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.

Why run organised play?

A lot of people seem confused by the concept of Organised play – why a store would do it, what they gain from it, what a brand gains from it, what a customer gains from it. Who does the grail serve and why should we care? Even before the global pandemic game store owners were increasingly starting not to care.

Now, Fan Boy Three was an early adopter of Organised play, so I’m kind of biased. Before us there had been one or two UK stores that had dabbled. We’d put on events for people to play in, because events allowed us to engage players and engage players spend more. Back then, in the dawn of time before Rolling Thunder, stores might bring in one box of starters and one box of boosters.

When Richard Garfield created magic the Gathering he had no idea it would take off the way it did. He’d imagined a world where a player might buy a starter and a handful of boosters, build a deck and travel around playing strangers – for ante – but everyone’s deck would be different. You would be surprised by your opponents power card and combo play because there was virtually no chance you’d ever seen it before. Because, well, THE INTERNET WAS NOT A THING.

Umm. Yeah. Not a thing.

It’s hard to remember a time before the internet. But if you moved into a new city back then you didn’t spam Facebook to find a D&D group. It was hard. I’ve seen people weep with joy when they walked into a game store back in the nineties because they’d thought that games were only sold in America.

No, really.

Organised play was a way of bringing these people together, for mostly selfless reasons. You see, engaged players buy more. It’s suddenly not a starter and a couple of boosters, but whole boxes and then whole cases. It’s a positive feedback loop – the more you are engaged the more you play, the more you play the more you are engaged. And the more cards – or HeroClix – you want.

Humans were hunter gatherers. We like collecting sets, we enjoy filing our cards, building our decks, talking about building our decks – hell, it starts as a pastime and becomes a hobby, then a lifestyle, then a culture and before long you have a community and that community is its own positive reinforcement loop.

Because to belong you must play, and to play you must buy.

The earliest Magic tournaments weren’t held in stores. Wizards actively discouraged it. At our first pre-release we had to cover up all the sealed product and take it off sale – it was an event, not an opportunity. But even then it was obvious that nerdvana was both. Buy as much as you like. Play as much as you like. You are among friends and equals.

This is because Organised Play – at its heart – is a sales and marketing exercise. It’s that simple.

Now, not everyone sees it that way. But they are wrong. Early Organised Play had prizes supplied by the companies that made the games, for free. This is because Organised Play stimulated sales. People bought stuff at events – boosters, sleeves, booster boxes, single cards and figures. It was an economic driver. Sales and marketing.

Events paid their way. This was because not everyone ran them. Or ran them well.

At its most basic level Organised Play is simply a night to play a cardgame or miniatures game. It doesn’t have to be competitive and doesn’t have to have a prize, but as humans we find the chance to gamble for a reward stimulating and the chance to test our skill to win a reward even more stimulating. We find it validating. We can walk out, head held high, as one of life’s winners. There doesn’t even need to be a prize – winning is its own reward. But it is even better – even more validating – when there is.

People tried every form of prize. Promo cards and figures, boosters, money, valuable single cards. Even a car. Winners can feel even more like winners. And of course, the more events you run the more winners you can have. The more engaged your players are.

Early on market leader Wizards of the Coast discovered there was a spike in sales and new player numbers for every new store that opened. Suddenly they had a universal panacea to stagnating sales – moah stores! Each new store gave a spike, each new store a new play opportunity and a new potential community.

But on the ground we saw rather the opposite effect. We saw communities start to fragment. In order to run successful Organised Play you need numbers. Two people are a game. Four are a round robin. By the time you get to eight you can play three rounds of swiss or single elimination. Three or four rounds equates to three or four hours, which for any given value of value is pretty good value.

Of course if you cap support, then your value proposition reduces for every additional player. When Friday Night Magic had 4 promos each week – regardless of attendance – if there were eight of you, there was a fifty percent chance of snagging one in any given week. Sixteen players, that number drops to 25%. So many Organised Play communities become self limiting in terms of size.

How big then is the perfect Organised Play community? Well, optimally? It fills your store and buys your allocation of product. But because there are many more game lines than nights of the week, there’s a certain amount of triage that you have to perform to maximise your engagement. At Fan Boy Three we have to try and fit in Warhammer, Yugioh, Pokemon, Dragonball, Digimon, Commander, Pioneer, Modern, Draft, Standard, HeroClix, X-Wing, Legion, Marvel Crisis Protocol, Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Starfinder, Vampire rivals, Final Fantasy, Age of Sigmar, Keyforge, Cardfight Vanguard, Flesh and Blood, Dust… the list goes on and on and the store isn’t some kind of Tardis.

Many stores triage by dint of the owner playing one game and wanting to support it, like the bar in the Blues Brothers that plays both types of music – country and western. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, but it’s a high stakes game. If Commander is the only game in town and you fall out of favour with it? Well, no game for you.

The more games you run, the more likely your customers will surf from one to the other. That table of Digimon players having fun looks a lot more enjoyable an evening than Bob crushing you with his mono-blue control deck. Again. Laughing.

And this is healthy. Most stores build a portfolio of events, just as they build a portfolio of games they stock. A healthy mix of casual and competitive events, ways to engage new players as well as reinvigorate jaded old ones. And we do this because we sell more. Engaged players buy more stuff.

The issue these days is that they don’t always buy it from us.

There are a lot of places that sell stuff cheaper than a FLGS that puts on events. Most of us have subsidised those events in the past – it’s a sensible strategy for engaging new players – but we could do that because we made a lot of money selling product. The internet again. Our own worst enemy.

Sadly most of us no longer sell in quite the quantities we once did.

Organised play space has a cost – it’s an opportunity cost, because by devoting space to tables and chairs we can’t also simultaneously devote it to selling stock. That sacrifice was supposed to repay us in terms of volume sales – engaged players buying more – but not everyone joins the dots.

Because Organised play is sales and marketing, the fewer people buy less we are engaged and the less the publishers are too. Hell, people will buy the stupidest shit without them having to print promo cards and put out events. We’ve literally just had a pandemic with hardly any events and people are still buying boosters for games they can’t play.

Stores began ripping out their tables and chairs and putting in jigsaws.

Now, I kind of believe in it still. Because my store is full every night with my communities, spread across multiple game lines and multiple nights and friendship groups, all of whom were desperate to reconnect in physical space. In my physical space. But it’s becoming an increasing challenge to persuade distribution of the wisdom of supporting stores like mine with – say – increased Pokemon allocation.

Organised play – supporting communities – used to be the gold standard in how stores operated, but with Wizards Premium it’s how nice your bins are, and everyone and anyone from the sub postmaster in County Wicklow to major high street chains wants as much allocation of Pokemon as they can get.

Now, I’m a believer that these things – these times – are a blip. That for two hundred thousand years of human evolution as a species we have craved the companionship of people ‘like us’ who care about the same stupid things we do.

Bringing those people together in one place, to play? I will never not think that it is important. And I will never not think that it is the key to selling more stuff. Being among your friends increases your happiness, and happy people buy more. That’s what they are engaged in. That’s the engagement that drove sales.

It really was the friends we made along the way all along.

And I hope we don’t lose that in our new world order of increasing isolation, because a decline in engagement means an even greater decline in sales. But not always. The one other thing I noticed when I opened Fan Boy Three was a decline in my roleplaying sales. I sold a lot in my previous store, but now hardly any – and it wasn’t because the people in Manchester didn’t play RPG’s.

It was because they played them too much.

Turns out the bumper sales I was making before was because people weren’t playing. They were buying, reading and dreaming. Dreaming of that time they would finally get enough players together to play that game they had always imagined, and of all the friends they’d make. Then suddenly I had delivered them.

Now they no longer needed to buy, because they could play.

This maybe was a flaw. But at the end of the day, as I tell my work experience students all the time, I sell happiness and community – it just comes in the form of boxes and books and boosters, on sprues and made of plastic and cardboard. And that has value.

I hope one day that the companies who have dialled back from support remember that one day. Organised Play was a vital component of the experiential retail model that I pioneered. Every store is a premium store to somebody. This pandemic will end, but the human desire to find a space where people like you gather, to play together?

I hope that never does.

It’s allocation time again.

Pokemon 25^th. Everyone wants it but there’s not enough to go around. If that sounds familiar, you probably work in games retail.

Pokemon has been something of a holy grail for retailers these past couple of years. But the more we sell, the more people want to ram their snouts in the Poketrough. If you are a bedroom seller, here’s your opportunity to make bank and pay for your own hobby, so there is suddenly twice as much demand for product.

If you are a supermarket, you want the hot product too. All those years when you wouldn’t return the buyer’s calls… suddenly you are calling them. Send me poke-pallets and send them now! I need to stack my poke-products next to my rutabagas, and I need to stock them in depth so people can steal them. Stat!

So what is a distributor to do?

What is ‘fair’?

So, I’m a store in central Manchester. We started running Pokemon in 2004 – we are one of the oldest continuously running leagues, and in terms of prerelease I think we are the second biggest allocation in the country.

We don’t sell Pokemon on line. And we don’t mark it up.

But since 2004 we now have three stores within one minute of us that also stock Pokemon. Go twenty minutes out and there are another three. Go an hour out and there are more than fifty.

They did not spend seventeen years building Manchester’s Pokemon community.

Support for a community is support for a brand. Pokemon hasn’t been a get rich quick scheme for us. We don’t even sell it online – too many bots were hitting us trying to buy up all our stock.

Now many stores consider this is good. One of my friends was complaining about his allocation of Pokemon ETB’s being five percent of his order, but while we’d doubled our orders last year he’d preordered five thousand expecting to flip them.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

You can see the community support axis in two ways: community growth over time and financial expenditure over time. A store that is consistently growing its play community in store is one that sees both axis grow over that time – because more players equals more product sold.

And if you don’t sell online, those are physical products sold to your physical community in your physical store.

Lets go back to the fact that there are three stores within one minute of me, none of whom run and support Pokemon.

One means of allocating would be to give everyone the same amount of stock. That way its fair. My huge organised play focussed store in the city centre with multiple staff and a seventeen year long history of both event support and financial support of both Pokemon and my distributor would get exactly the same number of packs and boxes as my local post office or that bedroom seller with a VAT number.

This is where I have some sympathy for online stores and bedroom sellers. Because we are all selling blind. People buy from us because they can guarantee getting the stiff they pre-ordered.

Only now they can’t.  

We’ve all oversold. Product is going to be allocated because the supermarkets quite fancy it. Because stores that would have previously sold a booster box now want their full allocation on everything, so they can flip it.

Normally I’d have done the work and got the reward. My prerelease kit allocations are the proof of our hard graft these past seventeen years. Normally a release is huge prerelease weekend followed by a huge chunk of box sales. We don’t pad our preorders, and we don’t flip our product – if I sold £10K of Pokemon last set, I have customers lined up that I built as customers for £10K of the next set.

Only, I’m not getting £10K. Because I’m getting a quarter of that. And so are the three stores, the six stores and the fifty stores.

Most of those guys did nothing for seventeen years. They weren’t cheering the little electric hamster dude on all those long years, set after set.

Here’s what happens on Day One.

All my stock has sold out to preorder and then some. We’re being allocated to a quarter of what we had already been given a maximum allocation of. So people come in, and we tell them we have sold out to preorder.

But that’s fine right, because there are three other stores – one of which doubled their prices on Pokemon.

Instead of selling what I consider to be the allocation I have spent seventeen years building, I’m sending those players to stores with less in the game who like free money.

And. That. Money. Is. Mine.

I laid the groundwork for it by building sound foundations for my business. I built the community. I built that on trust – the trust that a ETB that is listed at £52,50 is going to actually be £52.50. I built that on reputation – that we have the largest allocation of prerelease kits, so we are the biggest and best place to go for prerelease. We built the community brick by brick, player by player, event by event.

Other stores could have done that. But they didn’t. Half their space isn’t event space. To them this is just free money – and they price accordingly, for even freer money. But the difference is next year I – currently – will be still buying that much Pokemon or more. All a flat allocation does is demolish a floor of my building. Buit it’s a distributor, sat on the thing like Miley Cyrus who is wielding the wrecking ball.

Here the thing. You KNOW who your best brick and mortar Pokemon stores are. Because they have big prerelease allocations. Those stores have communities that they serve, that – like me – took many long years to build up to where they are.

How many in store Pokemon leagues are there?

Fifty?

Sure, we have had a pandemic and things are tough all around. Nobody knows what those numbers really look like right now. But those communities didn’t go. They are real – real players, real stores, real support long term.

And so I am asking the industry to rethink its strategy on allocation. One size doesn’t and shouldn’t fit all. Just as we support our communities, distribution should prioritise support for us.

Because our growth was real. We’re the Pokecake, not the Pokesouffle. And next year all those people will have moved on to sell the next hot thing. Maybe its collectible novelty toilet seat covers. But we will still be there, supporting you, supporting our players and supporting Pokemon as a brand and a lifestyle. Give us the tools we need to do that.

It is the year 2001. My first GAMA Expo. The last day of the Trade Hall.

If you’ve ever worked in larger industries, some of the sights and sounds of the hobby game industry’s premiere business to business event can seem a little strange. Grown men trying to strip stands of everything of value, their arms weighted down with booster boxes, boardgames and miniatures, jostling each other while business is still being conducted.

It was like being in a locust swarm.

Like, I got it.

These people had given up their time and earning potential to fly to Vegas, often leaving the store in the hands of a customer to keep it open while they tried to make bank, have a holiday, do a show. As I rode back to the airport in my taxi I passed the annual JCB convention. I wondered if constriction workers also asked if heavy plant machinery was up for grabs.

“You don’t want the hassle of taking that excavator on the plane with you buddy!”

I was from England. People handed me stuff. It had a name by then.

Swag.

The retailers of twenty years ago barely engaged with the trade hall. They didn’t go to the seminars. They were there for a holiday that they could write off on expenses, and as much swag as they could carry.

If you’d been a casual industry observer? You really would not have come away thinking our industry was even vaguely professional. Retailers were fighting over copies of the Palladium Roleplaying Game. It was a total scrum. People would waddle back to their hotel rooms, overloaded with stuff they hoped to resell. Some had brought trolleys, or other people to carry more bags. 

Enter the Box.

The Box was designed to reward retailers who attended publisher seminars. If you even had a baseline of professionalism you walked away with a pre-parcelled amount of swag to pay for your flight and hotel. It’s an attendance bribe, because GAMA was an organisation designed to serve up a smorgasbord of retailers for publishers to pitch their wares to.

Trust me – the year of two GAMA’s pretty much covered why this was its main function. And the Box was the way of delivering that.

Twenty years on and many retailers have considerably more professionalism than those heady days of jumpers for goalposts and people flying in just to score a Wizkids Dropshop. Hey, that was me too – Galactus, Dropship, Apocalypse Dragon.

This was because retailers back then were uber consumers. We were just hobbyists who had gone from poacher to gamekeeper. Bringing back the only Mechwarrior Dropship in the UK had value to our communities – and by extension to ourselves.

Initially the box had value too.

Yet pretty soon the products in the box started to vary in quality. Nobody is doubting the box still had financial worth – in fact it soon became two boxes, and then three, and then four. For a small store that’s like GAMA Christmas. But for a bigger store it’s almost certainly stock you already have. If its older stock, sometimes it is stock you – or the publishers – have already remaindered.

The year my boxes were shipped to my friends house in Vegas was the year I had to manually parse the contents of the box because it was now a) a year late and b) coming on the plane in my limited luggage capacity. Free isn’t free if you are paying money to stow it in a transatlantic hold or ship it – and somebody is paying that, so the things you put in the box are much more valuable to every part of the chain if they have some kind of value above and beyond the discount you got off you GAMA booth for their inclusion.

Here’s how you can make the box work for you. And for me. And ultimately for GAMA.

1. The product samples.

So, when I go to a catering and hospitality show folks are falling over themselves to give me free samples. New lines or new to me lines.

It’s not always so important that I like a line. Sometimes you want to see how a product behaves in the wild, so you have a CDU and you pop it out on your counter and see how excited people become.  This is often how bigger companies launch whole ranges.

Not everyone has the budget to do that. But let’s say you were Oink and had a relatively large selection of relatively small games and you wanted to break into a market. Sending a couple of hundred of your best selling games into stores in a CDU with reordering information stuck on the back might be the ‘in’ you need.

Every store sticks it on their counter, watches people pick the games up.

And buy them.

You’d then have the reordering information right there in front of you. Chances are within a week most stores would be placing an order. You have the mailing list to follow it up, you’ve potentially broken an entire market with one mailout that you didn’t even have to pay for.

Look, if I went to Proctor and Gamble and said I could get four hundred engaged businesses to put their new washing powder front and centre and it wouldn’t cost a million dollars in ad spend they’d bite my hand off.

That we don’t do more of this is criminal.

2. The sales tool.

GAMA is a great opportunity to take your catalogue, distil it down to the single product you have the best chance of success with this year and then drilling down and following through. Your direct to retailer seminar should concentrate on how to sell the product you want us to – tell us your elevator pitch. Give us the one minute demo – trust me if we are hand selling your product we need it in a small bite sized engagement chunk.  

Stop. Telling. Us. It’s. Great.

Look, we get it. It’s your game. But I can’t simply pull twenty games off my shelves and tell the customers they are great. I need to tell them why they are great. I need a one minute demo – and if you don’t think you can demo your game in one minute, Sarah Shah can.

(And I can too).

One minute.

Now, once you have told us how to sell it, you can tell us how to play it. And THEN you give us a copy. Canny stores will use the information you have given them to be able to handsell cases. And they will use that copy as a demo. Demo doesn’t always mean we play it with customers – sometimes we just open it and use it as a display. Sometimes it’s to teach the staff.

Now a canny store probably already did that. It cracked a demo of a game it knows it can handsell. Because handselling sells cases and just sticking it on the shelf might not even sell that one. We handsell mostly to casual gamers. Your standard hobbyist – the industries bread and butter – already knows what they want. They have influencers, Facebook groups and industry news to steer them towards games like Wingspan, Root or Gloomhaven.

Handselling is all about that casual gamer. So maybe that’s the sort of game you want to prioritise teaching us. And shipping us.

3. The event support.

So you are a cardgame or a miniatures line. The thing I absolutely most look forwards to every box is the Reaper paint and take. I was one of the original UK Organised Play stores, and things I can either run or turn into event prizes? They are awesome.

Here’s the thing about cardgames. One booster? One starter? These are statistically irrelevant unless we can source it in bulk. Back when he was at Bandai I used to badger James Tanaka for playmats because we couldn’t source them and I could turn them into prizes.

Yes, your boardgame promos are event support. Even if it’s just a purchase event.

You see, an event is anything a store can use to give it publicity.

And by extension you.

Every store wants the maximum number of people at its events – well maybe not now, but in general. We’re going to advertise, we’re going to shimmy, we’re going to sometimes even pay money to social media companies to increase our reach.

It’s the one thing I am always asking for when I am at GAMA – stuff to support events. Even if they are just purchase events – everyone who buys a game in store this weekend gets entered into a raffle, say.

Roleplaying game companies should send us beginners boxes. Since you all have living campaigns and organised play programs, give us something to kickstart that. Like, what I’d love to see Paizo do is give us a print run of the Pathfinder Society Introductory Module. Something we could have behind the counter, along with a beginner box for stores to run pick up and play games.

4. General stock.

Yup. I had six of Bunny Kingdom. Now I have seven.

Look, there is nothing wrong with sending free stock to somebody who already has stock. And if you send it to somebody who doesn’t have stock, well now they do. Maybe they now have Asmodee Top 40 AND Bunny Kingdom, and it’s the first game they ever took outside what they and every other store was handed on a plate.

This. Has. Merit.

(see point one above)

But you better make sure you have a way of following up and getting that store to reorder. Heck, you have an engaged store list of people who received your game. Sure, not every store wants to give you feedback, but you could do things to engage them – like ask them to send a picture of Bunny Kingdom on their shelves. Random draw to win one of each of your catalog.

This way you’re seeing two things – one, how big the store is, what their shelving is like – and by extension how professional they are. You are building a work with list of stores you need to have on your radar.

You are also seeing how your product fits into a store – or how store owners think it fits. Most of us have a filing system of sorts – ours was alphabetical, plus small games, plus BGG Top 10, plus solo, plus Asmodee Top 40, plus wargames, plus co-op and since COVID we’re also spread over multiple stacked tables primed for handselling with all our favourites and new releases. Seeing which other games are shelved near you helps you refine your own merchandising – why would they put that THERE? Maybe it’s the box size or their games are ordered by colour – saw a store do this once and it looked amazing. 

General stock box items are pretty boring for most big stores because we buy in cases. It’s just like a super expensive well travelled copy. Single copies when you deal in cases are always pretty depressing – either you already had plenty or you didn’t and it reminds you that you really needed another case.

(Still has merit and trust me we are grateful)

5. Remaindered stock.

Well, this is where it gets difficult. I don’t mean to be critical but if I’ve remaindered a product that turns up in the GAMA box I am like… so THIS is how little this company thought of me?

You. Know. Who. You. Are.

I get the need to remainder stock. You have a warehouse full and nobody wants it. You don’t.

And if you don’t I certainly don’t.

I get it. It’s a cheap and easy way of paying your ‘dues’. But this is because you are thinking of the box as a duty – an obligation – rather than an opportunity. All of us remainder stuff. You should offer this out to us at pennies on the dollar – trust me, if I stick a huge stack of boardgames out at 75% off they’ll pretty much all go. Sometimes we wrap them up as mystery Christmas gifts.

But what we don’t want is to have had that random remaindered shit prioritised and flown transatlantic to get to my door. At considerable expense. That shit don’t fly – apart from the fact that it most certainly did.

6. One offs

These are the absolute worst things. That one pack of 50 sleeves that I can’t order because they don’t distribute (or at least not internationally). That expansion for a game that’s out of print. Worse, getting a new edition (see 5 above). If I like a thing I need to be able to go back and get twenty of it.

If I can’t do that, you shouldn’t ship it.

Because now I’m losing sales because nobody cared enough to make sure they could translate what was in the box TO SALES. At that point I have to ask, what the heck are you even here for?

TCG’s are the worst.

TCG’s only work when you can get volume, in terms of players and in terms of sales. A TCG product in the box needs to be a stirge – it needs a long spike driven into the heart of a market, pumping in product and sucking out money.

Don’t send me a starter if I can’t get more.

Don’t send me a case of starters if I can’t get more. Because when a TCG bubbles, I need sixty.

Not six.

Most stores? They are Magic stores. They don’t always jump because they don’t always want to risk the community they have on a new game. But if you send a store like mine a demo deck? When I was running organised play for Bushiroad I sent out hundreds to any interested store. Magic Demo decks? I got through thousands.

If I am passing around one demo deck – or at least I hope, a pair – I need to source stock really quickly. Handselling a TCG is hard. There’s a play – commit – buy axis that is very, very short.

But…

7. Galactus was cool.

And I flew half way around the world just to be the first person in the UK to have one. If it is going to be a one off, it has to be drop dead cool.

A flagship item for a flagship store.

Part of me misses those days. I might not miss the scrum for swag. I certainly don’t miss being the quietly deferential British guy watching folks wheel away a year’s turnover in a suitcase. The industry has changed a lot.

But until now we’ve never really had this talk. About how retailers use the contents of the box. How  we view you and your expectation of us through those contents.

Remember it’s an opportunity, not an obligation.

A lot of smaller retailers are primarily Magic stores. The right product – and the right follow up – might be the perfect in for an entire product category with you as the cornerstone. The bigger the store, the more likely your box contents will just join general population on our shelves. But the more you think about what is in the box – what YOU put in, and what messaging you want to accompany it – the harder it will work for you.

And the harder we will too.

Because it can’t always be Gwynneth Paltrow’s head!   

Buddy? I don’t need your money. More money is always better than no money. Sure. But you are the sort of guy who wanted Van Gogh to paint dogs playing pool. Who demanded Joyce put in punctuation and paragraphs before you would read Ulysses and then you still wouldn’t have.

Here’s the thing. We call it patronage because during the renaissance the wealthiest noble house of Europe gave serious life changing amounts of money to creatives so they could create great art. A flow of money from those that had vast sums of money to those who needed money in order to create. But we aren’t in fucking Medieval Florence buddy, and you aren’t the fucking Medicis.

You have confused patronage with patronise.

Patronise is when you exert your ego on folks who won’t and don’t call you on it. Sometimes its because they are just embarrassed… no, actually – seriously – that’s most of the time. Nobody wants you to DEMAND TO SPEAK TO THEIR MANAGER – most creatives don’t have one. Nobody wants you to type back in caps DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? Because the answer is usually no…

Except…

We do. We all know who you are. Every creative on every forum and every subscriber to every creative blog and every retailer knows who you are.

You are THAT GUY.

None of us refer to you by name of course. That would give you a kind of power that…well, to be Freudian about this… is kind of what you crave. You are just THAT GUY, as in “OMG did you see THAT GUY” to be followed by “Yeah, I know what a sad and entitled ass”. “He backed my game but dropped out angrily after I wouldn’t draw him beheading a unicorn while shouting HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES DENISE!”

Hey, look… there are groups you can go to. Other entitled Kickstarter backers, bonding over the fact that no creator will accommodate their requests or let them back their products. You’ll have to pay more money post campaign from somebody who actually cares about creators and their rights of course, but its a small price to pay for integrity.

Even if you just want to buy it to burn it. You know, in a fit of self righteous pique.
And if you see Lorenzo the Maginifcent in there, tell him I’m still not repainting the Sistine Chapel with a fresco of him beheading a unicorn while shouting “how do you like them apples Denise”.

Because honestly no amount of money is enough to put up with life sapping bullshit.

Today I’m going to take a minute to write about diversity. And why representation matters. I mean sure, a load of people already know this – because, well, you know… they are under-represented. And when that’s you, you notice things like that. And you really want them to change.

And I want them to change too.

I mean, why do I care right? I have privilege? I’m already represented in the boardroom, the workplace, the awards, the products, the marketing? I’m a CIShet straight white middle aged man? I seemingly have it all?

No. Read on, gentle reader. It’s not one of ‘those’ blogs.

You see, even if I didn’t ‘care care’ there’s reason enough to care.

One, I like money. The more people buy boardgames from my shop, the more of it I have. It’s why I don’t call my game store ‘Dave’s House of Games’. Why we don’t have a guest list and a velvet rope. I want the world to think of us as ‘their ‘ game store.

Two, I sell happiness. I know I’ve mentioned this before – how retail therapy and the act of actively playing release neuro transmitters into our brains that really do help promote a degree of internal happiness. And happy people buy more. If you are spending your time in a store but getting the distinct vide of a Jordan Peele movie… well, you aren’t going to be in a happy place.

Did I mention that happy people spend more? See point one.

Three, I’m a nerd. I was a precocious kid who got talked down to a lot. Remember those nights when you lay awake thinking “When i get to be an adult, things are going to be different” and then you totally became a gatekeeper for your hobby? Nope, not me. Nobody gets to feel like they don’t belong – not on my watch.

Four, social justice. I like my games to be balanced. Sure, I love the asymmetric nature of games like Root. But asymmetric games need even more game balance than regular games, otherwise everyone wants to play the Marquise du Cat and then pretty soon nobody wants to play.

I can see though how, in that world – in Root Inequality (NOT an actual expansion TM) – the guy who owns that copy of Root may have a vested interest in playing Root and always playing the bloody cat, because it’s his bloody game. But we don’t live in the world of Root – and yes, I do always play the bandit.  

How can I make Root Inequality guy see?

Well, it turns out I need a time machine and to go back around five years. You see, we haven’t always been the game store you know and love today. There used to be a time when if you googled Fan Boy Three, most of the responses that came back were about how shit we were.

But not about race or gender. This was all about middle aged white boardgamers. Ironically, not feeling represented. Voices drowned out.

Not feeling seen.

A bit of context.

At Fan Boy Three I’ve always believed that the gaming industry is a big tent. And the bigger the tent, the more poles you need to hold that tent up. Boardgames, roleplaying games, miniatures games and cardgames. Four poles. Four pillars. A decent store supports all of those games, at least a little. Otherwise you are like my cornershop in Bradford who pretended to sell every biscuit but actually only stocked bourbon creams.

And we had play space.

Most game stores have difficulty monetising their play space. Cardgames are comparatively easy to monetise – there’s a reason organised play started with Magic tournaments. Organised play was effective as a sales and marketing tool, because engaged customers simply bought more card packets than unengaged customers. Before Organised Play, the average purchase for a TCG was a starter and half a dozen boosters. Once Organised Play was a thing, that moved to most players buying at least a box.

Roleplayers play campaigns. They buy miniatures. Miniature players buy miniatures and paints. Thousands of pounds of paints.

But boardgamers often bought nothing.

#notallboardgamers

I know we have discussed why this is the Quantum Retailer blog before, but it’s worth talking about it again for a second. There’s a thing called the 20:80 rule, that says 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. Naturally as a business you need to lean into that 20% because they are 80% of your business. But lean too far and now you just cater to 20% of your customers and only make 80% of your previous business. The more you drill down the less overall money you make – see point one above.

Now, the smart business looks after number one – or number one to twenty – while simultaneously looking after the customers that only spend a fraction of the money. If you had a hundred customers spending a collective £1000, 20 customers spend £40 each and 80 customers spend £2.50. But that still adds up to £200. If you want to increase your turnover you either have to increase the spend per customer or increase the volume of customers, because the underlying math remains the same.

So the smartest business understand they have to grow their customer base to generate more revenue.  See points one and two above.

Back in the time machine.

Old Fan Boy Three had two rooms – the front and the back. The back was our Organised Play space. People would come in, hang out, play D&D or Magic or Yugioh on the tables. Tables in the front of the store were nicer – of an evening we’d prioritise RPG groups, because it meant the back was quieter, more people could sit around a table in the front and it gave visibility to the games we played. People would walk past and see D&D being played and being played by people like them.

Cool, hip, young. And women. Because right from the get go we prioritised any roleplaying group with female players for priority seating, which – ten years on – had given us a reputation for being a place women could go play games safely without anyone batting an eye.

But this blog is about the opposite of that.

You see, during the day cardgamers would meet their mates in store for a cheeky game of magic or Yugioh. Remember ‘meeting mates?’ before the days of COVID and mobile phones. I’d stand on a street corner waiting for my friends to rock up so we could see Back to the Future 2. All over Bradford people would be lurking on street corners.

Now they lurked in my shop.

You are the USP that companies like Wizards, Konami, Bandai and Pokemon use to market their games. Your space. Your community. You want players in your store, and they want players in your store – its a match made in heaven. But one person’s heaven is probably another persons hell.

My shop had a bell. When you opened the door, it rang. Everyone would look up – maybe it was their friend, come to play that game with them? But it wasn’t. It was a boardgamer called Chris. Who ran the UK’s biggest Facebook group of boardgame enthusiasts.

By the time I had been notified of the attack thread, there were already hundreds of comments.

I’d though that building the space, putting a load of boardgames in, making space available to boardgamers was enough. I’d done the bare minimum, without thinking about it from a boardgamers perspective.  CIShet white middleaged male boardgamers.

They needed love too. Craved visisbility.

When they walked through the door, dozens of cardgamers who had migrated into the front of the store to wait for their mates looked up, stared at them, and went back to sorting their Yugioh trades or shuffling their commander decks. You had to pick your way past them. Often cardgamers would want to watch another game in progress, so they would move the chairs in front of the shelves. Old Fan Boy Three was a lot tighter and narrower – gangways were easily blocked. It was all a bit Das Boot.

Boardgames were half the way down. We’d made an RPG nook by the front window, so they were clearly front and centre. Wargames was on the back wall. Cards by the till. What had made sense operationally for us now looked like a deliberate de-prioritisng of boardgames.

Reading that attack thread was pretty bad. Even though we had the best selection of boardgames in the North West people deliberately refused to buy from us. To punish me. To drive me out of business.

To cancel us.

Thing is, I could see their concerns. Not at first – I mean, we are welcoming and friendly – we had a global reputation for excellence in running Organised Play and our shop was always full? So I left the store, walked around and came back. And all the TCG players looked up as the door rang, like twenty meerkats. Then – because I was not their friend – looked disappointedly back down. It was the social equivalent of somebody throwing a bucket of water over me.

So we changed it up a bit.  

Roleplayers are overjoyed to find a store that sells roleplaying games. We feel seen by little gestures, probably because we live so much in our own heads. I moved the RPG’s to where the boardgames were. Now boardgamers had their own boardgame nook.

We put piles of boardgames on our key tables as displays. Now TCG players had to go sit in the back.

Boardgames were now front and centre. And before long they were a large proportion of our sales. Not quite 80%, but decent. More than supporting their quarter of the four pillars.  

Boardgamers wanted to be seen, wanted to be valued, wanted to be catered for. They wanted to be visible 24/7 – which is a lot harder if you don’t have events that attract them into store. We installed round tables on the top, customer facing floor of new Fan Boy Three – boardgame tables during the day, roleplay tables at night. Added a boardgame cafe and a boardgame library. Now they had that visibility 24/7. And in 2019 we were voted the UK’s number one boardgame store by the same group that had wanted me to die in a fire five years earlier.

We were still in essence the same store. The same people. The same ethos. Much of what we did was superficial. But when people – middle aged white CIShet males – tell me visibility isn’t important?

Well, it was for them.

Visibility – representation – IS superficial. Trust me, everyone understands that. But it is also vital. We all crave it – all of us. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that its not important, or that you shouldn’t care. See points one through four. Whether you care passionately about social justice or just increasing your sales, visibility is a thing you can probably achieve as a store – sometimes merely by rearranging things a bit.

This? Is something we call coding. How to code your store to attract a certain clientele. And it may be that by prioritising boardgames over miniatures you are sacrificing one community on the altar of another. This is an argument pure Magic stores make for just running Magic. And sure – probably not having tables of people playing magic in store day in day out, in your face as soon as you set foot in the store probably dinged a dent in our Magic turnover.

If I built my store again I might well have four distinct areas. Though even then, whichever the area you saw first from the window would become your brand representation to the world. Maybe four stores, with four different doors and four times the staff?

Fan Boy Four.

Once, many years ago, my father and I encountered a man.

He was standing on a street corner, telling everyone about Jesus Christ. He had a little soap box he was standing on, and a Bible in his hand. And everyone was walking past, trying to avoid eye contact. Like you do. I wondered about this, for a while.

The next week the guy was there again. Nobody stopped. Nobody listened. It was all hellfire and damnation and wickedness preaching.

On the way home I asked my dad why? Why do that every week if it didn’t have an effect? I’d been brought up a Christian – most of those people who were hurrying by had also probably been brought up Christian. I mean, what was the point of trying to convert people who either didn’t want to be converted or already identified with the religion you were preaching?

“It’s not about you” said my dad. “It’s about him”.

“Some people feed compelled to test their faith, not because they love it, but because they fear it. They feel themselves slipping from the path, and its a path that they so desperately want to be both true and theirs and theirs alone. So long as everyone is walking past, their self belief is actualised. They are alone with God in their own private universe. The last thing they want you to do is stop and listen”.

I think about this a lot some days.

We don’t have a lot of rabid anti-maskers in the UK. We do however have some rabid-Brexiteers. Many of them are the same people, driven by self belief. Facts are irrelevant. their own life experiences are irrelevant. It is the belief that matters.

Credo.

There are a lot in the States.

And they don’t just stand on a street corner. They go into stores, demanding confrontation. A lot of store owners feel threatened by this – not for the loss of custom – I’m sure very few of the folks who demand to browse mask free are the secret millionaires they pretend to be. That’s just another abuse tactic. Threaten you with loss of sales, threaten you with bad publicity, sometimes actually threaten you.

But like the street preacher, I honestly suspect that the last thing they want you to do is roll over. It was a test of faith for that guy – his own private martydom. And its a test of faith for these folks too. Faith in their fallen leader.

Anti-maskers, Qanon, Trump.

These all align. You know that to be true. This? Is Trumps gospel. Come unto me you Karens and Bobs so that I may grant you the kingdom of anti-mask heaven. For it is for you and you alone.

I know its scary. It’s threatening. It’s one star reviews. When you scale it up its the risk of actual prolonged COVID outbreaks wherever these folks gather to pursue their own masturbatory sacrament of death.

This was not about you, and it never was. And I want you to understand that.

This is not about lost sales or lost customers or even public health. These are people who were promised the world and betrayed. And this is their way of feeling important. Bully pulpit street preacher guy? If he stops at any point, what was the point of all the times he pressed on, in the rain and the sleet and the indifference. He could have been sat in the pub, or watching wrestling on TV or masturbating frantically into a sock.

So now he has to keep doing it, day in day out. Because otherwise he once chose wrong, believed wrong, he thought the Martians were coming when he heard Orson Welles and now the Martians have to come, because otherwise he is just a fool, on a box in the rain, screaming at the universe to validate the pain of his existence.

This is your difficult customer.

Lots of movements through history promised the secrets of the universe for the price of belief and tax free donations. We were our own secret society once. Remember the days before D&D was cool? And there is an irony here.

What we do – our stores – they are about encouraging people to join us. Encouraging people to play, to embrace belonging, not because of entitlement or self belief or backing a political horse that turned out to be a dead donkey and beating up on others because you can’t look in the mirror.

You don’t need a street pulpit for that.

Just a game shop

Today we are going to talk about the Manicheans.

Open up your digital painting program. Look at all the scales of grey that digital painting package has to offer. Everything from virgin A4 sheet to a colour only Anish Kapoor is allowed to paint in. So black you could paint a stuntship in that black and fly it into the sun at a Douglass Adams tribute concert.

The Manicheans did not have access to Inkscape. They didn’t even have access to MS Paint. What they did have was access to cutting edge religious heresy around the third century AD.

Dualist heresy attempts to answer the question: Why does God allow bad things to happen?

And the answer is two earths. God creates his first Earth and its, well, not quite the look he was going for. Not enough contrast maybe? Anish Kapoor hasn’t invented really black ™ yet. So he builds a second, perfect Earth. We have the misfortune of being born, living and dying on the shit one. Alt-Earth. Anti-Earth. And the God of light has a shadow of Darkness – a demiurge.

A dark side.

Early Christianity: The Snyder Cut. Eat your heart out DC – Mani was eighteen hundred years ahead of Jack Kirby.

Mani lived in Persia, in third century AD. He was heavily influenced by the Zoroastrians and Gnostic Christianity. There were hundreds of different Christian sects before the Council of Nicea kingmade Catholicism in AD 325.

Mani was long dead by then.

But people kept rediscovering Manichaeism. The Bogomils of Bulgaria in the tenth century. The Cathars of Alba in the Twelfth. The Hussites. And there are Chinese Christian Manichean sects allegedly surviving to this day.

Not the Cathars though.

You see, Manicheans and their many Mani-chums don’t see those greyscales. They see a world that is black and white. It’s a philosophy we call dualism.

If you believe that the world is alt-Earth, that only the perfect who live a life untouched by sin can be raised to the ‘real’ earth? Well, the institutions of our Earth – remember, we are the shit one – don’t actually serve God at all. Its all Popes and anti-Popes, and the Catholic Church had had more than enough of that sort of confusion thank you very much.

So they sent Simon de Montfort – of de Montfort University – to kill them all. Which he did. They retreated to Montsegur, where they jumped to their deaths rather than be captured. You see the crusaders had marched inland from the entrepot port of Beziers – famous for its tolerance, where Muslim, Jew, Cathar and Christian had lived for generations in harmony. And they knew what was coming.

And it wasn’t the Kingdom of God.

Outside Beziers the Crusaders asked Arnaud Almaric, the papal Legate, Abbot of Citeaux and religious head what they should do? The city was surrendering, and everyone looked the same? “Kill them all, God will know his own” said Almaric.

So they did.

As they went inland, the crusaders would blind all but one villager in every place they went, tie them together in a coffle and leave the person at the head of the coffle with one eye. Then they would drive the human centipede out of town in the direction they were heading. The message was clear “This will be you tomorrow”.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king. If you ever wondered where that expression comes from, now you know.

The Cathars had believed they lived in hell before. Now they knew they did. They thought the Catholic Church was evil before, and now they had proved it. Undisputably.

And that’s the problem with Manichaeism. It’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy if everyone who doesn’t believe exactly like you is evil.

But this is a business blog, right? So is there a business lesson in all of this?

A lot of business is very Manichean. If you have only ever sold Magic: the Gathering, and you look at other products your first thought is ‘this is not Magic: the Gathering’. Magic. Not-Magic. Earth, Alt-Earth. Anti-Earth. And your customers are Manichean too – they’ll come into your store and go ‘whoa!!! That’s NOT MAGIC!’  

And they will be afraid. Like Pope Innocent III.

Scared people – people afraid of change and diversity – rarely make rational decisions.

In reality most people – most customers – are somewhere in that grey scale. Even in the Magic community, we saw – traditionally – a split between those who considered themselves perfecti – and just people who liked the idea of playing this goofy trading card game with Planeswalkers. We call these people gatekeepers, because they see everyone outside the gate as unworthy and we, as retailers, hopefully see those people as people we actively want to let in.

The Cathars believed that only by living a life of perfection from cradle to grave allowed you to pass through the gates and be reborn on perfect earth. They called these people the perfecti. If you weren’t already one, converting was pointless – you were already damned to reincarnate right here, in the shit, on the Earth ruled by the devil. Anything less than 100% perfect is damned.

Cancelled.

The Catholic Church of the twelfth century wasn’t proselytizing either. They’d stopped converting people and had starting butting heads on the borders. Protect the community you have – your status, your sales, your position – at all costs. Brook no disagreement. Instead of meeting in Nicea to discus theology they sent the boys around, with fire and sword and torture devices.

Neither of these positions are great business models.

Or political models.

Your business has no interest in ostracizing anyone who isn’t ‘pure’ enough to enter your gates. Throw those gates open. Let people in. Welcome them, even if their only reference is Monopoly. That middle ground, that grey scale is fertile. In business as well as in politics. Your business is diplomacy. It is a seduction. It’s not a crusade. You can like Pepsi and Coke. City and Rovers AND United. You can demonstrate through your acts why your cause is just, and win converts through being the most welcoming store you can be.

You can sell both Pepsi and Coke. Its not wormwood and gall.

And we can proselytize. We can covert people who don’t love boardgames and goofy nerd shit into people who might want to give it a go. Those pantone shades of grey are stepping stones, into the light from the darkness. Not everything has to be a damascene conversion, sinners into saints.

The bible contains quite a lot of forgiveness. You might even say that it’s a central theme throughout the New Testament. The book the crusaders at Bezier had sworn to uphold and protect before they massacred twenty thousand innocents.  

Be open to possibilities. The world isn’t perfect, but it’s not anti-Earth either. It’s what we make it, what we build ourselves here, right now. The Cathars, the Bogomils, the Manicheans, the Hussites – they were all wrong. It’s not a binary choice.

It’s a pantone swatch.

Here’s what has happened over the last year. To your brain.

One, you have been starved of stimulus. To a greater or lesser degree. You’ve had less dopamine, less oxytocin, less social interaction. Less sunlight, less exercise, less of every neuro-transmitter that helps regulate mood and happiness.

Two, you have mainlined cortisol. Our brains produce cortisol as part of our fight flight response. Great when the danger is that sabertooth tiger ready to pounce as we hunted mammoth across the great land bridge that joined Prehistoric Britain to Europe. Less good when Hy Brasil has long since sunk below the waves and our enemy is a virus we cannot see or hear.

This has been our lot for a year – punctuated by occasional bouts of soon to be dashed hope.

Cortisol activates your blood sugar. It turns your glucose stores into ready to run muscle meals. And then it tells you to eat the fuck out of any sugar you might have lying around, just in case.

What do you think of when you think of people living under persistent threat of death? People in a warzone. People in the trenches, survivors of disasters and abuse. And your body has been living on it, atrophying the other parts – swapping out the brain stuff you aren’t using like an organic computer might. Dump the social skills and the small talk routines. You are in solitary now.

Do you know how long you can survive in isolation? Well, because as a species we frequently torture and imprison each other, this is something we know. Anything more than two weeks of solitary confinement is considered psychological torture under the Mandela doctrines. After that, there is a danger of lasting psychological damage.

Mental illness.

Of course, if you were a child, or already suffered from mental illness, any amount of isolation is considered a torture. And you had over a year of it. So, the chances are you are one of the 50% of people suffering from poor mental health. It used to be one in four. Now its one in two. Chances are that’s you.

What are the signifiers? well, brain fog is one. Over eating? Under eating? anxiety? disrupted sleep patterns. The problem with mental health is that causes can be effects and vice versa. Have you noticed a change in somebody’s behaviour during this pandemic? Well, yes. We all have. Because it is all of us.

First the bad news. There was virtually no mental health support anywhere before the pandemic. We were all pretty shit at identifying when folks needed help, and then we were even shitter – as a society – at getting them it. It’s not actually OK to not be OK. Is this who I am now? No. No its not. Most folks with depression don’t reach out for help. We call it a spiral for a reason. It traps you in its ever decreasing circle and its down down to goblin town. Depression is solipsistic, it locks you in to that spiral.

“Just reach out – somebody is always listening!” That’s what we tell ourselves. Tell each other. So long as we don’t tell everyone to ‘man up’ we’ll all be fixed. So long as we can all express our emotions. Well, depressives are like Vulcans. And we are often too busy internalising that negative shit while we spiral to spend time messaging folks about our problems.

I get it – that’s a whole load of fucking bad news. But here’s the good. Playing games is good.

Games are intellectual, not emotional. A lot of the people I know can play games even when they are spiralling. We can roll dice and move counters around a table. The emotion aspect is what happens when we play a game. We are getting that oxytocin hit from company, that dopamine hit from actually doing a thing, that serotonin hit if we have to head to a store to do it, and maybe some endorphins.

Games are a ladder out of the pit of isolation. A lifebelt in the black cold sea of loneliness. They are ephemeral and pointless and stupid. But that means they are everything that humans need. Once you throw in some snacks. Maybe a drink.

Games are a hug in a box, the promise of happier times and good company and the sweet, sweet joy of winning. As we take our first steps out of lockdown, every game store in the world is under threat. Amazon likes you in a box, isolated and alone.

When I was at Travelling Man we noticed that people who played games regularly bought less – they could touch base with their hobby by doing, rather than just by consuming. Little wonder that Jeff Bezos wants brick and mortar retail dead.

Now, people will tell you that you can socialise without games. there are hundreds of bright bars and pubs where you can binge drink to your hearts content. But alcohol is rarely a great cure for depression, and your anxiety may well spike in a busy, noisy, aggressively social space.

And again, that’s where games come in.

They are an excuse in a box, a reason to hang out with friends, something we can all talk about without the baggage. Something we can do to forget our lives and our troubles, if only for a few hours. But that’s enough, to reconnect. To make the memories that remind us in the dark days ahead, that we love and are loved. There is a hug in every box and happiness waiting in every foil booster.

And this?

This is why we fight. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. In all of us. Every game store. Every game. Every gamer.

I’m a quantum retailer. As I’ve explained before, on other blog posts, the way I approach any problem is to first identify the two competing paradigms, and then try and find the consensus position between them. The interplay between stock, organised play and money, say. Or the hotness versus the lukewarm shelves of things nobody might want today, but in a week or a month or a year I will need.

Every decision I make as a business is an assessment of risk. Most of the time I am risking money, or my reputation, or customer goodwill. And I use the data to assess what the risk is, and whether or not i consider that risk acceptable.

Now, a lot has changed in the last three months. Risk means something different now. But my question remains the same – how can I mitigate my risk? How can I create a safe space in a world of asymptomatic virus carriers?

The first is that I could not reopen. Nobody would blame anyone in the current climate if they chose now to be the point they cashed out. But let’s assume that I’m not going to do that.

The second is that I can continue to do online sales and curbside delivery. But my country is set to resume in store sales from June 15^th. I don’t have to do it. Take up is almost certainly going to be minimal.

But only one part of what we do in the games industry is being a store. And everything else we do is about being a community hub, often for folks who need a community hub to keep them sane. People crave normalcy in a crisis. During the Blitz, the Windmill Theatre never closed, despite the bombing. It was a beacon to a tired and frightened populace.

Admittedly a beacon offering full frontal nudity – historians tend to gloss over that part.

The thing is, as a community third space – with thankfully no full frontal nudity – that’s a responsibility I take seriously, but I also have a responsibility to my staff and customers to keep them safe. To keep them healthy.

Virus free.

At some point stores will start reopening for in store play. In the UK we won’t see that until July at the earliest – while I can claim to be a retail store for in store sales, I can’t really then ignore the fact that indoor seated social spaces like restaurants and clubs and bars and cafes and theatres all remain in lockdown. Even if I could mitigate effectively against the viral spread, I have a duty to society not to interpret the rules in a way that undermines them.

Unlike Dominic Cummings, it’s not just about me.

But I still have to plan – that’s my function. And whatever plan I come up with has to be perfect, using the best science, the best data, the best social engineering, the best signage, because the penalty for me fucking this up isn’t just losing money and going out of business.   

So let’s look at the data. Let’s look at the science and let’s look at our ability to mitigate risk.

Yesterday the World Health Organisation released the findings of a study into limiting the spread of COVID-19. Unless you are one of the folks who believe that WHO are using 5G so Bill Gates can inject you with nanobots and help the reptoids enslave humanity, then this is information you might want to have to help mitigate your own risks and those of your staff and customers.

First off, social distancing.

The research found that your chance of catching COVD-19 from a contagious person dropped significantly with any form of social distancing. Without any social distancing, the infection rate was 13%.

With 1m social distancing that rate dropped to 2.6%. 

With 2m social distancing, that rate halved further, to 1.3%.

Now, most stores probably can’t function as social spaces with 2m social distancing. I worked out that my 128 person capacity downstairs OP space drops to just 16. Since you would need to deep clean it before, possibly during and definitely after, the logistics of staffing something like a 16 person FNM make it practically financially untenable.

Think two staff, six hours, divide by 16. Unless folks are paying a significant entry fee and not getting prizes.

Now, that assumes that somebody in your play community has COVID-19. What are the chances of that? Well, unless your country is South Korea, you probably don’t have a decent track or trace program, or anywhere near enough testing to know for sure what infection rates actually are. Sweden – practicing a full ‘herd immunity’ strategy where restaurants remained open, there was no lockdown period and no social distancing – reports that just 7.3% of the population of Stockholm had COVID-19 antibodies in their system. 

So in the most COVID-19 penetrated society on the planet, only 7.3% of people caught it.

1 in 13.

Now, we can reduce our risk factor further. We can use a contactless infra red temperature thermometer on customers who enter our premises. This will detect fever.  But remember, COVID-19 is frequently asymptomatic. Many more people could not know they even have it, while infecting other people, than who are actively displaying classic symptoms.

We can insist that customers wear masks. There’s been a lot of conflicting information on masks – I’m sure all of it was well meaning, but it has muddied the waters a bit. This new study reveals that masks can reduce the incidences of infection from 17% (no mask) to 3% (mask). This means that wearing a mask reduces your chances of catching the virus by over 80%. By combining mask with social distancing policy, you are mitigating the risk further.

At Fan Boy Three it’s likely we will also require customers to wear gloves. Cards will have to be sleeved at all times, and your deck wiped down before play starts. There will be no ‘tableside’ judge calls. Since my tables will be located 2m away from each wall – and the players will play end to end along a 6’ trestle – so long as the players move out to the walls and socially distance between rounds it should be possible to pair and seat while maintaining close to 2m between player noses at all times. Remember, back to back or side to side is likely not as dangerous as front facing each other.

My chairs are Postura plus, designed for school use, anti-bacterial surfaces and easy to clean. Wizards of the Coast might hate them, but so do viruses.

Like you, I studied the case in Emerging Infectious Diseases that HVAC can infect people sitting near air con outflow if an infected person is sat near the intake. Since it is impossible to tell an asymptomatic inflected person from a non infected person, that’s a difficult equation to solve. Except by not sitting anyone in either intake or outflow zones.

However, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) did their own study from the Wuhan restaurant data. They found that the restaurant had no outdoor air supply, and the window exhaust fans weren’t functioning. No similar cases have been reported – despite the prevalence of aircon in pharmacies all over the US. Still, they would say that – they are the governing body of the HVAC industry!

Fortunately my ventilation system doesn’t recycle air – it extracts it, and replaces it with clean air from outside. Hopefully this further mitigates risk.

Stores in the UK open for non-curbside on June 15^th. Restaurants and pubs are expected to open early July. At that point there will be a certain degree of peer pressure applied to all stores to run in store activities again.

Those of you who spoke to me at GAMA Expo will know that my plan was based around a three month shutdown. Well, three months are already here, and we are heading into month four. Britain is currently posting a higher daily death total than the rest of Europe combined. Half the number of deaths in the US on a fifth of the population. Even thinking about reopening seems premature.

But think I must.

The R rate in the North is twice that in London. People are acting like lockdown never occurred. But I can’t. I am a nerd.

I respect the science.

Should I open at all, before there is a vaccine? I can mitigate my risk down to less than a percentage point. Half my credit card rate. But I would fight to reduce my credit card rate down a TENTH of a percentage, and at the end of the day that’s a thin sliver of money. And this is a thin sliver of death. I can mitigate my store, but I cannot mitigate the public transport somebody might use to get to my store. Mass transit infection rates were high. That 13% for no social distancing. If I create a draw that pulls people in and infects them on the way, what good was not infecting them in store?

Even those who survive can suffer complications for life.

But the people who advocated against lockdown also had a point. Without normality, without community, without social activity we have seen a rapid rise in mental illness. We social stores have a role to play, a need to fulfill. Our communities both NEED us to survive and they need US to SURVIVE.

And we need them.

Other things we’ve done? We have screens. We have masks. We have hand sanitiser stations. We have socially distancing floor markers being printed. Posters encouraging social distancing, and good COVID-19 hygiene. I have perspex virus screens for my counter, anti-bacterial wipes for cards, multi surface anti-bacterial cleaner for constant deep cleaning. My staff with underlying medical conditions – other than myself – are furloughed indefinitely. Is it enough?

Hopefully I will never know.

I am a quantum retailer. And this is a quantum problem. I owe it to my community to minimize the risk to them from all sources. I owe it to my staff to minimize risk to them. I owe it to my business to minimize risk to it.

And that is why I read the science.