It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

At Christmas, retail changes its priorities. Usually I spend a disproportionate amount of time handselling – this is where I leave my console and talk to customers about their needs, hopes and dreams.

At Christmas all that goes out of the window. If I’ve done my job properly, my curated Christmas games selection sells itself.

How does it do that?

I pile it high.

I price point it – we’ll have a curated Christmas games selection at different price points and decent player counts. I want games at £10, £20, £30, £40 and £50. These are price points. The philosophy of price pointing is that we mentally ascribe value to objects and experiences. A game that is £30 is £30. A game that is £32.99 is £40. We hold the line on price as much as possible because what our price pointing is designed to do is cultivate something called a jump point.  

It’s ‘only’ £40. Imagine how much fun you will have for ‘only’ £40.   

The games we choose are family games. They are lighter than our usual fare. Nobody is playing Terraforming Mars with granny – she’ll have to bring her own copy.

Christmas is a nostalgia fest. Why do you think there are so many chocolate boxes showing twee Victorian families carol singing with no evidence of rickets or child labour in sight. People want to believe that this year will be different.

And you know what? With the right boardgame it can be.

Boardgames and Christmas have been inextricably linked since Parker Brothers released a game of the Night Before Christmas 125 years ago. All we need to do is sit back and let 125 years of history do its job for us.

People browse. They are on the clock. They need to hit enough stores to score enough presents. They crave a jump point. So we give it to them.

Piles of games that we have curated specifically for this task. Camel Up. Carcassonne. Settlers of Catan. Big Potato games like Herd Mentality or What’s Next. Pop culture games from Ravensburger – because why the hell not? The networks stick their tentpoles on Christmas Day for a reason – and these are our tentpoles because they are immediately recognisable.

And good.

Our goal is maximum sales over the holiday season, but why stop at one holiday season? As a brick and mortar store, if we’ve done our job properly – and we hopefully have – you’ll have so much fun that you’ll be back next year. And so will your friends, who also had so much fun.

Christmas is its own gateway game.  

Now, if I’m not handselling your game it needs to say exactly what it is on the box. It needs to sell itself. Not just on price point, but on every last detail. Your box should scream ‘Buddy – I am the single most fun you are ever going to have this year!’ Not literally, or we’d take the batteries out – Game of Throne Monopoly, I see you there with your press me button.

Chances are you do not have the market recognition that comes from being an Asmodee Top 40 line, or a popular cult film or TV license. So you have to work harder – first to get in my curated top twenty and then to sell yourself so I don’t remainder you on Boxing Day.   

I order biblically.

One. Few. Many.

The curated list is the many – we’ll sell so much in the run up to Christmas and we know we won’t be able to restock. One or two copies of a game is statistically irrelevant. This Christmas I’ve ordered a hundred copies of the Kim Joy baking game – I ordered something like half the initial UK stock. Everything about it screams ‘I am going to do well at Christmas’. Because Christmas is nothing if not about the over consumption of cute baked goods.   

Here’s what doesn’t sell at Christmas: big box dungeon crawlers. TCG boosters. Warhammer does OK, because there’s always a kid who wants to assemble space marines on Christmas morning. That’s literally the one exception.

Axis and Allies.

This guy came in once, looking for advice. He’d bought his girlfriend Axis and Allies Europe the previous year, but she hadn’t been that keen. Now he wanted to know if the rules for Axis and Allies Pacific were… better.

Buddy, it’s probably not the rules set interpretation of World War Two military conflict that was the problem.  

However busy Christmas week is, it gets even more hectic after last posting day. Then we are literally the only game in town. Those deep discounters online? Did they let you down? Well we won’t.

Online deep discounters sell games cheap to people who know what they want. Amazon needs you to have some idea what you want before its algorithm kicks in. And that’s the knack of brick and mortar retail – we sell you things you didn’t know you wanted. You hold the box, the golden ticket to the good times lottery – the promise of peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind in the palm of your hand, the ghosts of Christmases past hovering on your shoulder, egging you on.

I don’t sell games.

I sell happiness.

And. You. Do. Too.

It just comes in a box.