Featured Lists Browse About. And Tycoon games of course. Ignore this curator Remove ignore state Report this curator. Recent reviews. Recommended 24 April, Recommended 6 March, Recommended 20 February, Recommended 8 April, Recommended 31 October, Recommended 9 October, Recommended 31 March, Recommended 15 February, Recommended 22 December, Spend your money wisely, because you may still need it!
Expand your store! Are you out of space? Store management is a long and laborious process. Running a store allows you some degree of latitude in deciding a product mix that you personally believe in, but many stores have made the error of excluding a profitable category, or including a money-sink product or category that they could not afford to.
As the saying goes, principles are nice if you can afford them. Cash reserves are very important, and I have seen them make the difference in a startup surviving and a startup failing. Jim Crocker from Modern Myths in Northampton, Massachusetts sums it up thusly: "Bottom line: No matter how much planning you do, you'll find it wasn't enough.
So do as much and put together as much data as you can, and keep aside as big a 'reserve fund' as you can manage. Since this is The Games Journal , I'm assuming that your particular dream may be opening a boardgame-only store.
There are a very few successful ones, but there also seems to be a consensus among most in the business carrying only boardgames makes success much more difficult. While players buy bunches of packs of each new CCG release or a number of core and source books for their favorite RPGs, most boardgames are one-shot sales. There is just not enough board game volume to solely support a store, it just slices the niche too thin.
I know some of the distributors publish best seller lists. How many boardgames are in the top products? I carried a wide selection of boardgames, the most of any shop in town, at Batty's Best. I also carried comics. CCGs, in particular are a hard line not to carry. They take up very little space for the business they can generate. Andy Gipe adds: "Boardgames alone are hard, and will work in some circumstances, but I would recommend a breadth of product lines.
Don't focus too much on one thing. Especially if it's your one thing just because you like it. Most of the failings I see are stores with all their eggs in one volatile basket. John Kaufeld has a more complicated opinion: "I completely agree that a boardgame-only store aimed at a traditional adventure gaming clientele won't work.
Hard-core gamers can't and won't support such a store, although they'll gleefully eat free food and play in your game room. Regardless of the local population, it just wont happen. You might as well take your start-up money to Vegas and hit the tables, because you'll probably get a better return there. The store lives in a city of about , that contains four traditional hobby game stores including a new one that's just opening , plus two comic shops that carry a lot of hobby games and run some events.
We turned a profit in , paid three part-time people to run the store all year, and repaid over half of the loan that started up the store. Best of all, we broke our all-time sales record three times in December It was a good year. It takes a lot of customer education and product promotion.
Most of our customers didn't know that our products—or even our entire industry—existed before they found us. That's a bit of a problem, but it's also a huge opportunity. Our product enchant them, and they love us for expanding their world, and giving them a reason to turn off the TV and enjoy time with their family and friends.
Typical gamers don't really register on my sales radar at all. Almost all of our customers are normal people who shop with us because they heard about us from friends or on the radio. They thought the world of board games began and ended in the toy aisles of Wal-Mart.
They think that d20 is an oil additive or a pesticide. My regular customers don't price shop, show a fiercely loyalty, promote the store to their friends, and spend very well all year long. You can't say the same about most gamers. Andy Gipe adds: "I think boardgames that appeal to general consumers are a much more stable product line than collectible games or lines that rely on a returning customer base. We do very well with boardgames and they account for more than a third of our sales.
It's the most consistent in the sense that it appeals to almost everyone and anyone who would come into our store. So can a boardgame-only store succeed? You can unsubscribe from marketing emails at any time e. View Privacy Policy. Make Your Own Game. Everything You Need. No Coding Required. Get Started Now. Creating the Basics. Download Graphics. Download Save File. Collision Shapes and Object Settings.
Build Your First Levels. Making it Unique.
0コメント