Strange Patterns

We're getting interesting sales patterns as people spend or anticipate spending their stimulus money. It's kind of like a personal Christmas. During Christmas, we get fewer customers, who spend a lot more money on people other than themselves. It requires a lot of personal selling, since these people don't know the store or the hobby their shopping for, but there are fewer of them, so it's not a big deal. That's my sales pattern, at least, other stores might tell you something different.

This pattern is different because these are our customers, they know what they want, and they're concentrating their spending, while most holiday shopping usually spreads that money around. For example, a couple hours after prominently displaying our new shipment of classic games, we sold an expensive chess set and a backgammon set to different people. I haven't sold either of those in months. Someone came in during the evening and bought ALL the D&D mini dragons, ranging from $40-75 a box. Others are starting armies for various miniature games: 40K, Warhammer Fantasy, Flames of War and Warmachine. Ahh, the joys of deficit spending.

40K
I put together the mortar teams for the basilisk. It turns out they'll be under the cool camo netting I bought, but you'll know they're there. I tried removing the remote control module from one of their hands and replacing it with another piece of equipment, but it always seemed out of scale, with the equipment looking larger. I wonder why that is?

The Tallarn rough riders are, well, 17 years old models, and a pain in the butt. The metal models are covered in flash and the plastic horses are more a "horse kit" than a model, requiring filing and modifying to get them together and putty to fill in the obvious gaps. After assembling two, I'm a bit soured on them.

Keep on the Shadowfell
WOTC sent us a pre-release "store copy" of Keep on the Shadowfell, the first D&D 4e product, and I was torn whether to watch Battlestar Gallactica Razor, assemble rough riders or read this book. I did a bit of all three, with lots of reading left. The adventure so far looks conventional. It lacks some of the wonder of Keep on the Borderlands, although it smells just like a first edition module! I cannot over-emphasize that nostalgic smell. The main thing I got out of it so far is that the local town was not intended as the home base of the PC's. The quick start rules should be easy to follow for 3E DM's; the complicated bits are design work that's already been done for us. here. More to follow on this one.