Cookin' Cookies (review)

My four year old Rocco is not a big game player. He loves to play with his Hot Wheels and just recently got into Legos. When we introduce him to games for kids his age, he usually loses interest quickly. Maybe that's because we don't play a lot of board games at the house. He'll sit still for an hour with me to paint a miniature or narrate his own Dungeons & Dragons game, but when it comes to board and card games, he'll just mess around and play with the pieces.

Recently he started taking a cooking class and brought home some cookies. Like many small children, he thinks cooking is an amazing thing. I know theme can go a long way in keeping someone interested in a game, so I picked up Cookin' Cookies for him. This little Fundex game comes in a small lunch box tin. For $10, you get eight recipe cards, twenty six ingredient cards, and four plastic spoons with suction cups. This is like a super easy version of the game Wasabi!  The game has been around for six years, but one of my game distributors, ACD, just started carrying it last week. Cookin' Cookies is for ages 4+.

Cookin' Cookies has recipe cards requiring five ingredients. The ingredient cards are placed face down and you take turns picking them up with your suction cupped spoon. When you get an ingredient you need, you put it next to your recipe card. When you get a different ingredient, you put it back. If you get the rotten egg card, your batch is ruined and you put all your ingredients back and start over. Whoever finishes their recipe first is the winner. Some games took just a few minutes, while a few went on for quite a while, with the rotten egg starting each of us back to the beginning. That might sound tedious, but a rotten egg card was a hilarious spoiler, especially when I drew it.

Rocco absolutely loves this game. The whacking with a spoon is obviously fun and the concept of recipes and ingredients is something most small children are familiar with and find fascinating. There was a little confusion with the "first flavor" ingredient, a wild card. It wasn't in the rules but it was easy to reason out. For Rocco, mastering this game was an important milestone, being the first time he's played multiple sessions and understanding concepts like player turns, game completion and fully following rules. Kids mature at different rates, and I'm glad to see we're finally at this level. We'll have many more games ahead of us.

The down side to this game are the materials. The cards are plastic coated and should hold up well enough, but the plastic spoons are trouble. One of our four spoons had a bad suction cup right out of the box. Rocco broke two other spoons messing around with them (he hid them under his bed, so he wouldn't get in trouble). Rather than a simple, push in suction cup, the spoons have a small pin that affixes the suction cup to the plastic. I've read about other parents having the same problem. Even with broken spoons, Rocco was happy to play the game by picking up the cards with his hands. The spoons are a cool gimmick, but not essential.

Cookin' Cookies
by Fundex
$9.95
Ages 4+

Lies, Damn Lies ....

I was looking at some of our customer statistics yesterday and thought I would share. Some of the answers might be insightful. People ask me questions about them regularly. How many regular customers do you have? What's your average transaction? What I don't have are customer demographics, like age and gender, but my general impression is that we cater to young adult men. We don't throw around the term "gamer porn" for nothin'!

68% of our sales come from regulars. Being a regular means that you've been here enough to decide a paladin club card is in your interest. This number tells me important things, such as I should market quite a bit to my existing base, that I should work to get new regulars, and that I shouldn't put a disproportionate effort into attracting the general public.

Half a percent of sales is the amount our top customer spent in the store over the last year. I mention this because although customer service is paramount, nobody, by themselves, keeps the doors open.  Half of the top ten this year weren't in the top ten last year, but all were long term customers. Customer interests ebb and flow. Some people move away, die, get married, or lose interest, so standing still is not an option. Stores need to continually build their base. As an aside, I think it's never a good idea to identify or rank your customers, including rewarding them. I did this once after reading a magazine article on client relationships and it caused nothing but trouble. Everyone is your top customer.

$800 is the average lifetime sales of our regular customer. It's twice as high as the industry average I've heard thrown around. A top ten customer might spend ten times this amount. The average customer has come in 24 times over the last two years, an average of one time a month. This tells me that the answer to "what's new?" is what has come out in the last month. The tendency for us is to rotate new stock when space becomes an issue, rather than a particular date. Perhaps if we can't keep something on the new shelf for a month, we need a bigger shelf? Top 20 customers come in, on average, exactly once a week.

Game space and events are unimportant to half of our top 20 customers. You will never see them in the back and thus, they are less known to other customers and staff. This also tracks with our event emails, with half of respondents never opening event emails. That said, the other half of those top twenty customers are in at least once a week and take full advantage of our facilities. Game space has been a big issue for me because it seemed to take a disproportionate amount of time. The good news then, is that it's useful for at least half of our top customers.  It's not disproportionate at all!

Anniversary Party Photos

Our anniversary party was a huge success. We had a couple hundred people show up to celebrate our 5th anniversary with games, food and fun. The trip tip was outstanding and the door prizes were pretty amazing too. Some of the highlights: Games Workshop donated a Baneblade. Wizards of the Coast gave us an autographed copy of an R.A. Salvatore novel, with the author thanking the winner for supporting Black Diamond Games. Alliance gave us a bunch of 15th Anniversary Magic life counters, each worth about $100. Those were just the highlights!

Besides the great prizes, I want to thank all of our volunteers. Our RPGA coordinators did all the cooking, slaving over the grills for hours to bring us some excellent tri-tip, hot dogs and veggie burgers. Our volunteer game coordinators kept the games going all day long. Finally, our excellent staff were all on hand to help out, doing all of the prep work and clean up, as well as the heavy lifting along the way. I'm mostly a bystander at these things!

Below are the photos I took from the party:

Playing Race for the Galaxy

Our BOGO table. New games were added throughout the day!

Our GMs (Grill Masters)

Lots of miniature gaming all day long.

The game center was packed all day.

Playing Endeavor.

Game Store Motivation

Today is our five year anniversary at Black Diamond Games. It has certainly been a roller coaster ride. I've had some ideas floating in my head about what I would tell prospective new store owners. Lately there seems to be a  lot of enthusiasm for opening shops, perhaps some optimism as the economy seemingly recovers. Rather than post the usual business start-up advice, I thought I would look at why you would want to run a game store, at least from my perspective.

First, understand the difference between the two types of small business startups. There's the MBA driven startup where you attempt to acquire millions of dollars of other people's money to create some sort of product or service to then spin off or sell to the highest bidder. The second type is a privately funded (mostly you), shop or service provider in which the owner wants to carve a niche out of an existing trade. These second type of startups are considered lifestyle jobs. I hate that term, but it's true.

A game store is a lifestyle job when compared to the motivation behind the MBA startup. Nobody starts a game store to get rich or innovate in some interesting new way. You can run a really good store, with excellent customer service, and some minor innovations, and you may even scrape by making a living at it, but it's not going to make you the money you could have working any other professional job. You also don't get the high risk, high reward ratio of the MBA startup. It's high risk (for you) and low reward. In other words, it's financially irrational. Just know that going in.

Second, understand why you want to start a game store. Hating your current job is a really bad reason, as is coming into a bunch of money. What I found after owning my own business, is that I really like being a small business owner and working for myself, but ... it wouldn't have required owning a store. If you're tired of working for the man, before taking a vow of poverty and tying up every dollar you and your family have in a game store, investigate if you can do what you do now for yourself. Be the man. You may even make more money at it, eventually.

Games are great, but a good store owner generally plays fewer games because of their time constraints with running a business. Wanting to play more games is a bad motivation for owning a store. In my case, I could have quit my IT job and lived off savings for several years while building my client base. I would have had a LOT of free time to game. If you've got money to open a store, you've got more than enough money to try something like consulting, or even going back to school.

Third, plan. Write a business plan. If you can't organize your thoughts in a business plan, your eventual business will probably be equally scattered. A business plan also forces you to understand the finances of a retail store as you project your sales. Once you've got a plan, carefully choose your location based on how it will fulfill your plan. If you've got a solid plan and capital, you should be looking for the perfect location to implement that plan.

I can't tell you how many stores I've seen over the past five years that just make no sense when you consider their location choice. It's a tragedy when you consider all the money they wasted. My store is 25 minutes from my house. Why? Because my local demographics are all wrong for a game store and the nearby communities of Berkeley/Oakland are over saturated with stores. Research said Walnut Creek/Concord needed a good game store.

Finally, understand what owning a store entails. I've heard it said many times before, but try to work in a game store for a while. If you think this is beneath you, you have no idea what's in store for you. Owning a store is a fantastic adventure, but it's an adventure in humility. You will personally vacuum hundreds of square miles. You will be the guy who cleans up the puke in the bathroom. You will work long hours for little pay and your customers will insist they do you a favor by throwing money your way. You will be brought low. You will take a vow of poverty without the support of a spiritual community or the knowledge that you're making the world a better place. The only people who will understand you are other small business owners. The only reward, really, is the satisfaction of a job well done; a job done your way. But you know what? That satisfaction grossly outweighs all the negatives. You can't beat being excited about going to work every day, of loving your life, of being healthier because you have more happiness in your life. Just make sure there's no other way to accomplish this than owning a game store.

New 40K Magaforces

These are due in December. I haven't seen anyone do the math on these yet so:

Space Marine Megaforce

Predator $41.25

Rhino $30

Dreadnought $41.25

Tactical Squads $35x2

Assault Marines $26.50

Scouts $20

$229 value for $175

24% Savings

Ork Megaforce

40 Ork Boyz: $22x4

Warbikers: $35x3

Trukk $30

Lootas/Burnas: $22

$245 value for $200

20% Savings

The question is whether this is a generic enough combination to be desirable. I think it is, with plenty of bread and butter units. These would make pretty solid gifts for anyone starting or expanding these armies.


We are, of course, taking pre-orders on these at the store.

5th Anniversary Sale

We usually do some sort of sale for our anniversary party, and this Sunday will be no different. What is different this time is the extra huge savings. All red tag items in the store are buy one, get one free. What does this include? Lots of stuff. All of our left over Ding & Dent from our last auction will be brought out (stuff already marked down 40-70%). All of the clearance board games, including about 75 we just added, are included too (marked down 40-50%). Five years worth of used role-playing books are all red tag, so stock up!

Since we haven't used red tags for over 18 months, this also includes older product still on the shelf. There's a lot of this kind of stuff floating around, so while you're waiting for your number to be called for those thousands of dollars worth of door prizes, peruse the store and see what you can find. It's a scavenger hunt! We only do this kind of thing one day a year, so don't miss it!

Attached is the flyer for the party:

Cautious 2009

We were walking around the store last week, trying to figure out what would be the hot board games for the holidays. We were mostly at a loss. There were one or two obvious hits, but not a whole lot. It's not all doom and gloom, our overall sales are way up; more than we should have expected from this year. But from what? It turns out to be from expansions of existing games. The same is true for our miniature games, with very strong sales for no reason other than ... strong sales. We saw no new concepts or games for the year (Arcane Legions still being an unknown), but instead, a bunch of expansions of existing games. Hot new miniature games have been notable, but only sales foot notes, as good as they are. Role-playing boasts the same problem, a new D&D edition last year, but the hot RPG book of 2009 has been the D&D Player's Handbook II. Yep, another expansion of yet another edition.

Does it really matter? A few years ago, you could sense the lust for the new, the desire to throw something against the wall to see if it would stick. The now defunct WizKids seemed to have a lock on this model after getting a few solid hits early on. Wizards of the Coast reminded me of Microsoft, with two core, profitable products that supported wild speculation into many other areas. Most of those product lines have been abandoned at this point. I recall groaning at trade shows during product launch meals for such notable games as Dreamblade, Hecatomb and Sportsclix. Nowadays, a solid expansion is more welcome than a new game. Don't swing for the fence, go for a double.

Customers haven't seemed very interested in branching out of their comfort zone either. They want a distraction, preferably a familiar one. As the recession began, innovative new products were coming out of the pipeline and they died horribly on release. That "flight to quality" meant customers wanted their games improved, not changed too dramatically. They did not want their cheese moved.

While 2008 was a year of safe retreads, 2009 has been an even safer year of solid expansions. The danger in this lack of grand innovation is the same danger I face daily in my business. You don't want to become too complacent or too risk averse. You want to keep your edge and try new things, with all the risk that entails. You don't want your customers to lust after the new while you're still complacent with the familiar, or they'll cease being your customers. Perhaps we'll see more risk taking in 2010. You go first.