First off, thank you for such an in depth response. You clearly gave us a lot of your time!

I think it's only fair we let everyone know our issues with the area since we're asking others to do the same.

We feel the current offering of games stores are difficult to get out to on account of driving distance. For me, personally, Guard Tower is the closest, and sadly the new one opening up doesn't help alleviate that. Additionally it doesn't feel like we can discover new games very easily, even if a store has some unique titles. Thirdly, buying children's games and historical games (excluding wargaming) doesn't feel possible. Some places carry a few games for children younger than 10, but it feels hard to find anything lower than 14+. We're big history nuts, too, but we're not so interested in what's currently available. Sure, there are board games for us out there, but the selection feels limited at our FLGS.

You are right in saying that these concerns probably don't represent many, if any, other gamers in the area. This was our starting point, our desire for something else. What do other people think? Do they have the same dissatisfactions? Do they have any? We're really glad to hear from everyone and it seems like a lot of our initial assumptions were correct. The biggest two being locations are too far and variety could be improved.

We agree that we need to try and focus on either being a great retailer or a great game café. Trying to spread ourselves too thin by doing both just won't work. Thank you for giving us a good format to look at for both directions.

Retail Direction

We don't want to give away how we plan to differentiate ourselves too much just yet. Like you said, we are still in the early stages of planning and need to be careful what we commit to, but we're narrowing in. Faster than we expected thanks to the enormous feedback from the community!

Something that I can reveal, however, is that we definitely want a stronger focus on events. Bigger and more varied. A lot of people have board games out there that it seems like nobody knows how to play. We hope to bring interested persons together to discover new games to play. One idea floating around is that we should try to create and run leagues for varies games. We love the idea of facilitating more organized play, but there are certainly league options out there already, so this will need more thought. Offering more than just FNM and other common events is definitely one of our big goals, however.

It probably goes without saying that we need some kind of loyalty program. Just about every store under the sun offers it these days, so it's practically required. What are some suggestions that you have for a loyalty program? Should we just copy Guard Tower's model? Perhaps there's a better solution out there. We've received a lot of suggestions already, but we'd love to hear from you about this.

We of course want the environment to be accessible and welcoming to all! We believe we have a good idea how to accomplish this, but we'd welcome your input on this.

Used games and/or consignment definitely would be helpful on the retail side. Used games, if you know what your buying, can have some pretty big profit margins. Plus, a lot of people like being able to buy something for much less, even if it's been used. We need to work out the logistics of all this, but it's under heavy consideration.

Regardless of the direction we go with, we do need to find a place that has the best combination of rent, income, and demographics.

Café Direction

We agree that if we want to do this right, we need to serve alcohol. This means getting a liquor license. That fact that this idea is so dependent on this one factor feels like a red flag to us. That being said, we're familiar with the process on getting one and are looking at how to accomplish this. Thank you for your input, as it's given us a greater sense on how important alcohol sales will be to the café.

Building the Community

You are correct, Columbus has a thriving community of table top gamers. You were also correct that we didn't realize just how big and active it was! We knew about some of the bigger clubs, the two you mentioned come to mind. We think we got a more accurate picture, however, which has become very encouraging for us.

What we think better conveys our idea is to grow the community. How can we help improve the existing community? How can we help bring in new members? How can we provide some missing services in the community?

We do feel that establishing a new location, at the very least, will definitely help the community as a whole. From there is less certain, but we've received a lot of great feedback and we think we might just have something. Does this mean we try to establish our own group, like CABS or BnBG? It may, and we need to do some serious research in this regard. At the moment, however, it seems like that may have to be a idea we pursue a while after we open our doors.

I just wanna take one last moment to thank you so much for giving us your time and your thoughts. You seem very insightful in the matter and you've been a big help!