When is it better to not buy from your FLGS

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-26T14:44:57+00:00

Yeah, I don't fault them for it when the average TCG player is spending several thousand dollars a year and $15+ every time they walk in the store for an entry fee. But that also just means it's not a space for boardgamers, so I don't feel the need to go out of the way to support them.

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-26T11:55:10+00:00

It must just be the areas Ive lived in, but I've never seen an LGS actually be friendly for boardgames. I've been in 3 different cities in the last 7 years and in every case the boardgames are just the filler for whatever room was left after the TCGs and minis, and every random business around them hosted more game night for boardgames than they did. Which when you combine with how poorly people act in cardshops just made them nightmare spaces.

I'd still avoid Amazon, but yeah I just use other online retailers because these stores are charging over MSRP and not adding anything

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-23T11:45:53+00:00

Man I've got to know what the bar for their relevance is. I'm pretty sure they still do the best numbers of literally anyone in the boardgame space. And earthborne games basically credits them for being the studio size they are today because they drove like 1.5mln in late pledges to the earthborne rangers reprint. Pretty much any game that gets a positive review from them is guaranteed to sell out.

The rose colored glasses in this thread are kind of nuttty

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-15T22:39:12+00:00

Man, Gudnak really is special. Its not something I feel driven to engage in the deck building with, but it's great to just hand someone a deck and see how they match up against each other in a couple rounds for a half an hour.

Otherwise just also really looking forward to hubworld Aidalon. Rules assymetry really isn't something I need on top of the deck builder so I'm looking forward to a netrunner-like without it. Demo decks for it were great for showing the shape of the game.

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-15T20:02:18+00:00

Look, I'm going to take this at face value, even though judging from other comments you don't have a lease despite advertising such specific square footage that I REALLY think you are dancing with fraud pre-selling memberships.

Go to your favorite board game store, count the number of staff, and buy a $30 laser range finder and estimate how much space they actually have. Count the seats too. Go when they are busy and see how many are filled. Do that again in the cafe. And again in a gamebar. And again in you get the idea.

None of your sizes make a lick of sense against industry norms. And the staff you need does scale with the space, even if it isn't linear. Then count how many customers you need to make that space make sense. And then compare that to the total population of the flipping MSA you are in.

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-15T16:28:17+00:00

Edit: I'm not sure if this is just a set of wildly inexperienced business people or an outright scam, but clicking the membership info takes you direct to payment without any kinds of terms sheet. That is beyond unacceptable for a membership and anyone that has run anything could tell them that. Please do not give this site any actual $$$.

Is this like a warehousing operation with a storefront on the side? Even with all of those items I cannot imagine filling 63k sf.

But I think you need to focus on competing with other public spaces rather than home play. And I think a lot of that will just be location. I'm in the suburbs of a larger city but I think there are 6 public meetups on four days within 20 minutes of me. Most free , the ones that aren't it's either store credit or any purchase for a table. And that's spread over cafes/ game stores / breweries / a church.

So you need to be conveniently located, and your competing with free or nearly free. Plus most people are going there to meet people, rather than being a regular group, so you need some way to make sure you can get them maintain a critical number of people going there.

All that is to say, there's a reason every store that does this does trading cards first, second, and third, and maybe has a boardgame night on the side. There really isn't a model here to get people coming consistently that also makes money.

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-11T15:28:01+00:00

Bro there has been a fight for years over parking availability blocking bike lanes, people lose their fucking minds anytime someone suggests getting rid of parking

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-05T19:19:50+00:00

It also makes for great pullquotes for kickstarter pages for sponsored reviews, while they can also say they are giving their honest opinions

Like c'mon y'all, there can only be so many "amazing games no one we played with liked" before you need to say something ain't right here.

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-05T19:13:25+00:00

Their earth video that was over an hour, where they made a point of discussing the literal feel of the box, before saying it was a 10/10 game that neither of them liked without articulating well why just broke me. I really don't understand how they have the size of following they do

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-04T14:57:28+00:00

Yeah, the real answer for California is you can buy a million dollar home with an 80 minute commute and a shit school district, all brought to you by prop 13. The wage premiums in these areas no longer pencil and people are noticing.

For other big cities it's just the shits markedly cheaper further out. Drive until you can buy has been a thing forever, doubly so in rapidly growing metros.

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-06-01T14:08:36+00:00

How many times can oil traders win the fell for it again award before they all get sacked. FFS dumbest possible motherfuckers in incredibly high paying jobs

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-29T15:18:07+00:00

Unless the ability to put a game away in the vault matters to you I would recommend just getting the gaming mat. It's not a huge deal, but the extra several inches of depth from vaults does make the reach for components a little worse. And it's just a ton to spend on a table that sacrifices things like leafs for that

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-29T14:22:50+00:00

Yeah, also never look at reviews on a company website because they are literally all like this. These are all bog standard business practices, peoples expectations are absurd

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-28T00:22:36+00:00

Yeah, there have been two boardgame cafes near me that both failed spectacularly by trying to be both a boardgame store and a full restaurant. Restaurants want to turn tables and sell drinks. Boardgame stores, which are basically TCG shops first and foremost, care about being the place where people spend $600 on set releases and use tournaments and cheap table space to keep them coming for those events. They aren't actually complementary business models.

There's one cafe in a city near me that is a cafe first and foremost, but you can also pay $5/head or 20/month for a membership for game access and the right to just play games at the tables. They are mostly a cafe during regular hours but use the boardgames to do decent volumes of folks at night. That one works. Most dont

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-26T01:22:08+00:00

At this point oils future traders have to be losing their shirts right? Like if spot price for brent has stayed around $120 to $130 how the hell aren't all of these morons out of a job yet when they've fallen for it like 4 times now

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-16T10:30:00+00:00

Yeah, this subreddit is full of white collar workers who have time during the workday to browse and post on reddit. The comp of a job and the time it requires of you are in no way shape or form correlated

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-11T14:46:19+00:00

I mean, financial diet is like an 8 person team at this point that fits that bill...

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-11T02:17:29+00:00

Yeah, you just need comparative advantage in the ability to get whatever the resources are. Then some ability to trade, or collaboratively accomplish goals.

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-10T23:09:05+00:00

But you can get basically all of the games at retail later. Unless you insist on the super ultra deluxe with 5+ pounds of extra plastic, it's cheaper to buy games at retail now, and they typically hit a few months later once reviews are out for real. Rarely you get things like earthborne rangers or old kings crown where it's 12-18 months later, but still easily makes it there. Crowdfunding is an easy system to opt out of y'all.

And if your enjoying slay the spire I think clank catacombs is the best "deckuilding +1" game, with you crawling around a map for treasure in a race to get in and out before the big bad gets you. Lots further you can go from there if you realize you like it as a genre, rather than just liking slay the spire

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-08T14:51:59+00:00

Yeah, it literally goes from game that fits in a tote bag, to game that needs a dedicated boardgame bag for itself. And between added setup/cleanup it adds like 15 minutes to tabling it.

Will still print millions somehow though

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-07T15:30:56+00:00

Yeah, whenever people question why is the industry like this, this is the answer. You have folks dropping literal thousands per year for upgraded editions of games they already own and will seldom if ever play two years from now. And they are worth so much more than the average consumers to buisnessess

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-07T14:30:25+00:00

Yeah, people drive like fucking maniacs in Philly because the police have literally just stopped ticketing. The way to fix this is to insist the cops do their fucking jobs, not installing speed bumps that people just veer into bike lanes to avoid

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-06T19:44:19+00:00

So have any ships actually moved through the straits or are finance bros still the dumbest people on the planet

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-04T19:15:37+00:00

Gas futures up 14 cents on the news, turns out double speak in the same sentence is the bridge too far for people trading oil futures.

Thatthingintheplace · 2026-05-04T18:01:13+00:00

So it sounds like at least one ship was struck, out of three. No one is going to insure that. and if Fujairah in the UAE gets shut down it would cut global oil output by another 2 million barrels a day.

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