Top Sellers for June

I haven't obsessed over statistics in a while, which means sales have been improving.....

Top Items for the Last 30 Days

1. 4.0 D&D Core Rulebook Gift Set
2. MTG - Shadowmoor Booster Pack
   
3. 4.0 Player's Handbook
4. D&D H1 Keep On The Shadowfell
5. D&D Minis - Dungeons of Dread
6. MTG - Shadowmoor theme deck
7. MTG - Shadowmoor - tournament
   
8. MTG - Shadowmoor - fat pack
9. 40KRPG: Inquisitor's Handbook
   
10. YGO: Light of Destruction

Not a lot of surprises here with new D&D and new Magic taking most of the top spots. Keep on the Shadowfell was a surprise hit. It was our best selling RPG product in years ... but that was before the release of the 4.0 gift set. Number of people who bought a gift set or player's handbook from us in the last 5 days: 86. I would like to say sales of D&D have surprised me, but they're exactly what I expected.

Top Games for the Last 30 Days

1. Dungeons & Dragons
2. Magic
3. Warhammer 40K
4. Warhammer Fantasy
5. Warmachine
6. Fantasy Flight Games
7. Dark Heresy
8. Mayfair Games
9. Bleach
10. Yu-Gi-Oh

It's nice to see that Fantasy Flight Games doesn't suffer from the Euro decline that we've seen lately. FFG is more American style (some say Ameritrash), appealing to the mainstream gamer crowd, a more consistent customer type. Bleach is the flavor-of-the-month for the alpha card gamers. Yu-Gi-Oh is about to slip off the charts into oblivion since we fired those customers.

Top Departments

1. Role Playing (+1)
   
2. Tactical Miniature Games (-1)
   
3. Trading Card Games (same)
   
4. Used Games (+3)
   
5. Board Games (same)
   
6. Collectible Miniatures (-2)
   
7. Paint (+3)
   
8. Card Games (-2)
   
9. TCG Supplies (+6)
   
10. Dice (-1)
    
11. Classic Games (same)

The number next to them are their positions from a year ago. I see the increased decline of collectible miniature games, a Bay Area phenomena. Paint and TCG supplies are both accessories associated with in-store gaming, something we do much better now. Note that these are movements in sales position, not in sales dollars. Sales dollars are dramatically higher in this location.

Store Identity (Madison IV)

Part of that Madison technology discussion...

A new store needs an identity. What's it about? What will you sell? Who do you want to attract as customers? You want something general, but something with personality. You don't want to specify a narrow product range unless you're certain that's all you want to sell, and all the money you want to make. Gary's Miniature Haven sounds like the perfect place to buy your miniatures, and nothing else. You may want to sell nothing but miniatures, but customer demand will determine where you eventually focus. The Dunge0n of D00m sounds like it might be a fun, but my mother wouldn't walk in the door. You want to avoid appearing to be a niche game store and you want to avoid alienating potential customers. You also may wish to avoid making it personal. For example, I don't want myself included in my store identity.

This I wouldn't include, but I don't mind posting it here:
I don't want Gary's Games, the corner store where you'll find the shopkeep Gary wiping down the counters and talking shop. I want Black Diamond Games, a potential enterprise, where you'll find excellent, well trained sales people who consistently help with your every gaming need. That person might be me. That store might be part of a chain of game stores or just one store, but I want it to feel professional. You may wince at the idea of a franchise for your store, but a well run franchise does more things right than it does wrong and is more of a model to emulate than despise. I wince whenever someone is speaking on their cell phone and says, "Yeah, I'm at Gary's." I want them to feel comfortable with my store identity.

Logo and Identity. Once you have a comfortable identity, you need a way to visually express this. Graphic designers are the people you want to go to. You could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for logo design, but there are online resources that I would recommend instead. Sites like designcontest.net will host a logo design contest for a small fee. You tell a private forum full of graphic designers from around the world your business identity concept and they will attempt to come up with logos that meet your approval. You pay the winner a small prize, perhaps a few hundred dollars. You get to see them try different things and you get to hone your identity by presenting it to a group of people. You'll want to use this logo on everything you can get your hands on, from your sign outside, to shopping bags, business cards, store receipts, staff shirts, yellow pages ad and in store signage.

Email and Website. There's no reason nowadays to have an AOL or hotmail address if you own your own business. Before the store I ran my own web and mail server at home, but I'm not in IT anymore, so that makes no sense, even for me. "Hosting" of these services is very inexpensive. For example, I use Yahoo to host blackdiamondgames.com. For $12.95/month, I have email for up to 10 employees and a website, all under the domain blackdiamondgames.com. Yahoo appears nowhere in my identity and the service is far superior to what I could provide myself and about the same price as electricity for a server.

Your Website. Websites should include basic information such as a short explanation of what you are, your mission statement, directions to your store and contact information. Later you can add more dynamic content, like a schedule of events, photos and information about past events, and new releases. Who will design your website? Sponsor another contest or contact the designer who won your logo contest. It's often fairly inexpensive to have them create a template with your store identity. Your ability to manage and update your website will determine how dynamic you'll want the content.

Community Building. Websites are fine, but they're static billboards of content. Consider a more dynamic approach to your content where you can interact with your customers. A web forum is another service you can have hosted inexpensively. Forums are great for posting events, talking about dynamic content like new releases, and interacting with your customers. If you've got open gaming, it's perfect as an opponent finder or scheduler. With a forum, you have to be open to feedback from your customer base. New stores need to remember customers will try to pull your store in every direction, attempting to make it fulfill their vision. You'll have to be firm with your vision to pull off a forum in the beginning.

Blog. A more one-sided dialog that still invites comment is a store blog. Customers will be fascinated to hear about your store as it comes together and it can dispel many myths about game stores and running a business. If you're not comfortable posting a lot of dynamic content to your website, you can always use your blog for this purpose. Blog sites are free and can be semi-customized with your store logo and identity. Depending on what you discuss, you might want your blog only loosely associated with your business, especially if you talk about things other than the store. If you believe your personal identity should be separate from the business, a blog actually works against this.

Paint Rack

We got our new Games Workshop paint rack in today. It's a nice, tall rack that includes a place for the brushes, tools, painting guides and all the paints, including the Foundation paints, new wash sets and primer. I must not have been paying attention, however, as there were quite a few colors that got dropped from the range starting with this new rack (hints of this were in a recent White Dwarf I've come to learn). My favorite new color, terracotta, was discontinued, along with such well known favorites as tentacle pink and bronzed flesh. The inks are gone as are empty mixing bottles. These will all be put in our old Foundation Colors cardboard rack, since there are exactly 18 discontinued items, the same number as the foundation paints.

What kind of irked me about the rack setup was how they printed their description tabs. Colors that they consider best sellers now have multiple slots, if you use their tabs. Sometimes a color has up to three slots in the rack, such as skull white and chaos black. I can just imagine some bean counter at GW looking over their overall sales figures and saying, if skull white sells three times as many pots as any other colors, why not have three times as many slots in the rack? The answer is frequency. I may indeed sell the quantities they think I do, but I can't imagine a time when I would need 30+ bottles of a single color on-hand. Better would be tabs for those 18 lost colors. Meanwhile, you can find clones of some of those missing colors in the Vallejo Game Color line, although most GW painters are loathe to cross-over.

The best thing about the rack is it consolidates all their products into one place. Hopefully Foundation Colors will get more respect and visibility when they're better integrated with the line. Tools as well, have been apart for some time, at least in our set up.

Dropped Colors:

• Bad Moon Yellow
• Brazen Brass
  
• Bronzed Flesh
• Fiery Orange
• Midnight Blue
• Tenticle Pink
  
• Terracotta
  
• All Inks
• Mixing Pots
  

End of My D&D Campaign

We played the finale of my D&D 3.5 campaign tonight. The party bluffed their way into the final ritual chamber by convincing the vrock demon that they had a powerful being soul trapped in a gem that they were presenting for sacrifice. In fact, they did have such a being trapped, a celestial that they found but did not release from earlier in the campaign.

When Wuntad, the evil half-demon leader spotted them, all hell broke loose. They had fought before, with the party killing his party, with Wuntad narrowly escaping. The party managed to eventually destroy all the containment chambers and kill all the priests, effectively ending the ritual.


In this photo, the vrock demon makes his last stand to preserve the ritual. Once the ritual was disrupted, he teleported away, his commitment to Wuntad fulfilled. This changed the encounter from utterly hopeless to just incredibly difficult.


On the left we have Wuntad, who has come down to the ritual level to deal with the party. In his right hand he holds the faerie cleric, who he has grappled and is slowly killing with his evil power. In his left hand he holds a chaos cube, a container of pure chaos energy. He is threatening to crush the children with it. The party is attempting to block his throw, NBA style. They eventually "stuff" his first shot, sending the cube down to the lower level. Eventually the trick is repeated with a Gust of Wind spell and now two chaos cubes sit in the far corner.



In a final act of desperation, the party's resources close to exhaustion, the wizard, hiding behind the evil black throne at the far end of the chamber, brings lightning down on the cubes, destroying one and creating a cascade explosion that destroys the second cube. In D&D term each cube does 20d6 points of damage in a 100' radius. In the first cube's destruction, everyone in the chamber is killed except the wizard, the sorcerer on the high level, and Wuntad, who is badly injured. The second, cascading explosion kills Wuntad.

Once Wuntad dies, the giant black throne that the wizard was hiding behind collapsed on top of him in a lake of acidic goo. He dies as the sorcerer runs over to save him. The sorcerer was the sole survivor. He releases the captured warlord, the final sacrificial victim, which prevents her troops from sacking the city in search of their missing leader. The world was saved and war averted.

40K: The fluff or the crunch?

VS.

I acknowledge that I'm somewhat of a power gamer. I gain enjoyment out of building characters and army lists, maximizing combinations and creating "what-if" scenarios. I was in a debate recently with someone at the store about this. My issue: A game shouldn't provide bad rules choices, known as "crunch," for the sake of flavor, or "fluff". If the designers intend for a player to take a flavor option, it should be given an appropriate value to encourage this. Fluff choices shouldn't be traps that result in uncompetitive armies.

Dungeons & Dragons has done this for years, but Wizards of the Coast has moved away from it. They've declared war on flavor vs. effectiveness in 4th edition, where they've balanced character classes for combat, rather than balance for overall effectiveness. Since the game is primarily about killing monsters and taking their stuff, it's not fair to balance a class based on social skills or similar non-core abilities.

The army I've chosen for 40K, Imperial Guard, has a lot of flavor "traps" as I see them. Most doctrines are crap (doctrines are rumored to be dropped in the next codex), and much equipment and character options are just not worth the points. So if I want to play an iconic Tallarn army, for example, I need to choose one bad doctrine, a poor HQ choice, an overpriced special weapon and a mediocre heavy weapon. If I were more into the fluff than crunch of this army, I would gladly do this. But why make good fluff choices bad crunch choices?

The argument I was given was that it was alright to have bad crunch for the sake of fluff and the game was more about modeling than winning. Granted, I can see that, but why can't we have both?

Basilisk II (40K)

This is my second of three basilisks, four if you count the Armageddon class experimental basilisk I have someone else working on. That one has an enclosed crew compartment.

I haven't varnished this one yet, so you can see some shiny spots, like around the transfers. Gloss varnish solves the silvering effect. You can see my first Tallarn here, the tank commander. This is the gunner from a heavy gun blister, the idea coming from a White Dwarf issue. This guy took a lot of work. As my first human model, I was trying to get the look right. I was going by a guide online, but I changed the recipe by using the new Citadel washes.

I started with Ogryn Flesh wash, which was too light and moved to Devlan Mud, a kind of dark brown. What I liked about the washes was that I could experiment out of the bottle. There were several looks that I liked and they were effortless to obtain. Eventually I went with a kind of intermediate filth look. Things like his shoulder pads took about four different colors before I settled on black. I think I'm going to go with a dark gray on future models.

The black wash has become my all purpose weathering wash. It's great for things that look too clean, muting colors, or making things look intentionally worn or dirty. It did a great job on the floor behind the big gun, which is now more black than gray, which bugged me about the first basilisk.

I knocked over the entire bottle of black wash, which had me questioning the bottle design. I don't like how the cap connects to the bottle; it's too fiddly. A minute later, I squirted out a Vallejo color and found that the tip had come off when I opened the bottle. Same effect, with paint all over my work space.



So far my only Forge World component is the box of grenades you see here. Kinda cool, although I don't use grenades with this army.

D&D 4 Sales and Supply

Sales were very strong for the D&D 4 release. It wasn't our best sales day ever, but it was up there. In addition to the 40 box set pre-orders, we had a steady stream of customers, who didn't pre-order, buying sets and Player's Handbooks throughout the day. Some of these people we haven't seen before. A couple mentioned they were buying from us because Amazon couldn't ship until July. Many people were interested but cautious, content to buy a Player's Handbook but waiting to see if they wanted the other books. It was a pretty clear division, and we sold zero individual Dungeon Master's Guides and Monster Manual's. A nice surprise were the sales of the new 4E adventure, Keep on the Shadowfell, which we went deep on and still have many on the shelf. Other stores reported strong sales of dice, mats and accessories, but sales weren't appreciably larger than normal.

What has been surprising is the supply problem. Wizards of the Coast ran out of gift sets as they under-predicted demand. Baker & Taylor never did get me the other half of my order, promising the books sometime in June, so they never sent us Player's Handbooks or Monster Manuals. This is a company that shipped early and shorted my order, despite ordering 5 months in advance. I'm told WOTC had some words with them about their shipping times after I reported my early arrivals. Then again, a Forbes article reported that buy.com shipped about 100 copies rather than the 8 WOTC told me, so who knows what to believe.

My main Wizards of the Coast supplier ran out of books before the release date. My last minute dozen copies of PHB's, to make up for Baker & Taylor, was shorted to 9, the last of their supply, with no Wizards re-supply to them for at least a week. I think we'll be fine, but this is not how an evergreen product should be treated. I think this says something about these companies larger, overall view of the economy. Wizards under-printed. Distributors under-ordered. Pre-orders from retailers didn't guarantee supply. On the other hand, mainstream game distributors like ACD and Alliance were well prepared with plenty of books available.