Social Deduction Games

 Apparently games such as Blood on the Clocktower, Werewolf, Secret Hitler and Good Cop Bad Cop have gotten prevalient enough that they now have their own game category: social deduction games. In a social deduction game, one player takes on a role in which they attempt to harm the other players or prevent them from winning, while keeping the fact that they are doing so secret. This has been a part of gameplay for a number of years as games like Shadows over Camelot and Saboteur come to mind but the genre has gotten popular enough to warrent a name finally.

How to Win at Rock Paper Scissors

This article looks at the psychology behind Rock Paper Scissors and presents a couple of strategies for winning. Based on an analysis done by the World Rock Paper Scissors Society (yes, there is such a thing), you will most likely win if you throw paper. Here is the reasoning:

In Society tournaments, players throw scissors 30% of the time (well 29.6%). That means there is a 70% likelihood your opponent will throw rock or paper so if you opt for paper and your opponent chooses rock, you win. Paper covers Rock. If you opt for paper and your opponent also chooses paper, you tie.

The other thing to take into consideration is that players will usually throw the same thing twice in a row, then switch. So if someone chooses Rock twice in a row, your best choice on the third game is scissors as they will most likely change to scissors or paper. If you change to scissors, you will either tie or win.

Glad to help

Pre-orders

I've talked about the importance of pre-orders before but wanted to revisit the subject.

Pre-orders help us judge how many of a particular comic book, card set or game to bring in.  We have records that we look at in order to judge how well an individual new release will sell but "past performance is no guarantee of future behavior".  We have dozens of new games releasing every month and over a thousand new comics. We simple have neither the space, nor the funds to bring all of them into the store.

Generally with comics, we will bring in all the regular series of Marvel and DC, though if a title release several issues in a row that just sit on the shelve, we will likely drop it.  Mini-series we really look askance at, unless they have a track record such as Kick Ass or Watchmen.

Since we have very little interest from customers on the various Image and Dark Horse line, as indicated by subscriptions, we generally skip lines from those publishers, as well as most of the smaller publishers.  If there is a title you want, please fill out a subscription form so that we know there is interest. More often than not, when we gamble on a new title, it sits there so "once burnt, twice shy".

Same thing goes with games.  Expansions for currently popular games, sure, we will bring in the next in the line.  past experience shows it will probably sell.  However a new release from Mayfair Games that isn't Catan or a train game may not make it to the shelf. We have a couple of dozen Mayfair Games that have never sold a single copy in the store.  Same thing with Castles & Crusades from Troll Lord Games.  I like this game but people don't purchase it so we will give a very hairy eyeball at new releases unless we get pre-orders for them.

Pre-orders help us help you find new games and help us buy from the game companies, which keeps them in business.  The more pre-orders we get, the better is is for all three of us.

Pre-orders Please

When customers pre-order items, it really helps us gauge the level of interest in the game or book.  The store puts in pre-orders 2-3 months ahead of the estimated release date of the game or book and, once we do that, we are committee to purchasing that quantity of the item from our distributor. Sure we can refuse to take delivery of it, but a store can only do that once before getting a reputation as an unreliable partner with suppliers.

In effect, stores gamble that we know what our customers want and in most cases, we are correct. Those stores that aren't, go out of business.  However, pre-orders allow us to better gauge the level of interest in a product and we get very few of them on most new releases.  Of the half dozen Pathfinder releases in January, and despite the fact that we have a comparatively large Pathfinder Society group, we had a pre-order for exactly one of them.  Pathfinder modules sell very slowly, so we have moved to a special order only on them.  Pazio mapping tiles and flip mats also move periodically.  We sat on a number of the flipmats for several months before most of them sold so are loath to restock them heavily.

Similarly in the field of comics, we had a customer in recently asking if we had gotten in the new hardback collection of Teenage Mutant Turtles comics.  Since we don't sell a lot of the comic off the rack, that indicates to us there is not much interest in a hardback collection of earlier issues. A pre-order on this book would have indicated there was and probalby encouraged us to order another one for the shelf.

Help us have the items on the shelf that you want to buy by either letting us know you are interested in it, or better yet, committing to a pre-order for it. That helps us manage our inventory better and lets us offer a more targeted selection to you.