Release Schedule

Games Workshop has announced no new releases until at least May 2 and WOTC has pushed back the release date for Ikoria until May 15.   Under the circumstances, blackout dates between Prerelease and launch would create a poor experience for fans. Therefore Prerelease and launch are collapsed into one date. Both in-store and at-home Prerelease will be available on May 15 for any stores able to safely implement them.

Release Date Tape

WizKids announced something new:  the company will start putting Release Date notices on their products that ship before release dates, warning them that there is a release date for the product. This still won't stop everyone from breaking street date but getting information to people is certainly a step forward.

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.