Commander Pride Event

 On Sunday July 30th, the store will host a Magic Commander play event. All commanders will have the Keyword "Partner" and all players will receive, while quantities last, a limited edition Chandra holofoil print.

Cookbooks

 We have been surprised at how well themed cookbooks have sold in the store, well except for the Manga Cookbook, which has sat on the shelf for years. We restock the D&D and Critical Role cookbooks regularly and have had to restock the Stardew Valley cookbook 3 times in the past month.

Free RPG Day

 Free RPG Day is this Saturday. You receive 2 free items for coming in, 1 for wearing a Castle Perilous shirt, one for showing your Preferred Customer Card, 1 for each 2 stamps you earn on a Castle Card and one if you show us a copy of the store enewsletter on your mobile device.

In addition, we will have a selection of limited edition items. You may select one of each for each $100 you spend on RPGs and RPG related items.

D&D 2024

 Here is a look at what to expect from Dungeons and Dragons for the rest of the year. The article does exclude the Infinite Staircase book, which should ship in early July

GW Shipping

 

Although we have not had a similar problem with  Games Workshop shipments, it appears that other stores getting way too many cartons for a simple shipment. Not only do shipments take one to three weeks to arrive, but when they do, they arrive in multiple boxes, even though they are invoiced on the same order. One store even reported that its shipment had been broken up into shipments of one item per box, meaning that a 20 item shipment arrived packed in twenty different boxes. I certainly hope this is just a glitch in the system and is not going to become the norm or that someone at Games Workshop looks at their shipping process and reduces the number of packages per order. Shipping charges generally accrue per item. Currently orders from Games Workshop and Penguin Random House ship free so I hate to see the companies paying extra to ship products to stores in multiple products when it certainly is not necessary. Companies that charge freight on shipments that fall below a certain amount, such as Alliance, Southern Hobby and Diamond (though I have seen some pretty egregious examples of Diamond overpacking orders of single items) generally pack shipments as efficiently as possible.

Shipping Cartons

 

I wonder if there is a sale on shipping carts or some of our suppliers have managed to find a really cheap source for them.  Our weekly orders from Penguin Random House typically arrive packed in half a dozen or more cardboard mailers and one cardboard box. This even happens with shipments of our weekly FOC orders. We put in one to 4 orders a week including the FOC order and receive an armload of boxes, sometimes only containing one comic and the packing slips do indicate that these multi-shipment orders do contain our FOC order, split up into several different boxes.

NPR on Magic

 NPR, surprisingly, has a long column looking at Modern Horizon's 3. Over 1000 card treatments in the total set and the writer is concerned about the power of the set. OTJ games could take 30 minutes or more but a game with Modern Horizons 3 could get decided in the first few turns.

Gen Con Trivia

 With GenCon coming soon. Pop Insider has published  48 bits of trivia about the history of D&D and GenCon

Cranial Ram Banned

 Even before it was released,  WOTC has banned Cranial Ram in Pauper. Too many cheap artifacts in pauper makes the card too powerful.  Why no one figured this out in playtesting is a mystery.

Privateer Press

 Steamforged Games announced today the company has acquired the rights to the Iron Kingdoms IP from Privateer Press. this includes the Warmachine miniatures game, Iron Kingdoms RPG line, P3 paint line and accessories as well as the novels. Warmachine did quite well from from its launch in 2003 until about 2013, then interest died off drastically, both locally and nationwide. I hope Steamforged manages to revitalize the game lines but it is very hard to do so once a game tapers off.

Modern Horizons 3 Pre-release

 We will only run 1 pre-release event for Modern Horizons 3 on Friday night, June 7 at 5:30.  Entry fee is $60. We will provide door prizes and pizza.