Trades

 If you bring in a large quantity of cards, games, comics, etc to trade/sell, it will take us a while to get through them so if we are busy, we will ask you either to leave them here for us to go through or to bring them back later.  It is also a good idea for you to call us ahead of time to see if we will make you an offer on the items and save you a trip.  Since we are currently reworking our comic room, we are not looking to to buy any back issues until July.  Boardgames we are currently overstocked on as well. We are always interested in role playing games, Magic and Pokemon cards. However, it is best to bring in small numbers of Magic and Pokemon, say 5 to 10 cards so we can get through them quickly and may you an offer.

Tables

 Just a reminder that our tables are open and empty all afternoon. with summer here and no or fewer classes, now is a great time to get some extra table top play in.

Car Wars

 Received the 6th edition of Car Wars today (and people complain about 5 editions of D&D). Nice big box. We have 3 copies of the game at $124.99 and 1 of each of the add ons available as well. The game is supposed to go into distribuiton eventually but the add ons are a one shot. Also, if you buy a copy of the game, leave your contact info as SJG shipped them missing some counters which we are supposed to receive later.

Family Board Games

 We got in several classic style board games from Winning Moves, a company that reprints a number of older Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley games. This week arrived Clue Master Detective, Yahtzee, Hi Ho Cherrio, Risk and 1980's edition Monopoly.

Used Boardgames

 Picked up a stack of used boardgames yesterday, including, among others, Everdell, Villainous and Cthulhu Gloom. Out on the shelf in the used boardgame section.

Expansions for Root Coming

Root: The Underworld Expansion

Delve deeper into the world of Root with the Underworld Expansion, which adds two new factions and a new board. Play as the Underground Duchy: Sway your ministers to lead a righteous expedition to the Woodland, bringing order to the unending war and chaos above. Corvid Conspiracy: Use cunning and trickery to hold the Woodland hostage, instigating plots to seize control through terror. Play on the Mountain Map: Trek across outcroppings, clear blocked routes, and hold the mountain pass to show you are an effective leader. Lake Map: Whisk yourself across the map by travelling on the ferry, meeting new friends and allies along the way.

LED 01002                                                                                            $50.00

Root: The Exiles and Partisans Deck

                An alternate card deck with new persistent powers inspired by the many factions of Root. An expansion base game of Root required.

LED 01004                                                                                            $10.00

Root: The Vagabond Pack

                Upgrade your Root game with seven custom Vagabond meeples. Includes three new Vagabonds Harrier, Ronin and Adventurer. An expansion base game of Root required.

LED 01005                                                                                            $10.00

Root: Resin Clearing Markers

                Make your Woodland beautiful and more visible with these12 resin clearing markers. An expansion base game of Root required.

LED 01006                                                                                            $20.00

Root: The Clockwork Expansion

                The Clockwork Expansion allows players to square off against four fiendishly automated factions that can be used in solo, competitive or cooperative games. An expansion base game of Root required.

ROFL

ROFL is a fun group game designed by John Kovalic of Dork Tower fame. Players have to communicate to the guesser a pop culture phrase by using as few letters as possible. The fewer letters you use, and the earlier the guesser guesses the phrase the more points you score. Good party game for 2-6 people, although there isn't much competition with only 2 players.

Good Solo Games

Looking for a good game you can play solo while you self quarantine ?. Here are some suggestions:
Fuse
Forbidden Desert
Forbidden Island
First Martians
Clank
Arkham Horror
Eldritch Horror
Pathfinder adventure Card Games
Bears

Yes, People Still Play Boardgames

I was listening to NPR’s Here and Now program and caught this story on the resurgence of analog games, as the reporter refers to them. Every so often, a  reporter in the media  in need of a human interest story will catch onto the fact that millions of people still play boardgames regularly and will write a story announcing that there are games beyond Monopoly and Clue and that people actually still “gasp” play boardgames as if it was something that millions of people don’t already know. As the Here and Now program points out, boardgames are the largest funded category on Kickstarter, dwarfing their digital brethren in terms of amounts pledged. According to ICV2,  boardgame sales have increased year to year for the past 8 years, sold over $1.2 billion (eclipsing the number of comic sold) in 2015 and fueled a 50% year to year increase in Dungeons & Dragons sales at WOTC/Hasbro. Boardgames are big and yet it still seems as if daily, game store owners report customers walking into their store, looking at all the stock and asking “So where are your games?” Why? Here are a couple of reasons:

1.       Size of digital gaming market—Remember that I just mentioned that boardgame sales topped $1.2 billion in 2015. That’s a pretty impressive figure, except when you compare it to the digital gaming market which is projected to top $100 billion in sales this year. Compare $1.2 billion to $100+ billion and you can see that boardgame sales are a drop in the bucket compared to the sales of their digital brethren. When you have numbers like that, it is  no wonder the average customer thinks of digital games first when they go into a “game store”.

2.       Confirmatory bias—This is the human tendency to judge everything in terms of its relationship to ourselves and to seek and be more comfortable with information that confirms our beliefs. Since I run a game store, I deal with what the reporter in the Here and Now story referred to as “analog games” on a regular basis. Most of my regular customers play analog or table top games and we primarily sell tabletop games. Due to our extensive familiarity with them, we naturally thing of table top games when we think of games, forgetting that the average consumer has more likely played a digital game last and are far more familiar with those games than they are the ones that we sell.

3.       The Wal-Mart Effect.  Customers are far more likely to have shopped in a Wal-mart, Target or Walgreen’s than they are to have shopped in one of our tabletop game stores and are therefore much more likely to have seen the games for sale there and to view Monopoly, Sorry and Clue as the standard of a boardgame. Confirmatory bias works both ways. When a customer spends all of their shopping time in a mass market store, they are going to get exposed to mass market games and not have any reason to consider the huge variety of other games out there, either at your FLGS or available through Kickstarter.

Maybe, instead of shaking my head at the next of these stories about discovering that people play boardgames, I need  to figure out better ways of getting the word out to the huge numbers of people that do not play “our” boardgames.

Wingspan and other Boardgames

We now have several popular boardgames in stock:  Wingspan, Tapestry, Everdell, Tiny Towns and Ecos. Due to their limited quantities, we were heavily allocated on Wingspan and Tapestry and do not know how long it will take for a restock to arrive. If you are interested in either, I would suggest picking up a copy this weekend.

Who Is Genius Games

Reached out to Genius Games with 5 questions about their company and games:

What type of games does Genius Games publish?

1. Genius Games publishes science-accurate hobby games. Every game deals with a specific scientific concept, like cell biology or subatomic particles. We then design the game around that concept so that the mechanics encapsulate the scientific process. Before we release each game we make sure it's completely accurate to the science and the gameplay is engaging for people both new and familiar to the topic.

How did Genius Games start?

2. I've CC'd John Coveyou here, he's the founder and CEO of Genius Games. John had been teaching chemistry and kept running into students' perceptions of the hard sciences as intimidating concepts. So John decided to use gamification to make science concepts more approachable and fun to interact with. He launched Genius Games's first title, Linkage (one of the few titles we no longer publish) on Kickstarter, and Genius Games has been growing ever since. If you want to ask him any specific questions feel free to shoot him an email.

I like worker placement games. Which of your games would you recommend?

3. If you like worker placement games, I highly recommend Cytosis: A Cell Biology Game. It's a worker placement game that takes place inside of a human cell, and it's completely accurate to all the organelles and molecules inside a cell. It's been awarded the Dice Tower Seal of Approval and endorsed by the Journal of Cell Science.

How do your games support STEM?

4. All of the newer games (Cytosis, Subatomic, Periodic) include Science Behind the Game documents that have been outsourced by us to experts in their field, including many PhDs. We essentially have them play the game, and then write sections on the actual natural process and how it's represented in the game. It's really useful to show how the content in the games matches up to curriculum. Plus, Ion was recommended by the National Science Teaching Association for classroom use. It's quick, easy to learn, and covers chemical bonding, a subject taught very early on in chemistry classes.

What upcoming games do you have?

5. We've just released Periodic: A Game of The Elements, which is a tactical pickup game played out on the periodic table of elements. On October 16th we release Lovelace & Babbage through our Artana brand (more info on that below), which is a mental math and set collection game about the world's first computer and its programmers. And later this year we'll be releasing Ecosystem, a quick card-drafting game about drafting organisms and environments and placing them into an ecosystem, and Nerd Words: Science, which is a party word game with teams giving clues and trying to guess the science word based on the clues given to them. Our full line includes:

• Peptide: A Protein Building Game
• Ion: A Compound Building Game
• Covalence: A Molecule Building Game
• Virulence: An Infectious Card Game
• Cytosis: A Cell Biology Game
• Subatomic: An Atom Building Game
• Periodic: A Game of The Elements

We've also acquired the Artana brand, which has focused on moments and people in science history. It's a good corollary brand for us as people interested in science are interested in the history of science and luminaries as well, but it's distinct from the Genius Games brand which focuses on the natural processes themselves. The Artana line includes:

• Tesla vs. Edison: War of Currents
• Tesla vs. Edison: Duel (a lighter 2-player version)
• Einstein: His Amazing Life and Incomparable Science
• The New Science
• Speakeasy Blues
• Lovelace & Babbage (releasing Oct 16)

Betrayal Legacy

The design for  Betrayal Legacy as WOTC is referring to it, comes from Rob Daviau, one of the designers of the original Betrayal at House on the Hill and designer of the Legacy series of games:  Risk Legacy, Pandemic Legacy Seasons 1 and 2 and Seafall. All of these are, for want of a better word, customizable boardgames. In fact, as far as I am aware, Risk Legacy paved the way for what could be called the customizable board game, a campaign style of game in which the board gets modified permanently, cards get altered or destroyed and the players wind up with a individualized, but still playable, game.  Games in a similar vein include Charterstone and Gloomhaven. As you play the game, over time you wind up with an individualized version of the game.  The Legacy version of Betrayal is projected to include a prologue and a thirteen chapter story arc covering several generations in the history of one family that occupies the House on the Hill with player characters aging over the course of gameplay and even descendants of the original characters making appearances in later stories.

However, based on recent experience, I am not particularly sure about how well this version of the game will sell. Risk Legacy did pretty well, but the game established a new category and games that create their own product niche always dominate that niche until competitive arises (See Dominion and deckbuilding games). Pandemic Legacy Season 1 did pretty well but nowise as well as Risk Legacy and I do not think we have moved a copy of Pandemic Legacy Season 2 yet. As far as Seafall, we still have our original copy on the shelf and I noticed Asmodee/ Plaid Hat Games had the game listed on their annual Christmas clearance sale last year. Charterstone has done OK, moving quite well when it first came out but sales have slowed down on the game since Stonemaier Games dealt with the out of stock problems Charterstone had when it first released, a problem that Cephalofair Games has not managed to overcome yet with Gloomhaven as it still suffers from horrendous out of stock problems for the past year. This, however, has not affected demand for the game as, of this writing, it still ranks number one on BoardGameGeek’s Hotness Index and sports a 9.0 ranking on the website.

Much of the demand for Gloomhaven is driven by the scarcity of the game. Since stores have been told they should see much of the scarcity problem alleviated when a new printing arrives this summer, it will be interesting to see if demand for the game stays at the same level it is now, with copies selling for over $400. Pre-sales of the new printing indicate a drop in interest as some stores are taking preorders for as little as $92. Based on this, it looks to me as if the great interest by customers in Gloomhaven is driven more by scarcity than by actual gameplay and I worry we may see the same reaction with Betrayal Legacy. The original Betrayal still sells well, as does the Widow’s Walk expansion, but Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm among customers. Given WOTC’s supply chain, I do not expect to see any shortages in Betrayal Legacy, so demand for the game will be driven by customer perception of gameplay, not scarcity. Will be interesting to see what happens.

Jay's Favorite Games: Red Dragon Inn

I like Red Dragon Inn because it's a fun party game about drinking and gambling. It can be played with two or a near infinite amount of people and anywhere in between. It's a great game for people ages 13 and up with very simple or very complex rules. Over all I love it a lot and think you will too.

- Jay