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Undeserved FLoGings I'm lucky enough to live surrounded by a wealth of Friendly Local Game Stores so I wanted to share a little tableau of them. I'm going to avoid identifying them by name, but would be happy to via PM if you're nearby. I'd really love to hear about your shop(s) too. I'm gonna harsh a couple of my local places for some various things, but I really appreciate not only the volume of options that I have, but how hard all of them work. I'm starting with the worst one only because it's the most entertaining. I don't want this to be taken as a review of any of these shops, not in the Google / Yelp way anyway. I just find game shops to be cool boutiques and weird outgrowths of the hobby. They have character. I want to capture some of that as best I can. The Pit The nearest store to me is on a street that divides my suburban downtown loop from the high school I attended (God I want out of this town) and a bunch of working class residential neighborhoods. It shares a building with a pawn shop and what I think is a photography studio, but not one I've ever seen open, although it's obviously not closed either. Parking is atrocious, but in the evenings the other shops are closed so at least that opens up a little. Most of the clientele here are the locals. A lot of the high schoolers are within walking distance of the shop. And that's great. There's a feel to the place that it's remained unchanged since comic shops became a thing. ...A feeling that extends to the interior design too... The floor is peeling linoleum tile, the walls, wood veneer or painted concrete.The shop is divided into three rooms, to the left is the comics section, which is extensive over multiple tables of filled longboxes and shelves stuffed with nerd tchotchkes. The middle section has the sole register, the singles case, and the other tabletop games, then then there's the game room. The game room is smaller than the lovely Subway shop you don't like going to but do sometimes anyway. You know the one. It has eight ISO white folding tables, each with four or six chairs that must have been stolen from a county jail. This is twice as many as fit in the room, and even moreso when you figure in the girth of the regulars. The walls are plastered with every poster offered to the shop. When this place is excavated, they're going to spend years peeling these back and archiving each time DC Comics reset their universe. The clientele is too young, the lights are yellowed, and at the end of the night, the only thing I want is a shower. But for a lot of those kids, this is their clean well-lighted place and I wouldn't want them deprived of that. How it stays open, I honestly don't know. It's part of a larger company in the area that runs four or five shops, and the next is just a few miles down the road. But it's their FLGS, and I'm glad they have it. Next up: The New Place
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Apr 28, 2017 21:32
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| # ? Apr 30, 2024 12:16 |
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You roll a natural 20!! *Runs finger down sheet #20 - No one gives a gently caress.
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Apr 29, 2017 12:30
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My LGS is actually a record store that also happens to sell Magic: the Gathering stuff and also hosts events. It's a little cramped but the people there are nice and no one smells too bad. Plus they always have videos of old metal concerts playing on a TV in the front. Plus it's within walking distance of my apartment. It's a cool place and I like it.
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Apr 30, 2017 04:45
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I've long since moved away but in my MTG days I played in weekly tournaments in a store that was literally a block away from a maximum security prison. The store owner really only cared about baseball cards but hosted Magic tournaments because it was the only thing that brought in money; the clientele was mostly teenagers, but there was this one regular who looked exactly like Jay of Jay and Silent Bob and sometimes brought his wife and infant daughter along. We had occasional visits from a scalper who never played, just hawked overpriced cards or tried to pick up anything interesting that people got out of packs, and then there was the guy who ran the tournaments, who I think used to favorably seed himself and loudly talked about buying himself a Black Lotus for his birthday. It was interesting times. These days my options are basically "board game shop that doesn't do RPGs or wargames," "go halfway across town to the tiny little place which nominally hosts tabletop stuff but has nowhere to sit" or "take an hour and a half bus ride and then walk another 30 minutes to the place that actually has regular gaming." Which is kind of weird given this is a much bigger city than the one that had the shop I mentioned before. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 03:29 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 03:27
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Being in an area that is packed with major colleges and universities, I have a smorgasbord of FLGS. I only really ever regularly go to one though, as it's the easiest to get to and also the nicest. I've been fortunate to make a number of friends in that store, actually, and found a surprisingly well-adjusted group of nerds during the last season of Adventurer's League, and I play with some of them outside the store now. It's a well lit, sizeable place, with about 60% of its space devoted to comics and graphic novels, with a decent sized play area in the back. The rest is an even split between board games, RPGs (and accessories) and miniature games (minus 40k, weirdly. Theres another store nearby that pretty much dominates that scene). They host an FNM, plus a Saturday board game night, adventurers league, and a smattering of other things including comic making events and a monthly "queers in comics and gaming" night which I think is cool. They strive to make it as inclusive as possible and have a pretty diverse staff who are all pretty knowledgeable in their chosen hobbies. They also do a pretty good job at running out the harmful weirdos.
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May 28, 2017 05:58
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I used to go to a magic shop that was also a pizzeria. They would take store credit for food and do discounts for pizza. Also, some tournaments (prereleases) included a couple of slices and a can of pop. It loving owned and I miss their baked spaghetti so much.
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May 28, 2017 16:48
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The New Place The new place is at the edge of the metro area, in a town I don't much like. It's too rich and too hillbilly, and my ex-fiance used to live about five minutes drive-time from the shop. That's not really relevant of course, but even long after all that's done, muscle memory on the drive over reminds me sometimes. The store recently moved into a bigger venue a block from their first location. It's well lit, split evenly between game store and game room. They run a LOT of events here. While there was a Netrunner scene in town this was the shop to go to for it. There used to be a pretty tight knit group of us that would hang around and grind out games. Folks grew up; I wish I could. It's bright and it's clean at the new shop. The tables all have extra large mats with anime tits. I don't have the heart to start a fight with the management about that. Their feature table is a three hundred pound hand built monstrosity in weathered, dark stained wood. Snack bar in the back serves concession stand fare, and they keep Ramune ball-soda in the fridge for the sizable number of local weebs. When they're not running M:tG Commander (so much Commander), they run Smash Bros. tourneys too. I watch my tongue around that crowd, lest I utter heresies about why items are better. They used to be across the street from a dive bar, where a couple of us would play Drunkrunner, drinking a round or two between rounds. They're beside one of those pop-up slots places now (is there a name for those, they're loving infesting the opioid addicted American Wasteland here) but I've never seen anyone go in or out of it. I think the manager likes me because I never talk about my rad new commander deck you guys; I've tried to get him to get a liquor license for the place. He probably can't because of WoTC rules, which sucks. Drink & Draft is the best way to play Magic. I've been going there less and less. I wish I had more reasons to go back, I like the regulars (mostly) and the staff. But I suspect I'd be just as happy with no reason to ever go back.
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May 31, 2017 00:33
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| # ? Apr 30, 2024 12:16 |
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There's this place here in town that's been operating... probably thirty years, at least, since I started visiting in my mid teens. It started out in a converted house, a tiny place that nevertheless had mostly new stuff from month to month. The owner, I learned later, was a complete rear end in a top hat. They moved into bigger digs a block away-- an actual storefront this time, with side rooms they'd rent for gaming and such. It was then that I began to notice the owner was one of those guys who didn't understand the concept of stale merchandise. Does anyone remember the Dragonbone electronic dice? I wanted one when I was a geeklet, and here one was, in the display case by the cash, for... frankly, an exorbitant amount of money. Especially since it was actually labeled as being broken. After a few years there, he moved shop across to the other side of downtown to 'attract a better class of clientele'. Place was a bit smaller, but they had a LAN you could rent time on. Friends played Starcraft there, but I was just there for the RPG stuff... which got staler and weirder as time went on. I eventually bought a copy of GURPS Bunnies and Burrows, and two or three Flying Buffalo dueling gamebooks a few years after I first saw them on the shelves there. This was long years after all of them had gone out of print-- I've no idea where he got them, or why he thought they'd sell. Eventually they moved into what had been a little nook of a coffee shop in the late Nineties. It's survived, against all odds, but I went in recently and... woof. Nearly bare walls, nearly bare shelves, an utterly random assortment of AD&D books, WoD, a few blister packs of Bones and a rack of that Star Wars collectible minis game. Oh, and three employees chatting about Magic (which they didn't seem to stock) and ignoring potential customers. The original owner had clearly retired; I have no idea how the current owners made anywhere near enough to keep the place open.
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May 31, 2017 03:49
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