Friendly local game stores remain one of the best places to buy tabletop games

It’s not exactly a hot take to point out that retail stores are having a rough go of things lately. That goes double for a niche offering like an independent board game retailer, or FLGS (“Friendly Local Game Store”), as they are commonly referred to within the tabletop hobby.

Online retailers have for years represented the most significant threat to the FLGS, and it’s not hard to see why. Online retailers often offer cheaper prices and more inventory, as well as the option to shop in your pajamas. And if a tabletop gamer does venture into an actual brick-and-mortar business, they are often able to find a product they want in the ever-growing board game sections at Target, Walmart, and Barnes & Noble, big-box stores pushing into the hobby game market with the same techniques they used to annihilate so many other retail sectors. That these big-box stores are, themselves, rapidly ceding ground to mega e-tailers like Amazon might feel karmic, but it’s cold comfort for the FLGS that’s now being undercut Do it twice. The explosion in crowdfunding and direct publisher-e-commerce have made it impossible for retail stores to be involved with the customer flow, particularly when it comes the most buzzy and splashy new releases. Many campaigns offer retailer tiers but require cash-strapped retailers to order a game that has barely reached the design stage. This could mean it can take months to possibly get it. Jahre You must earn a return before you can get one.

To top it all off, a certain recent (and still ongoing) pandemic sent foot traffic through the floor, shuttering retailers of nonessential goods for weeks, months, or more — many of which, despite heroic efforts by the industry, never reopened.

So, that’s the bad news. Friendly Local Game Stores, already operating on margins as thin as 5-10%, have struggled in the last decade and especially the last two years, and it seems likely many won’t survive another 10 years of ever-stiffening competition, pandemic waves, and the customer and publisher habits that have developed and calcified as a result. In spite of the odds and current trends, those who are still around in ten years will be successful.

But if retail is dying, tabletop gaming is still a growing market — if anything, the pandemic has been a shot of adrenaline in the much-chronicled “gaming renaissance” that’s seen the hobby as a whole grow and broaden. A new type of tabletop business has emerged from all the shuttered, soon to-go-underground FLGSes. Let’s call them FLGCs — Friendly Local Game Cafes.

A FLGC is basically half coffee shop, half tabletop gamer’s paradise, and there are already more than 800 scattered around the world. As they open any one of the many games from an carefully-curated lending collection, guests can enjoy food and drinks. If they love the game, they can usually buy a brand-new copy from behind the register, but that’s not really the point.

“We don’t care too much if someone buys a game,” says Greg May, co-founder of The Uncommons and co-owner of Hex & Co. “We’re perfectly happy if they simply join us when they want to play anything at all. For traditional retailers, that’s heresy.”

The Uncommons, a FLGC in the heart of New York City’s Greenwich Village, occupies the tight footprint of what used to be the Village Chess Shop (a monument to a New York you can increasingly only experience by watching movies from the 1970s, the Village Chess Shop shuttered in 2012, its farewell post calling itself “more of a curiosity or portrait than viable retail environment”).

Uncommons has achieved a lot for itself. In 2013, it opened with private investments, a modest Kickstarter campaign and some excitement from the media. The tables can hold 60 to 70 people and have various sizes. Most evenings are filled with players who play games and drink beer. You can purchase beers at the cashier, as well as bagels and smoothies. A feature wall is given over entirely to a selection from what the company claims is “the largest [board game] library on the East Coast of the USA” — with over 1,000 games, far more than the wall could hold, much of that collection is on “semi-permanent loan” to Hex & Co., which boasts two uptown locations even larger than The Uncommons.

The lending library — or rather, the $10 cover charge to access it for three hours — provides the store’s principal source of revenue. The cover charge initially provoked skepticism from the online commentariat, but it hasn’t stopped people from flocking to the cafe since it opened. There’s a reason for that, explains Uncommons general manager Danny Dyer:

“People coming in, sitting down, playing games, spending that community time trying out games, they aren’t sure if they would necessarily want to drop the whole price of the game. It costs $10 to just play the game, and $60 to purchase it. You can sometimes save quite a bit of money by realizing this. Oh, actually, I’m good. There is no such thing as enough time.”

Not everyone comes in with a specific game they’re looking to evaluate. Many players, especially those just getting into the hobby, see that wall of games and don’t even know where to begin. They naturally turn to Dyer and one of his colleagues for help or a complete tutorial.

“People will say, ‘Do you have any fun games?’” Dyer relates, his eyebrow cocked. “And I say ‘No, there are no fun games, not a one. Sorry, you’re out of luck.’”

But then he gets down to business: “I want to get a sense of the game genres they might be interested in, especially people who don’t necessarily know the name of those genres. Like if somebody comes in and they’re like, ‘Oh, we love Root’ — like, oh, OK, let me show you some other games that are in that vein. Things that are asymmetrical, or have a lot of character to them.” Dyer and his staff often suggest three or four games at once: “A little bit of a spread. This game is very easy. The game takes about 15-20 minutes to complete. This might be a little bit harder than what you’re looking for, but it’s really great and matches what we’re talking about.”

It is quite a contrast to the surly gatekeeping of nerds that has been so famously mocked by. The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, behavior so notable among some FLGS staff that gamers often wonder if the “F” in FLGS stands for “friendly’’ after all (though, of course, #notallFLGSes). No FLGC worth its salt would employ staff like that, says Steve Tassie, chief gaming officer at Snakes & Lattes. He believes that a key pillar of the model is staff that are “jeuliers — like sommeliers, but for board games.”

If Uncommons is a cafe, then Snakes & Lattes is a mini restaurant empire. In Toronto in 2010, Snakes & Lattes was established. Since then, the company has grown to eight locations in North America. They often purchase and expand existing businesses. Most Snakes & Lattes stores boast a chef-prepared menu, private spaces, game boxes organized in a gridAnd individually color-coded (“Green games are easy to learn, yellow games are a little more challenging, and the red ones are really tough. Plus, if it’s a game that’s really good for two people, we put a blue sticker on it”), even drag brunches and comedy nights. The stores served as an inspiration for Uncommons and Hex & Co., as well as many others, which in turn inspired other stores — or, as Tassie calls them, “children” and “grandchildren” of Snakes & Lattes.

“We’re hardly the first board game cafe in the world. They existed in Europe and in Asia long before we came along,” Tassie acknowledges, pointing out that there are plenty of FLGSes that offer chips and soda, and also many bars that have a shelf with a few copies of Scrabble, “or maybe a box of Trivial Pursuit questions on every table… but we’re the first in North America really to be serious as both a restaurant and about board games.”

Snakes isn’t secretive about the way it does things — in fact, a few years ago it ran a 24-part video tutorial touching on every aspect of its operations, from staffing the kitchen to guiding customers beyond familiar-but-basic fare like Monopoly and Munchkin. Because it doesn’t consider any businesses to be competitors, not even gaming shops, this can allow for such openness.

“It’s really about the experience. That’s really what we’re trying to capitalize on and offer to our guests: something that they won’t find anywhere else,” says Snakes & Lattes’ Canada & U.S. marketing director Anaïs Guilbert. “I would say that the places we compete against — though I don’t consider them direct competitors — would be other entertainment venues. Places where people can go for food and drinks, but don’t offer board games. So it’s like, when people are going to go out, they ask: ‘Are we gonna go to the movies tonight or to Snakes & Lattes?’”

“We’re in competition as much with Alamo Drafthouse as we are with any FLGS,” adds May. “The Uncommons was perhaps answering the questions of about a decade ago: Namely, could New York City rents support a gaming bar and cafe? Hex is meant to be our look at the future.”

What does the future look like? For Hex’s West Side location, already large by Manhattan standards: “doubling in capacity early next year, with upgrades to private rooms, tournament systems, and vast improvements in our kitchen.” And, separately, an entirely new, third Hex store opening downtown in just a few weeks, with an even grander vision: “full liquor and cocktails, full kitchens, A/V, live-action role-playing events, higher-end retail operations with customizability, one-of-a-kind items, prize balls, 3D printing, and much more.”

It’s an ambitious plan, to be sure, and May is sanguine about the possibilities. He has some warnings for FLGS that are looking to transform into FLGCs:

“Retail spaces cannot transition easily into experiences. It is rare that a store has started as a retail business and then moved into a café or bar without having to move and start over. Each aspect of the business, including employees, layout, supply chains, back office, and building codes, is unique.

Becoming truly experiential, especially looking towards the future, requires setting aside traditional retail entirely.”