Ticket to Ride United Kingdom

It would have been nice to have this out, oh say a month ago, so that we could have had it on the shelves in plenty of time for Christmas

Top 5 Games for Christmas

Based on our sales for 2015, these are 5 most popular games, in terms of numbers sold, for 2015. The list includes both board and card game, but no collectible ones:

1.  Cards Against Humanity--Cards Against Humanity LLC  "A Party Game for Horrible People"

2. Catan (and expansions)--Mayfair Games  The game of exploring and developing the land of Catan.

3.  Munchkin (and expansions)--Steve Jackson Games  "Kick down the door, kill the monster, steal its treasure."
4..Ticket to Ride--Days of Wonder  Collect the cards to build the tracks you need to win.

5.  The Resistance--Indie Boards and Cards  Uncover the spies among you before they sabotage your mission.

Why We Passed on Halloween Freighter.

I took a look at the Halloween Freighter set at the Alliance Open House in early September and thought it a cute add-on that we could sell a couple of in the weeks leading up to Halloween.  Notice I said “weeks” there.  This is not the sort of item in which the vast majority of our customers have an interest.  A comparatively small percentage of them like Ticket to Ride and an even smaller percentage of them would purchase a novelty item like this (to give you an idea, we still have most of our original order of the Ticket to Ride Monster Expansion that released over a year ago and we ordered lightly on that).  We expect those customers with an interest in the Ticket to Ride line to come in one to two times a month.  With the odds highly against them coming into the store during the brief period before Halloween, ordering it the week of the 31^st just didn’t make sense from a sales point of view.  Perhaps if it had been called a Pumpkin Freighter, we could have sold it as a fall seasonal item, extending the selling season.  As it is, with all the mass merchants around us marking everything tagged Halloween to half price on All Saints Day,  our customers are trained to expect that of all Halloween merchandise and would be loath to pay full price for it.

Ticket to Ride Halloween Freighter

The Ticket to Ride Halloween Freighter Train and Station Set from Days of Wonder, and to a lesser extent Asmodee Games’ City of Horror, is a perfect example of the importance of paying attention to the seasonal product life cycle (PLC).  According to the Alliance website, the Halloween Freighter set released on October 25^th.  My sales representative went over it with us during our weekly sales call on October 30.  We are a two day ship, meaning that, if we had put the order in with him, it would have arrived on November 1, or one day after Halloween, meaning we would miss the entire window of opportunity for selling Halloween themed merchandise  (I guess I could take a charitable look at it and view this  as a 364 day window of opportunity  to promote Halloween merchandise but too many other holidays in the way).