What went wrong: Denouement

So, we've come again to the unfortunate discussion of AQ having to close. Currently at the start/end of April I'm going to have to close up shop.

At the end of last year people came out to help AQ with my GoFundMe campaign, which was honestly the nicest thing I've ever had a group of people do for me. I was a day away from suicide when I made that GoFundMe page and instead I went ahead with the campaign and people came forward giving me hope and a better perspective. I didn't expect support, but it came, so I went out of my way to find investors, buyers, or anyone who could get the store to progress forward. Unfortunately after many offers, people backing out, and lackluster investor opportunities I ultimately saw that I was on my own here trying to make it work.

There are too many back bills to be paid and since I haven't paid myself since May of 2015, I feel it is ultimately the right decision to walk away and let someone else try instead. Stores come and go so quickly in Colorado, but hopefully someone out there can make it work where I have failed. My first partner backed out in under 9 months, my second spent about the same doing his best to help, so I'm glad I have decided to try anyway for 30+ months to do what most people would not. I've given my life to this store and met some great people over the years, but what was once a dream must ultimately be put to bed. I feel like it wasn't really my dream anyway, but I'm glad I got to meet as many great gamers as I did.

Advice to Others

If you've ever looked at starting your own business or wanted to get into game-stores, I feel like I should let you know: What did I do wrong?

If you have a great idea like a game-store bar: Do it. Don't start halfway, waste your initial capital on stock and expect it to work. You have to stock whatever your community wants, so you won't know what they want until at least 6 months of being open in the first place. So start with a secondary revenue stream. Like a bar, cafe, etc.

If you expect to have an online presence with Magic cards: List early, list often. Keep your prices competitive and sell and buy as many cards as you can. It will keep the lights on in between releases of other major products.

If you can get NET terms with a distributor: Do it early. This ruined many sales and preorders the first couple of months having to have money up front. In retrospect though, once you get used to paying bills 30 days out, don't overextend. Start shoring up your bills earlier and earlier so that you don't have to rely on everything you order selling in under 30 days.

Don't waste your time with RPGs if you want to stay in business. Books will sell, drinks might sell, but ultimately the space required and the people that choose to play at a game store don't make a store survive.

Run tournaments for Magic, miniatures, even board games and promos and prize support will always make a night worth your time compared to half the room laughing and rolling dice without a fee. Same with Board Games. Sell them: Don't provide nights to play them. There is nothing more maddening than to hear every week about where the board game group got their great deal online or at Barnes and Noble. Results my vary, but investing in sellable space is always better than playable space.

Shout-Outs

Thanks so much to people like Jon Conley for keeping my X-Wing and Imperial Assault tournaments running smoothly and the community laughing. Chris swung over from DMG to bring a community into a fun environment to AQ and I can't thank him enough for making X-Wing a super fun game to play at the store. 

Thanks to Nate Burg for making Infinity a hit both at my store and others with guys like Shane, Devin and Dexter. If you guys hadn't stepped up and made me support a great game like Infinity I'd have died off much sooner. Hopefully I'll join you at a bar tourney sometime soon.

A crisp high five goes out to the Arvada High School crowd for choosing AQ for a more friendly community that appreciated all their Magic needs and decks. I wish I could've given you folks more to make your Magic experiences even better. Same with the entire Magic crowd really; we had some good EDH nights and some amazing Prereleases. 

And to everyone who went out of their way to support AQ at Prereleases, or who preordered product they could've got online, or who decided to keep coming back and shoot the shit with me to keep me sane on slow days: I can't thank you enough. Helping families find board games to play, getting in those weird orders whenever I could to be reliable, or just plain having the right thing in at the right time has been a great experience for me to have every day I was open. Those of you who constantly bought from Adventurer's Quarter, you know who you are, and just know because of you I lasted as long as I did. 

Where do I go now?

If you play Magic: Go to Advantage Games up North or Black Gold down South. If you're in the middle: Try Atomic Games West.

If you're playing Infinity, you know where to go: Funtastic Games is the next best thing in the area and I wish  them the best of luck as a new business since they're super excited about miniature gaming. 

If you're playing anything else, try Funtastic or go to Black and Read like the rest of the Denver area. They've always had 5x the amount of product I could ever hope to have, but without any of the playspace. And surprisingly they have sent a great deal of customers to my store over the years.

So long, and thanks for all the dice.

Tabletop Vs. Video Games

I'm a Millenial. My first experience with games was my friend's NES, my first console was a SEGA Genesis, my life has been consumed by PC games since I was 13. I was an only child, so board games didn't really come to fruition for me until college. Video games are great, to some extent, but they have their limitations especially in the online world we live in.

My favorite online games don't exist anymore. Tribes 2, an FPS with jetpacks was my favorite as a teenager. Star Wars: Galaxies was my all time favorite MMO before I hit college. The worst thing about these games for me? I can't play them anymore. All the friends I made are playing other games and the games have no servers supporting them. When a great video game dies off, it's gone forever. When a great board game comes out: You can always break it out and play it again.

There isn't one big patch that breaks the game or a new expansion that you have to buy to continue having fun with your friends. There's a word that defines board games that isn't used often enough: Timeless. Sure some games go out of print, but if you own it: it's yours forever. The fun experience you had with that game can constantly be brought out of the closet and made anew. There's something magical about that.

Families come in all the time saying: Board games, great, a way to get my kids away from their video games. Adults my age don't say that. They see tabletop games as what they are: a stable platform to have fun with your friends. One that isn't going to disappear when the servers die. There's a reason tabletop games are having a revolution and it has a lot to do with people growing up with video games. We've had our fun with video games and still do, but sometimes you want to invest in fun your friends can have at any hour, in any place, without the need for software or everyone having a computer, controller, etc.

My regular Magic crowd nowadays constantly reminds me why I do what I do how I do it. They play through a tournament with the regulars and say aloud: I love coming here, seeing the same people, having rivalries with some and not being afraid to try out a new deck. There's something great about existing in a community that understands games like you do and finding people who want to do more than just play a game. The X-Wing miniatures crowd constantly seems to be finding new formats to play that aren't official, either to spice things up in between tournaments or just to find a way to make it fun to meet up with new players to the scene and keep the game fresh.

They've taken a mechanically simple game and given it new ways to be experienced simply because they love the game enough to change it. It's very reminiscent of the modding community of video games; wherein they love the original game so much that they've gone ahead and become developers for a community that is so into the game that they want to look on it with fresh eyes every time they boot it up.

There's always new video games out there where you can find some friends and play through a match, or co-op into a game, or group up in an MMO. Sometimes it's just more rewarding to sit down at my table, wait for my friends to arrive one by one; catching up on their week, then diving into an imaginary world of my own design that they get to experience as different every time. The breadth of experiences you can yield from a single night of gaming is pretty diverse compared to the types of experiences you can have in a video game. Typically a cool kill, a weird story interaction, or the teamwork your friends have in a video game is all that really comes up. When your character is the main character in an RPG, the story is the whole evening and the experience only tells the tale of all the hijinks you had to have to get there. At the end of the day, having someone sitting across the table rolling dice at you and seeing their face every week with new ideas is going to leave a lasting mark on your memory of what it means to play tabletop games versus simply the avatar that represents them on a screen.

Daily Revenue: The Transparent Bloggening

It's been awhile. I started this blog with an err towards transparency in game store ownership, namely because "How to run a game store" isn't a book that's readily available like "How to run a business." As most of you know, the store has had trouble maintaining these past few months. I'm close to securing investors to afix the future of the store's sustainability, but beyond "How are things?" most of you probably don't know what a month looks like or what a good month is within the world of AQ. I think the overall point of this post will be to clarify the facts: what the store makes versus how the store operates.

For reference, I'm going to focus on two 30 day periods that are incredibly different and give you an idea as to what's going on in terms of daily activity. The first month starts 2 days before the Battle for Zendikar Prerelease.

I ordered 54 Prerelease packs and spent about $700-$1000 just for Magic product for the weekend, with another $500~ for board games and such expecting a busier than average time of people being in the store. The 3rd big green bar on that graph is the day of Prerelease, where I basically made back the entirety of the order plus a little extra as people were preordering product that was to release the next week. After the weekend, I ordered in my booster boxes and spent another $2400 just on product for release day. Mind you about a quarter of my product was already preordered from the past month. The day of release is the other big mustard yellow bar, which as you can see about made what I ordered's money back before the end of the weekend.

What to take away from all of that? I basically broke even every week, ordering product and selling it immediately. The only way I was even able to order in the release day product is because I have 30 days to pay the prerelease off. And you can see the middling back and forth bar graphs of day to day sales never exceeding $600 for the rest of the month. But enough days in a row and hey, bills got paid more or less.

Something I'll be pointing to more directly in the next month analysis is all those days where it looks like <$100 was made. What's going on there?

Here's November as my next best example of a "Non-Magic Month." Off the bat you can see where the "Magic-effect" exists. I made $4,000 less simply because there wasn't a  release. Every week I order around $400-$600 in restock, new product and such. Unless there's new Infinity/X-Wing releases, the orders are relatively small. The benefit of this month was three-fold: The first spike in the graph was actually a minor release of the Magic: Commander decks. The second spike was literally just someone getting into Infinity with a few friends and a pile of Magic singles. The last cascading spike was Black Friday weekend.

I ordered around $1700 in non Magic product this month. Probably $800 in Magic. Rent is $1600. Utilities around $300. Taxes of an $8,000 month are about $1000. That's about $5400 in bills on a month that made $8000. Where'd the other $2600~ go? Typically it goes to the previous month's bills, to pay off an invoice before it is due instead of waiting till the last minute. Or because of how sporadic sales are, I immediately pay rent the second there's enough money to do so, which takes' a considerable amount off the top. And because some of the monthly income is from Magic online, those payments don't post into the account for 2 weeks, so they appear under this month but aren't there until the next.

The point I think I'm getting at here is that it's week-to-week when it comes to staying open this past year. You can see 6 days in November where next-to-zero dollars were made. 4-5 days in the Zendikar month above that. Some of those days I was closed, but not all. Sometimes the door's open and I just flat out don't see anyone all day. And 80% of the days in the month are sub-$200 totals. The average purchase in store is about $25, which means at minimum of 8 people came in to make that day close to average. Naturally not everyone that comes in buys something, but there's enough preorders coming in and regulars that continue to choose AQ that 95% of the people I see are people I know by name.

For a more broad reference, the above is a category breakdown since June. Far right is Magic sealed product, followed closely by Board Games, followed sharply by Magic singles. The 4th bar from the right is in-store items like drinks and line-items, which are mostly preorders and Infinity. That little red bar near the middle is RPGs. The things I order are obvious from that graph. But what isn't as obvious is when those sales occur. If you refer to the other charts, you'll see most Tuesdays (Board Game Night at AQ) make almost nothing related to board gaming. Nor does D&D night typically make anything because new D&D books come out on Fridays. So if you were me and attempted to work 7 days a week since July you'd probably decide that the slowest days are the days you'll be closed and that is the main reason I've been closed the past few months at least 1-2 Tuesdays/Wednesdays a month. Circumstances being what they are: It's more effective to not open and give people a place to play for free than it is to sell the same amount of games on the weekend when it's busier.

I'm just following my own line of thought here, but if I met more people I didn't know, or had the stock levels to appease every new person who comes in looking for "X" game, then my average daily sales would increase; in theory. And that's why I'm finding investors: More product diversity so that I'm not just ordering one week to appeal to the next. Because in all these day-to-day uncertainties of sales, I err on the side of "I need to get in X-amount of preorders for soandso with X-amount of best selling games if next week is to average X-amount of money." I can't err on ordering too much, just enough to know that 30 days from now I'll be able to handle paying for the order that I got in to sell. Turn around on product in ridiculously difficult to track in game stores unless you know the game is great, which is why Magic with the most volume and most consistent releases, tends to save game store's from losing their minds trying to keep up with what to order. "How much Zendikar do I order? As much as I can afford. When will it sell? Within the first 3 days of release, to its' entirety." You can't make that assumption with Munchkin or Settlers of Catan; they're different beasts.

Hopefully this whole thing doesn't feel whiny or ranty, but I legitimately appreciate folks that have gone the extra mile to order things from me when I don't have them in stock. You understand I lack stock levels and now you should ideally know a bit more about why, but at the end of the day you accept that I am trustworthy enough to get it in for you quickly so that you can return and continue to use the space for your gaming needs. The silent agreement between a game store and it's gamer clientele survives only on that trust: We both know you can get it cheaper, but you willingly pay for my overhead and I try to deliver you the best service I can to justify that cost. Hopefully with more cooks coming into the kitchen I will be able to find that extra money in the months to come and reward your trust with a better store than either of us could ever imagine.

Origins and Progress

Origins prerelease was this weekend and I thought I should go into a little biography of myself, as an origin story so to speak. What brought this on? I'm the sole owner of Adventurer's Quarter again, as Justin has moved onto greener pastures with his Cardboard Clothing Kickstarter.

For most of this year I've worked a second job in addition to AQ and will probably continue to do so until I can get the store to a place where I'm comfortable with its' success. I don't tell people I'm working a second job out of pity, just more as a "What I'm doing with my time" concession. Growing up in Maryland & North Carolina, my parents always worked 2-3 jobs a piece. So it feels normal to do so because I was raised to work hard to get what I want. It's tiring, naturally, but work is necessary to accomplish great things.

I spent years playing video games with friends online because there weren't game stores to go to where I grew up. When I moved to Washington for college the first thing I found was people looking to play RPGs around campus. I found in Seattle more game stores that I could shake a stick at and discovered board and card games. In this way I learned to be liberal with my gaming attachments. Whereas some people only play euro-games, or Magic, or D&D; I learned how to play them all and enjoy them for what they were: Social engagements.

It is through this desire to meet people in a tabletop setting that I started AQ, I think, and this openness to try all types of games that allows me to succeed where other stores might fail. I don't focus on one thing, instead I carry what the community wants me to carry because they are both my customers and the people I engage with on a daily basis. Seeing old faces come out of the woodworks every Magic prerelease makes me smile knowing that they only play during these types of events and when they do, they come to my store because it's a friendly environment where you can win some fun prizes and have a good time.

I'm working to progress the store towards a stable place where there aren't bills piling up because of past mistakes and soon I'll be able to do that. The idea next month is to go the extra mile and launch a Kickstarter myself to transition the store into a true destination location, where there's beer and food and a reason to hang out beyond just gaming. If I don't launch a Kickstarter it's because I've found other avenues to fund the beer license and we'll simply move forward and get shit done. I want the store to be a place to chill and meet new people more than I want it to be a store you go to expecting to play a certain type of game. We'll continue to have the same growing library of games and carry the next best thing from Fantasy Flight, Magic, and more, but ultimately if there's nothing coming out that strikes your particular tabletop desire this month we'll still be a fun place to visit and grab a pint.

Making Adventurer's Quarter truly a place where adventurer's gather to socialize has been the goal of all my encounters with board gaming. Whereas I might appear rather stoic and calculating in my conversations at the shoppe, my passion within the shoppe is truly to meet new people and hear about what they love to play. Most of our Odyssey beernights once a month result in the group hanging out and talking more than playing games because that connection through gaming is more important than the games themselves. As the future of AQ approaches and the its' survival depends entirely on my decision making and your willingness to participate in it, I hope you'll join me on this adventure soon.

Blood Red: Or why Branding matters.

The store is covered in blood. Well, red paint. Justin, my partner, started a board game clothing company and produced some new AQ shirts that have a red line with our key symbols of meeples, dice and board game paraphernalia. From there we're changing the window to be a red line with our name on it instead of the busy green bits and posters that is now. We'll be covering the walls with board game art. Why are we doing all this?

The ambiance of the store is that of a playspace for most of our regulars. People come to play games that they enjoy and find others that do as well. The shoppe portion of the store is being revitalized so that we carry a diverse selection, ideally one of every type of game out there. Statistically speaking, the more games we have in stock, the better odds that someone coming off the street or playing games can find the one they're looking for at the time. Going with a more modern look should attract more adult gamers, which are 98% of our clientele. In this way we hope to get our beer license out of the way this summer sometime so that they do adult activities like drinking with their favorite hobby as well.

I think the appeal of AQ has long since been that we provide a clean, well-lit, and non-gamer-smelling shoppe compared to a lot of stores people are used to. We want to be a retail store first, a community second, and a resource to players of all ages third. People are always remarking how much they like the look or feel of the store, so our intentions in changing its' color and interior design is only to exemplify that fact going forward. If we can make the store ultimately appealing to every single person who enters because we're different from what they expect then it has the potential to provide long term retention and dividends. Our Five Stars rewards program concept is paramount to that, as it namely rewards regulars with persistent discounts and deals and helps brand new people remember what we're about with reminders that we are running events and here to support their gaming choices.

The warm glow of red in the store should also psychologically encourage more eating when we have better food options and make the store more homey during the gray winter months as well. Stores like Haunted Game Cafe and shoppes in Oregon we've researched have similar color schemes as well as a few bars around the Denver area. Red jumps out at you, says "Hey, we're here. We know exactly what we're about and we want to better serve you because of it." It's not a passive color and I think that reflects our personality as AQ strives to succeed into our second year of being in business.

Random Chance: When is a game just luck?

Randomness is a big part of gaming, but it is often overlooked as how much it can influence overall gameplay. Whether from a dice roll or a deck of cards, there's always a level of randomness to be expected from a game and how it affects the game can be as seamless as transitioning between turns or as jarring as needing to yell at the dice for not going your way.

Last year's Spiel de Jahrs award went to Camel Up, a racing game where you bet on camels as they make their way around a track. Every turn you pop out a dice from a tower to see how fast one particular camel moves or you bet on a color. Ultimately the game concept is very unique looking and the stacking of camels that are on the same space is an innovative way to demonstrate a tie, as well as how you break the ties by keeping camels above others in the same position as they race along. For my money, it feels like Camel Up is a literal "bet on a race" game, simply because you bet on them and either win or don't. There doesn't feel like much strategy to be had because it's all down to dice as to what camels end up winning. It's more an odds game and statistically you might be able to predict a winner eventually, but ultimately your decisions are more about what's happening beside the game than what's happening in the game. It's a flawed game, but won the game of the year award for design and play. Its' randomness is critical to the game working, but ultimately the game plays itself and you just bet and hope you win.

There's a certain degree of player involvement that is necessary to keep a game interesting. King of Tokyo manages to be a dice rolling game with decisions to be made on "what you keep" by rolling the dice 3 times and deciding what your turn will be about. You might not always get the rolls you need, but you'll get 80% of what you want, making for a feeling of importance as to what you're doing in the game versus what the dice are just randomly doing to you. If the game is simply random, then it loses replay-ability, as you know next time you play it'll be down to luck whether you win or not. So long as the game has inherent strategy that governs when things are random and when you get to make decisions, it'll benefit the longevity of whether or not you keep playing.

Deck builders tend to have a good handle on when to deal with randomness by having shuffling increase the odds of randomness, while the cards you add to the deck are up to you. Magic: The Gathering does this very well, given that you craft your entire deck and when cards come up is the only luck available to you. Although the game gives you options for statistical improvement with scry effects (looking ahead at the top of your deck), fetch effects (thinning out your deck by fetching a card and reshuffling the remainder, thereby improving the odds of finding anything else) as well as the ability to play from your discard pile (graveyard) or your opponents deck. The elements of randomness are handled as an inherent probability that is within your power to control. This makes most games of Magic varied and about decision making. The choices you make to interact with your deck determines how random you want your game to be, which is why it remains a popular game that has infinity replay-ability.

Finally, when it comes to randomness, there is the King of Random to consider: RPGs. You roll a dice, add your associated skill to improve the odds of success, and get a result. When I play RPGs at low levels I have very few skills, so how I interact with the world is erring on the side of more decisions versus hoping randomness works in my favor once. If I constantly roll dice to make decisions I should have no possible ability to succeed at then eventually I will succeed and build my character's arc. For instance, as a low level Wizard I snuck onto a boat with low level spells and simply because I knew people were of similar level to me, I became invisible and went below deck to set a trap on their powder kegs. I have no inherent ability to do this trap, but because I rolled well my experience and decision making was rewarded. Even if I had failed, my decision would feel like my own so the randomness of the dice would feel like more of a character flaw than a game system flaw.

The point of randomness is definitely one of making the game feel tense, but it doesn't have to mean the game is pitted against you either. I try to play all games with an RPG mindset so that so long as I can make decisions that allow me to give the game personality from my own decisions I can enjoy it. It isn't down to just the pages of text and dice in the game because ultimately a game is something we share as a group in our imagination and if it's all numbers and chance, there's no imagination or influence we grow the game as a valuable experience for players.

AQ Against Humanity

Cards Against Humanity is the best selling game of the past decade, bar none. It's Apples to Apples meetings offensive phrasing. Unfortunately for us it's an Amazon exclusive, rather than through distribution, so we, like every game store around, must order it and mark it up. What is the phenomena of this game and why is it so popular?

Ultimately it is popular because it's the easiest game in the world to play. It requires zero imagination to play with anyone off the street. The answers the judge must choose are as verbose and graphic as possible so that no one has to read between the lines to discover your intentions at winning the round. In Apples to Apples it's a lot more vague and requires foresight into why you might have chosen a particular answer. Something similar to this game style comes across in Snake Oil, where you have 30 seconds to pitch your answer of non-sequiters to become the winner for the round. In CAH it's simply: What is funniest? The cards are what are funny, not your choice. You simply get to be funnier than any other card in the round, but it requires no effort on your part generally. Playing one person randomly into the pot has just as much chance of winning as you debating your answers.

The reason CAH uses Amazon is pretty clear. Amazon is a big-box store of the internet. It only cares about what sells and tries to sell everything at rock-bottom prices because its volume makes up for the margins. People voluntarily choose not to shop at Wal-Mart because they don't want to support bad hiring habits or price gouging that ruins local businesses, but because Amazon is online it's easier to just hit the button and forget about your choice. To buy something cheap online requires no imagination or moral commitment, much like CAH.

Ultimately the reason for this blog is discovering less about why CAH is popular and more who chooses to play the game. I can honestly say 95% of the people asking for CAH in store off the street come in specifically looking for it hoping it's here. When I pitch Apples to Apples, Snake Oil or even Cash n Guns they want nothing to do with my knowledge. They don't respect that there might be better games out there: they want the one offensive and easy game they came looking for today. I don't disagree that the customer deserves to get what they're looking for, and that many gamers play CAH as well, but generally speaking the people who play or want CAH are not gamers. They want nothing to do with the gaming community, they simply want to be the cool-kid with the offensive game about cocks to be a laugh riot with their family or friends. Nothing wrong with that.

As a game store with a community though, CAH brings with it a toxic problem that it attracts gamers who are not interested in finding new gamer friends. They aren't seeking to expand into the hobby of gaming at large. They want a game that has all the answers, no hard rules, no real challenge; just cards full of dirty words that are interesting to their group. To support these gamers in their hobby of playing CAH I have to support a big-box store like Amazon to get them the games they seek. 90% of my regulars tell me they'd rather spend a little more to keep me open; that they'd rather me order in CAH and mark it up than they buy it from a place like Amazon. Ultimately I'm still ordering it from Amazon, keeping them in business, and all it's doing for me is making a new distributor that is also basically my biggest competition for pricing on every other game I sell.

Cards Against Humanity is a big-box, bottom of the barrel, option for gaming. There are great entry-level games for all ages out there that are just as accessible that I'd rather a person off the street try honestly. Takenoko does resource management and modular board building really well, just as 7 Wonders introduces people to civilization-style card management in a quick-to-learn setting. Even something like Munchkin does wonders at teaching you how to add gear to a character to screw over your friends with a hand of cards. There are games out there built for new gamers but most CAH buyers want only to play CAH, not to grow the hobby or meet new gamers. They'd have just as much fun with a different game if the willingness to try to use their imagination existed within the world of gaming, but instead it is trapped in a vacuum of offensive jokes that require no effort.

I suppose the point of board gaming is three-fold: 1 To learn how to play a system with your friends, 2. To experience the world and setting a game designer has made, and 3. To enjoy conquering the rules system to win the game for yourself or the group in a competitive environment. If we are to be gamers, yes we can play CAH with a drink and friends, but we can also try new things and game within the world of table-top gaming in all aspects to better understand what it means to be a gamer.

In the spirit of CAH, after criticizing it for several paragraphs, I'd like to note that AQ will be carrying the game more frequently come February, so swing by and grab a copy if you're looking to add it to your collection. While you're in, might I suggest playing a game of Splendor with us and seeing what beautiful game design looks like as well.

Good gaming,

Naming the Party

What's in a name? I hear people mispronounce the store's name all the time as Adventure Quarters/Adventurers Quarters as if my singular store was a plural entity. It's not a huge deal, but perhaps the name leaves some confusion to be had. What the hell is an Adventurer's Quarter anyway?

In reality (well, fiction, but it's where we got the idea): it's a district in the fictional town of Waterdeep (better known in D&D, and nowadays in Lords of Waterdeep the board game). It's where the Adventurers go to get their magic items, meet other adventurers and generally feel less like members of the city and more like members of a group that knows what adventure feels like. Why name a store after something like that? Probably because that's what I would always hope a game store could be for people: to meet other like minded adventurers in the world of gaming. It's cheesy, but nerds always need other nerds to play games with and having a place they can meet up is essential. At its' core a game store is that district for modern day gamers.

To play a video game nowadays you just load up the game and bam-you're on an adventure on your own. It's self-contained. To get into a table-top game's adventure you need a party. Be it in D&D, a board game or a Magic tournament. At the end of the day you need to gather your fellow adventurers and prepare to quest towards a singular goal. Be it stopping the pandemic, saving the princess/dragon, or taking out that X-wing before it kills your pilot.

So while some stores in Denver and around the world go for the more generic: Blah Games, Science-Jargon Gaming, etc. I like to think that using a more evocative style of game store name gets to the heart of what a store can be about. You might not see rolling some dice or playing Ticket to Ride with your family over the holidays as an adventure, but it is just that: a quest for fun.

Hopefully 2015 is filled with plenty of Adventure for you and your party.

Community Involvement and the Magic of Gaming

Learning new games can be difficult, since board games take learning the rules outright before you play and RPGs take commitment to a setting and a system to understand. Finding the easiest games to learn is essential in my line of work and nowadays Magic: The Gathering is strangely the easiest thing out there. There's free video games to learn the basics, intro decks to understand how to play in person, and even though there's years of cards to learn; typically the Standard set of Magic makes rules interactions the easiest. I know I've spoken a lot about how Magic integrates with the store, but this may be the post that explains why I keep doing it. 

Magic is a gateway game. The second someone knows how to play Magic, they're going to make a friend across the table who they learn to play games with immediately. As they make more friends and get better there's going to be more and more complexity to their gaming experience. In my mind, that means that eventually they'll have 4-5 friends that want to play something that lasts longer than the typical 40 minute Magic game. So naturally this means that the more people feel comfortable with Magic, the more likely they are to play board games and break into a world that is built for cooperative/competitive play with many moving parts. It is because of this progression of actions that I'm always on the lookout for new players so that I can eventually get them into the world of table-top gaming on a larger scale.

It is for this reason that I'm going to attend a PTQ run by another local game store called Black Gold. A friend and I have been learning to build decks competitively and want to participate in their smaller all-day-tournaments so that we can 1. Win some cool prizes, 2. Meet some competitive players that we don't normally play, and 3. Show that local game stores can compete casually for the benefit of growing the hobby as a whole. Initially I was concerned about the perceived impact my playing in a tournament would have; namely "Why is a competing store playing in an event, taking packs, winning with their 'inside knowledge'?" but I think there's value to be had in making a showing with an AQ playmat and meeting people. By participating in a big tournament I can learn how to be a better player, which will ultimately help my store grow. I can also show support for the growing tournament scene, support another local store by showing up, and grow the hobby into a greater friendlier experience for all involved. 

Camaraderie with local game stores is hard to come by. Most players think we're all competing with each other to put another out of business and it is in their benefit to get the most out of one store over another price-wise until one disappears and another rises in its' place. Since I've been here in Arvada I've tried to be a friendly store always looking out for where players can get what I don't have. There's always a game you don't carry or don't have a community for, so I direct players all the time to stores nearby that can better serve their needs. Only through working together do smaller stores survive, so showing support for another local store seems like a way to find the players that can't get all the way South to the guys running the tournament and capture players that might live closer to my shoppe and not have heard of me yet. 

The experience of building decks with friends is an exercise in statistics and social interaction. There's a whole world of experience in tournament settings that influences overall prices of cards and value of cards in particular over another. Every time I build a deck with a friend of mine we learn a little something new about how to counter each other's concepts, which we've arguably only learned by playing and discussing strategies with another over the table. We've played RPGs together and find synergy within our class-concepts all the time to build party cohesion, so the experience in Magic is very similar. Through one table-top game we progress our expertise in another as understanding systems is essential to any games we play. 

I hope to learn something valuable from playing in a tournament on a larger scale than ones I run all the time and at the very least can thank local players for being as good as they are for informing the meta and growth of the hobby towards something competitive and powerful for building communities. We'll see if I lose like a fool or win by some stroke of luck, but hopefully I can find new players interested in participating in the larger community of table-top gaming and better represent my store as something bigger than itself. As something concerned with the success of all local stores and the development of something as simple as a hobby into something as important as a community. 

In-Store Trade and Inventory Success

Khans of Tarkir, the most recent Magic: The Gathering set, is a problem for my small shoppe. If you buy a full box of packs and open them all you tend to get your money back in spades. Judging by last week's draft, had we opened it instead of drafting: 6 Fetch Lands (60-75$), 1 foil Fetc ($45), 1 Sorin Planeswalker ($20) comprised part of the box, which is $120 minimum, not counting all the other rares that may have been a buck or more. Arguably, that was a great box of cards, but typically just coming in and buying 3 packs, there's pretty good odds of getting $14 and getting 2 more packs, thus beginning the cycle of trades over again as we give out half credit for cards. 

This is just how Magic works though, it isn't inherently bad for my store, as it turns what was once a 20% margin off the pack into a 50% margin off the cards, so perhaps closer to 35% after the wash of transactions occur. It's an interesting issue though, as all MTG stores survive off singles as far as I can tell, but to maintain a level of singles necessary to stay open you need a shitload of packs in the store. 

Strangely AQ survives off a little bit of everything, so to order in a bunch of packs/boxes of Magic cards requires me to not get in preorders for folks that pop in once a month. It requires giving up money in the future for money every day. No matter the weather, or slowness of events we run, Magic will continuously sell every single day without fail. So we walk the line, carry a little bit, but not too much. The second we're off the ground running, it'll be obvious to regulars; as we'll have every Standard block of packs in stock, as well as a booster box on hand for those who want it, not to mention a full wall of sleeves and deck boxes to compliment them. 

I've recently been watching Derium's CCG channel, which is both entertaining and elucidating in its' store's daily operations. It's fun to see the little things a store like my own does during the day and how much volume they must move. They've got a constant web presence from their #Cardshoplife videos and more, but it's especially necessary because of their reliance on eBay and TCGPlayer to have an impressive web presence. AQ does well on TCGPlayer, but ultimately until we have more packs to just open and sell, it'll never quite be at its peak. A store like Derium's appears to open a few cases (6 Booster Boxes per case, 36 packs per box) every week, which is ideally where I'd like to be. It just takes that little extra a month to maintain that level of stock. I think AQ will get there, but in the meantime, learning from the best seems like the way to go at the moment. 

So what does all this mean? When times are slow we latch onto Magic as lifeblood to survive because it's volatile yet consistent in its' results. To maintain board games in the shoppe we need board gamers to buy more, or at least preorder more; but that isn't easy either. Board gaming companies are notorious for changing street dates, delivering only a few copies per store, and simply being unreliable. Who would want to preorder the next big thing in board games if it wasn't guaranteed to be at a certain date? Magic and D&D have hard street dates that typically never breaks, so when you preorder a box you know the exact date you'll get it and preordering that is doable because of confidence. In the meantime, I'll continue to take in cards for games, for packs and for more of the same because it's a way to get over the bumps in the road that the industry has put up.

D&D is Friendship

The new Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is exceedingly popular this year as Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) finally figured out exactly what players want in an RPG. It was called D&D Next, is casually known as Fifth Edition, but the official title given by WOTC is just "Dungeons and Dragons." And with good reason, as it isn't trying to stand out as a "new" edition of D&D, so much as it is rebranding itself as nothing-like-previous-editions.

New D&D has simplified combat systems with advantage dice akin to the Edge of the Empire (Fantasy Flight) system which take away a lot of the math involved in previous editions and get down to just rolling the dice for solutions. It's about the dice rolls and ultimately it should be. Most of the proficiency bonuses are low and similar to Pathfinder (Paizo) so that anyone can add as they go and figure out how well they're hitting. The class styles for each class are like a combined version of Prestige Classes mixed with thematic heroic choices. If you're a bard, maybe you focus on lore and know all about history; whereas maybe if you're a combat bard you just need ways to keep your friends alive. There are straightforward ways to level into any theme that works for you.

Edition wars are a mainstay of the D&D culture, with many older players from 2nd edition never wanting anything but that system because "It's what they grew up with." Most 3rd edition converts had books for almost a decade to choose from and enjoy the heavy tables and min-maxing so that they can be powerful. They don't convert to new systems because the complexity is the point. There are the rare 4th edition players, which were undersupported by WOTC and hated by most other RPG players. They just want to play a game that is straightforward and fun.

Part of owning a game store is hearing all the opinions of players of all ages and juggling the issue that most RPG players have a near religious adherence to their system of choice. Anything new is toxic and a "cash-grab" (Never mind the fact that 5 editions in 40+ years is probably healthy for any game). Magic has a new set every 3-4 months. Most board games don't go more than 3-5 years before reprinting or revising some rules. For a complex system of world interaction like D&D I'd hope for almost more tweaks so that it is more balanced, but they hold back most of the time.

The trick, and I think this is the biggest thing, is that most old guard D&D players want their system to be the rules backbone, the Bible of their RPG experience, so that there is no question that their rolls and their choices in game are correct. This is a flawed dichotomy, as the whole point of RPGs is that it's an outline, a place to begin, and that all world building and rules decisions are up to "GM-Discretion" for a reason. The point of an RPG is to experience the world in an honest way and the rules simply make it possible, but to have a hard-and-fast "this is how it has to be" is to destroy the integrity of the system. The game is about who you are playing with and why that's fun. The rules should come second, especially since a good game can last years.

The new D&D is making it easier for new players to jump into RPGs, which is great, since the more people that play a game, the more feedback and experience people can get with RPGs. It's a lot like capitalism in that way: The greater the market, the more it fluctuates and the better balanced the internal system operates. Ultimately the new system is great, well received, and will probably exist for years to come to exemplify what D&D is to all players.

The trouble with any old-guard RPGers and the hesitant new ones is that they don't always have a group to play with regularly that they enjoy. The system is all it is for them and that's how they interact. Finding a good group means finding 4-5 great friends you want to explore a magical world with for years to come. It's a commitment, a relationship, that most games only manage to create for 1-3 hours in the world of table-top. D&D is about friendship and the lasting experience of gaming with a group for months, if not years, at a time. A well written system is there to allow that friendship to exist in game, as heroes working together to fight great evil, and to perpetuate the need to return as friends in real life so that together the experience of role-playing will bring the group together for years to come. Dungeons and Dragons is just another way to party with your friends in real life and treating it as such is the way to long-term sustainability within the RPG culture.

Bullying and Community

Today I cover something a little less business-sided and a bit more culturally important to the community of gaming overall.

The head designer of Magic: The Gathering Mark Rosewater replied to a question on his blog that was of a more personal than professional nature: "Do you find on your end you hear much regarding the issues of non-male treatment in Magic? Do you feel it's improving?" His response was very inspirational.

Questions of treatment of women in gaming has always been a tricky subject. The fact that women make up 50% of the gaming market means something has to change though. I know plenty of women enter a game store to stares and slack jawed faces and immediately feel out of place. Or they are just browsing for something new when someone in a game across the room tells a party member they just "ran away like a woman." How is that supposed to make her feel like a member of the community when her mere presence is slighted immediately by the "popular opinion" of nerds trying to sound like "big men"?

I think treatment of others isn't limited to just women either, but rather the way the community treat other people. It's not uncommon to hear in video games as well as game stores the cries of slurs like "faggot" or "retard" or "pussy." Even if these phrases are said in jest or as curses; it's not good enough. There's always the possibility of someone in the room who is transgendered, homosexual, mentally challenged or simply a part of an underrepresented group. If you're fighting magical dragons, building far off civilizations on tiles and living in an imaginary world; I'm pretty sure it isn't a stretch to think up a better interjection than a racial or sexual slur. All it does is bring down the overall intelligence of the community you're playing in to let anger destroy the integrity of the game store you play at.

Bullying comes in a wide array of forms and it isn't just in the traditional "jocks vs. nerds" format, but nerd on nerd bullying can come in the form of ignorance or excuses of it being just a joke. When you call your dice "Faggot dice" for not rolling what you want to roll, you continue to both make it okay to use homosexuality as an insult and are under the impression that because you're calling your dice that; it's okay. You're not calling anyone in the room a faggot, right? That makes it okay. Nevermind the fact that someone in the room may take offense to your screams of insults and can't tell you to shut up because it's "just your dice." It's a double-edged sword to call out your friends or people across the table for fear of accusing them of anything. Traditionally gamers are looked at as outcasts and they come to a game store to find community; so to call someone out is to become the accuser and that is a faux pas of extreme variety in a room full of people seeking common ground.

Being mindful of your phrasing and being ready to buoy up your community of fellow gamers is what is important.

Remembering that not everyone is as loud and ready to shout out their opinions like you are is important.

Remember the person across the table from you is a person with their own story and if you want to be remembered as a hero in their story, then don't become a villain by ignorance.

Counting Chickens, or Branding Them

So I'm knee-deep in forms to secure my beer & wine license and carry bottled/canned beer at my shoppe. It's got me thinking about the future of my store and what it will mean to come to AQ. I made a post on Reddit asking how sustainable my business plan for this license would be, with some success. One of the big questions that popped up at me was: "Will this change the market of gamers who visit your store?"

I think the obvious answer is: Yes.

The big point in bringing people into a game store, especially one they might not have visited before, is what my brand exemplifies. I've spent the past year preaching "Casual gaming, small town feel, play what the community desires." Going forward, I don't think much of that will change, but with beer comes different questions. Will my shoppe be less kid-friendly? Perhaps.

I think if I've learned one thing from living in Colorado this past year and a half it's that families go to bars and breweries all the time. The creation of a bar/game store is the first step in bridging the gap between families only thinking about games as "for kids" and gamers thinking bars are an "after gaming" place. To put the two in the same place is to encourage people to consider that table-top gaming is an adult activity, to be enjoyed with all the benefits of a bar atmosphere and a game store vibe.

As I close in on finishing this process of licensing, I've told folks off the street about my ideas,  (in the past, we had the idea, but never planned on when to follow through, so I never bring it up anymore) and the response has been "Huh, that sounds awesome. Never would've thought of that." Which ultimately makes me wonder if I am at the cusp of discovering the one thing Coloradans haven't followed through on yet and what that might mean going forward. I'm hopeful I can get beer off the ground, make it a profitable venture for the success of the store in the next 12 months, and if it is look at remodeling and expanding the idea into a fully fleshed out bar concept.

Obviously I'm counting my chickens before the forms are turned in, but I'm hopeful so far. I think this could be the key to jump starting the store into a venture worth talking about. I won't just be a "game store" in the Denver area anymore. I'll be a new thing; worth seeking out, worth taking the adventure to visit.  In the end, that's the brand I'd really want for my livelihood. An adventure.

Marketing, or "How to Drive your Competition Crazy"

I've been reading a copy of  "how to drive your competition crazy" by Guy Kawazaki to brush up on my business knowhow, and it's pretty interesting. Getting involved in a small business means you know your competition pretty well, as there aren't more than a few other game stores in the Denver area. All of them are fairly fair away, but those stores that are considered my competition by customers are namely about one thing: Magic or discounts.

Game stores in my area do a lot of Magic sales and that's only 1 night of the week for me, though I compete with them online by having better pricing. The discounted board game market exists pretty fiercely with Black & Read but they lack any kind of playspace or knowledge of the product, which gives me a slight edge in the long term. Discovering how to drive them crazy is mostly about knowing the product better and keeping it in stock or getting in special orders for nerds that need it.

A few questions that were posited in the book are pretty useful for considering the future business strategy of the store itself:
1. What business is your company really in?
2. Where do you see your company in 5, 10, 20, 50 years?
3. If a prospective customer doesn't buy from you, where do they buy it?

1. My business is one of customer service and trust. People come to me because I'm building a community to find like-minded individuals who want to play together, so organized play basically. Coming to me, people know I try to know as much about games as possible and will personally try to find a game that is up their alley and in the vein they require. I have my finger on the pulse of gamers in my area and try to fill their needs and develop relationships for the future.

2. In 5 years, I will hopefully capture a larger Magic market that other stores cannot. Given that based on past experience, 2-3 shoppes in the area will go out of business and won't immediately be replaced, I have to be ready to take their customers when they leave and know how to provide space and product for them. Ideally, I will be doing something different (like beer & wine in the store) that will help me stand out against any store in the area so that I'm not just a well run business people can trust, but a shop innovating on the edge of gaming.

In 10-20 years (hopefully I'll still be here!) I can hope to have a few employees running the shoppe in my stead, able to provide the same services I maintain, and can build the shoppe towards being a destination for gamers all around Denver to venture out to. With the light rail coming to Arvada and the revitalization of the Ralston neighborhood surrounding me, the walk-in/drive-by traffic will increase almost 50% over what it is now, given the trends, so providing a catchy spot to drop in and game will be critical for that. In 20 years, I can hopefully be a pillar of the community that is a one-stop-shoppe for all things gaming that never runs low on stock and always has in the newest games.

3. If people don't buy from me, they go to Black and Read locally, or to Amazon. I can't really prevent that, except by keeping a more flourishing stock of games and being aggressive about getting in preorders in a timely manner. Success in this market requires a constant restock and a full store, as well as the openness to stay clean and friendly for anyone who might come in.

The future is bright, but getting to the point where I can be satisfied with the level that the store is at requires constant diligence over the product I carry. Never letting something get out of stock and finding that new hot thing that people want to play is critical. Hopefully I can remain vigilant and eventually get sales spiking even higher so that I can be paid a living wage and eventually provide for an employee to do the same. I think examining the future marketing needs of my shoppe through watching other stores is a part of it, but getting the revolution of tabletop going myself is key to success, not just survival.

Top Ten Essentials for a Game Store

I watched an interesting interview called "The Top Ten Essentials for a Game Store," featuring Tom Vasel and others and it led me to think: What am I doing right, what am I planning to do, and what do I need to work on? A lot of the things they talk about are things I'm already doing okay at, but their list was intriguing because of the coverage their list tended to have. About 10% of stores they interact with do the things they requested of stores.

Some of the things mentioned were: Keep your store clean, including bathrooms, and without clutter. Have staff that are friendly, informed, and interested in repeat customers. Run a well lit space with areas for playing games and enough room to shop. All of these are basic things that any store should be interested in, so it isn't surprising to see them as the critical steps for a game store to follow. It's more interesting that most game stores do not follow these small steps of running a business because they're generally run more as clubs, playspace for like-minded people, or just a hangout. It's something for me to never lose sight of: That I run a store at the end of the day and everything else is secondary and a benefit to it.

Things I'm planning to do:

• Star Mats for X-Wing nights, so that all our tables look professional and ready to play on instead of just bare wood. 
• Beer & Wine license, so that people can hang out and drink while they play instead of leaving to a local bar. 
• Better lighting by the windows at night.
• A computer interface to browse Magic cards and our prices. 

Things I'm working on:

• Preorders arriving in a timely manner. This has a lot to do with budgets and some to do with diligence of talking to distributors and getting things set aside. I think this will slowly resolve itself as it has gotten better every month since I opened. 
• More diverse food options. Some different snacks and drinks being regularly in stock will help and getting some feedback on what people want me to carry may resolve a bit of that as well. 
• Bigger events. Making our weekends a destination is getting there, but as I continue to reach out to the community with beer & game nights this might eventually get sorted out.

What am I doing right? 

• The store is clean! It's well lit, fairly accessible at all times to any corner of the store to find what you're looking for and still avoid running into tables or other customers. 
• When I preorder a product for people, I try to guarantee (if it's out) that I will get it in before 30 days are up. Usually it takes less than 14 days, but it's critical to me to be the kind of store people can trust to preorder product through and know that it's coming in. 
• Consistency in hours and events. Every night is different, but the crowds that come in to play on those nights know they will have space to play and meet other folks. Priority space goes to the night scheduled, which resolves disagreements in having space to play normally. I post hours and show up during them and try not to stay afterhours too often, so as to keep people used to the closing time. 
• I try to stay up to date on new releases, informed about what games are like other games, and do my best to engage with regulars even though they may play games I do not know how to play. 

When it comes to finding the areas I'm weakest in, there's always going to be a blindspot, but knowing how to critically understand what you're missing going forward is something to keep an eye on. I hope that the areas I'm planning and working on get resolved and replaced by a pile of new things that I need to improve upon, since there should always be a way to work towards a tighter run ship. 

Behind the Quarter

Well, this is how it begins.

This blog is for others to learn from my mistakes and for me to keep track of mine. Running a game store full time is a lot of work: accounting, inventory, pre-orders in a reasonable amount of time, new releases, customer service and event scheduling. There is no area of the store that is unimportant, but as I've only been open 10 months, there's still downtime and ways to improve.

So far Monday-Friday is full every night with people enjoying their particular brand of board game, card game and RPG. It is arguably a success as far as events go. Getting the weekends rolling will happen slowly, but so far getting more games on Saturdays and appealing more to the Olde Town crowd during the mornings is step 1 and 2. A lot of stores take a day off a week or open super late, but it seems like the best bet is to always be available as a store to the local community so as to be relied upon to be open and available for last second purchases. Events work and help us feel less like a store pushing product and more of a place you support to find like-minded nerds.

 On the other hand, being a store means marketing, and finding ways to tell people you are here is key. I've read a lot of advice from other stores over the past few months and I think the way to not spam the world is to be interesting. Post once a day on Facebook so as to stay active and up to date, but not become a thing people want to "hide" from their walls. Post 3 times a day in Twitter, about anything at all really, and see what sticks. With enough followers it could eventually become the event feed for the store or at least create an open dialog with folks about games in general. This is more of a reminder to myself, again, so that I don't let up.

It's so easy to lay back and think: Things are going at a good speed, just let it work itself out. The thing with owning a business is that it must be your passion. I intend to be a personal shopper for any person off the street or for regulars that have been with me from the beginning. I want people to find a game they really enjoy, not just grab one because I said it's good and want a sale. I read something from Black Diamond Games  that struck home with me awhile back: Whenever someone enters the store, part of me lights up to help that person, because I'm genuinely shocked and pleased that someone chose to enter the store and inquire about the things I love.

I am a very stoic man and anyone will tell you they've never seen me excited. At the end of the day, that is just there to temper my world from being too one-way-or-the-other. I feel it is a strength and a weakness, being able to handle stress more easily and not to make rash decisions, though I also never appear super enthused so retail is an odd environment. Thankfully the low-key retail space of a game store means I don't have to be pushy, loud, or overly-attached to work well.

So what is all this? What will this blog be, seeing as it's not a big AQ related blog about new games and the like? It's game theory, store theory, and business from a casual novice who wants to bring transparency to a career that is traditionally impossible to do long-term.