]

Inspired by the 'The Ultimate Gaming Table' thread, and my own fevered imagination, I thought I'd get some input into what would make a great gaming venue specifically for groups of players.

Imagine a place where you could hire out a room, say 20'x20' room with couches around the edges and a circular table in the middle with one armchair setup for the DM and the room had speakers and a computer on a LAN with limited player access points, and the computer had a library of sounds and images for monsters, encounters and whatnot and...

Ok, I'm getting ahead of myself, but you get the idea, right?

I mean, you could fairly easily setup a store like this, although partitions probably wouldn't be enough as I'd be pissed if I could hear what was going on in the next group so proper walls would be in order, but aside from that, even the computers wouldn't have to be huge, just celeron's or whatever the cheapass versions are these days, just enough to provide the facilities for enhancing the gaming experience.

Same with the chairs and tables. Nothing too fancy, but comfortable and proper couches, not just dining table style chairs, and a table at regular coffee table height would be best, IMO. Something that you can easily reach over to position mini's and where everyone can see dice rolls.

The store could not only hire out the rooms but could provide munchies and drinks and maybe even hot food like pies, pasties (I don't think many Americans know what a four'n'twenty pie is like... but anyway) and hell, I've seen small pizza ovens that make a decent pizza too and really don't require huge amounts of skill to operate.

You could have book and mini libraries too. Much like video libraries, you'd have to join and pay to rent them out, but imagine how cool it would be from a DM'ing perspective to have access to minis and books? It would encourage buying too 'cause you'd limit the borrowing to ONLY within the store.

Man... I reckon this'd rock and would bring a lot of gamers who had previously not been able to game simply due to lack of venue or lack of suitable venue out of the woodwork and would encourage many more to gather groups.

Seriously, I wanna hear opinions on this. I've heard TSR once did something a little like this ages and ages ago but it flopped. I'm not surprised... they were all hippies back then and had no business sense

Anyway, post your thoughts and let's see if we can come up with a working business model!

 

[Azure Trance]

Well, continuing in the same optimistic viewpoint:

We could assume 6 20x20 rooms in a hallway, unless for some reason there was a plethora of D&D gamers in the nearby area which would demand for possibly even 10 rooms. The library would have 3 or 4 copies of each of the core rulebooks, and a single copy of most of the WOTC / popular 3rd party ones (BOEM series, etc). Perhaps the most intensive items which would require upkeep and collecting would be the miniatures. Assuming their not Pozas cardboard minis, they should be at least decently painted and many would be needed to outfit a 'proper' collection (ie, a dozen orcs, a dozen kobolds, a few ogres, etc)

 

[dave_o]

That would be incredibly rad, and if I actually had some venture capital - I'd go for it. My friend owns a shop in Lexington called The Rusty Scabbard (I wonder of Michael Morrus has been there, since he's Lexingtonian, as well). Sadly, it's mainly for miniature wargaming, but as for it - it rocks!

Anyway, a few ideas for a nice, delicious RP shop:

• A few types of rooms for gaming. Perhaps some along the lines as described above, and then a few more traditional ones. With a nice, high, long table, chairs all around it. A projector/whiteboard and such would be nice, too. A big need would be thermostats and controllable lights in every room, for mood, etc.
• A few public tables for CCGs, board games, or whatever. Sort of just a general hang out spot. The Rusty Scabbard used to have a great place like this, with soda machines, snack machines, and a big screen TV. We'd chill out, chat, play some games and watch Buffy.

 

[Azure Trance]

From a nonoptimistic viewpoint, I imagine that the store would have to be located in a urban area where there would be more players per mile instead of a suburban area where houses are usually large enough to game in. And, enough players would have to come and play to handle the overkeep let alone profit. Perhaps it could be coupled with a LAN to handle computer gamers as well. In Flushing near Roosevelt Ave I visited a LAN 'store' which had ... something like 100 computers. They even had their own half life clan. If that's popular enough, it could be useful to anchor in the profits for the gaming rooms (though 6 x 20x20 is an awful amount of space to pay for)

 

[Tarek]

At our FLGS

Well, at the Game Parlor store in Woodbridge (where I work) we don't have anything quite so impressive as leather couches and an audio-visual system, but we do have a nice gaming space.

Imagine, if you will, twenty wooden library tables arranged in a 5x4 grid, each with four wooden library chairs. On the other half of the gaming area are four wood tables, each 5'x10', built specifically for wargaming.

One of the rooms in the back, the one with the window looking out over the store, is roughly 12' x15', and holds two of those wooden library tables, along with seating for eight. There is one large white dry-erase board on the wall, and there are two corkboards as well, if I remember correctly.

The entire space is carpeted.

There are eight study carrels, each with a top-of-the-line Dell computer connected to a LAN, acting as a partition dividing the gaming side of the store from the retail side. In the near future, we plan for these computers to be connected to the Internet, so that we can hold computer gaming tournaments with our other store in Chantilly, and so that our guests can play online.

It's truly a beautiful place, and darn near an ideal environment for gaming outside of custom-building a gaming room at home.

Tarek Okail

(You can check out Game Parlor at www.gameparlor.com)

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

Re: At our FLGS

Well, at the Game Parlor store in Woodbridge (where I work) we don't have anything quite so impressive as leather couches and an audio-visual system, but we do have a nice gaming space.

(You can check out Game Parlor at www.gameparlor.com)

The Game Parlor in Chantilly is quite nice, too. I shopped there (twice) when I was in the area visiting relatives over Christmas. I bought a few items once, and then had to make an emergency run back later to buy Mille Bornes.

 

[Chauzu]

That's a good idea, but I wouldn't make any more rooms than 4. It's not like there will be a bunch of gamers going to the store to play at the same time, even in a city.

 

[Shadowdancer]

There was a place in Austin similar to this back in the 1980s. Nothing so fancy as individual rooms, or computer setups, but it had gaming tables in an large, open room, and other amenities: food and drinks for sale, a game library, etc. I believe it was called HexWorld. You had to be a club member to go in. You could come in once for free if you wanted to check out the place and decide if you wanted to join. I don't remember how much the membership was, because I only went once, since I don't live in Austin. I heard it closed a couple of months after I visited.

 

[Tewligan]

Also, you could have a field behind the store full of friendly ponies that you could ride.

 

[mythago]

There was a store similar to that (lots of free gaming space, very reasonably-priced munchies and microwave available, etc.) in the city I lived in before this one.

It eventually went under.

The problem was that the gaming tables were almost always occupied by people who didn't spend money. Sure, they occasionally picked up a booster pack, but they brought their own food, complained about the (again, quite reasonable) prices on the food for sale, and tended to hog the tables.

The owners did try to politely handle the freeloaders, but a) they were trying to deal with paying customers at the same time and b) there is a tendency to depict game-store owners as evil, capitalist oppressors of the gaming community.

Essentially, they were paying extra rent to host game space and clean up after folks who didn't pay their way. It couldn't last, and it only lasted as long as it did because the owners really, really wanted the concept to work.