I know there has been some consternation around MTG recently, events we offer, and prizing, and I wanted to try to address the players and let you know how it fits into our business plan (such as it is).

First, Small Town Games has always been more about the atmosphere of the store…providing a fun, attractive, social and friendly place to play games, whether MTG or others. Our allocations and our cost of product have always prevented us from having the most product at launch, being able to offer ridiculous prices on boxes, or being able to offer the same prize structure as other more established stores. I wish it were otherwise.

That said, I have always tried to provide good value for events, especially smaller ones. I tried to run Friday Night Magic as basically a way for players to spend $10 for a couple hours of entertainment and walk out with (on average with 8 players in the pool) about $11.80 in product (2 set boosters and 2 promo packs for the pod). Our total take would be $28 for an 8 player pod (about $3.60 per player) .

I tried to run Commander as a win-a-box, where at 8 players generates $120 in revenue for the store, and the store gives out a box (our regular price $144.99) and again another 2 promo packs (around $15). Total profit for the store is less than $19 (our price on a set box is $101.45). Again, players get to hang out and (hopefully) find a good value for their entertainment dollar. I’d gladly run draft pods of 8 all day every day for the a similar price per box if a player wanted to take the lead in organizing them.

Now, a couple of notes…running a 2 hour event where the profit to the store isn’t enough to pay the employee running it for those 2 hours makes it very difficult to keep the lights on. Sure, I recognize that most times the employee is also doing other things (unless they’re playing)…but my goal has always been, if Magic grows (or any other product line), then we’d have an employee full time dedicated to each event. However, we’ve never brought in enough revenue for the average event to make that happen.

Second note, yes, having folks in the store hopefully leads to secondary sales of food and drink and other products. For some people, that is a bit of revenue for the store, but not as much as one might think. Average concession for the store(for folks that have some) runs about $9, of which we usually make about $4. So for a pod of 8 over 2 hours, the store would make a maximum of maybe $60 (and hopefully more in card sales, sleeves, etc). Of course, most times we can’t get a pod of 8 to fire, but as an example I hope its helpful to see where we’re trying to get to.

To put that into perspective, all in, the store needs to make about $40/hour profit to to keep the lights on. Now, that does not include paying Jeff or I for any hours (Jeff is currently on the payroll of our other business, and I haven’t ever taken a dollar out of the store, and my hours working on behalf of the store since 2020 are about 5000 (not a joke).) So I hope folks see that any of our differences about Magic and prizing is not about penny-pinching, or not wanting to offer a good value to people, but its about how on earth do we all work together to keep the lights on (assuming people want to keep the lights on). If the store actually paid out all the hours folks have worked on its behalf, we would already have closed because we’d be nearly $100,000 in the hole.

Please note, this is not to make anyone feel bad…businesses come and go, especially in Lewisburg, and we knew going in that 80% of all game stores close within the first 2 years…most of them because they don’t come to grips with the above realities. The fact that we’ve been open over 2 years is awesome, and I’m glad to have been a part of it no matter what happens in the end. I still think it’s possible the store survives, but to do that, we all need to come to some kind of understanding about what it would take to actually have a profitable store.

Now, some of you absolutely do understand, and have supported the store 110%. All the players that have bought a box of cards from us at $145 when we all know they are available for $110 at release online is making the choice that having a table to play cards at is worth something, and we are grateful for you. Any DM that buys a book for their game at $50 when Amazon sells them regularly at $30 is saying, ‘hey, this place is worth it.‘.

When I can’t offer $500 worth of product for an event that brings in $400, I hope you’ll understand that its not because I don’t WANT to. If we were firing 12 player events twice a week like clockwork, I would regularly be adding cool things to the prize pool. I always want to fire up the popcorn machine and give it away; I always want to toss in extra promos or packs or coins. Because if we were regularly firing 12 player events there would be room in the budget to do that.

However, at this moment I can’t, because I’m trying to keep Caleb and Robin employed. I’m trying to keep a store open that is safe for kids, and nerds, and outcasts to have something better to do on a Friday night than get high. I have to budget for our air conditioning going out again this summer, and for 2 air fryers that we just replaced. In order for this all to work, every event needs to be self-sufficient in and of itself, and we can’t just hope that ancillary sales makes it all worth it. (because so far, they’re not)

My door has always been open, and so have my books. If anyone wants to talk the economics of running a business generally, or a game store specifically, I will gladly sit down and do that with you. No one is over here secretly acting like Scrooge McDuck as we shower ourselves with gold coins. We’re all intently trying to figure out how to keep our little slice of heaven open, because at this point we’re not making it.

Hey y’all! This post is born from some conversations we have been having around the store, and what we have seen with attendance at our Commander events.

Our first two official Commander events drew 11 and 12 players respectively…the second two were 3 and 4. Quite the drop.

The main issue based on folks we talked to is the power differential between our average player and the couple of Competitive EDH decks that showed up. This past weekend the entire tournament was over within 12-14 turns…all 3 games combined (4-5 turns per game).

For most players, that is not fun. Most of this is my fault. I never expected competitive decks to show up for a $5 event, especially as the games around our tables day in and day out are at what I’d call the ‘casual’+ power level. (IE. Precons with a couple of upgrades, or home brews made mostly of recent sets, with a few folks some stronger decks…but no real early combo-finishes among them)

So what do we do about this?

It’s a tricky question…I don’t care for subjective ‘don’t do this’ kinds of rules…such as ‘no infinite combos’. Why? Because I think at our tables some off-the-wall 4 card combo on turn 15 is cool with everyone. The challenge is when a game is ended with a tutor to a 2-card combo on turn 3. Since we’ve opened, I’ve always stressed that I’d rather have folks duking it out with cool creatures and big spells than locks or 10 tutors to a combo…not because those don’t have their place, but because those games tend to be far less social, less diplomatic and, dare I say it, less fun for the majority of folks in our store.

I heard the comment this weekend that ‘well, its a tournament, people want to win.’ And while technically true, I think what it misses is that I think even folks ‘looking to win’ would rather have 12 people in an event than 3, if only because more players means a bigger prize pool. More than being focused on winning (specifically speaking of a casual type even), what we want to see is folks having fun. That’s always been the point of the store, and always will be.

One thought is we say our regular $5 tournaments are ‘casual level’ tournaments. Basically this would mean ‘pre-con strength decks with some upgrades’ to ‘moderate strength’ that can be handled by multiple folks at a table working together. Higher entry-cost tournaments with bigger prize pools would be tailored to let folks break out the ‘bigger guns’.

Our goal is to have a whole range of events; however it’s always good to have a baseline. I think our earlier numbers (10-12 folks) run comfortably, offer a decent prize-pool for a low price, and let folks get together to sling some cards, which is really what we’re going for.

As we’ve mentioned to many of our regulars, we’re also fine offering higher-power/higher-priced events with much higher level prize pools (a $40 event depending on attendance could have a $500-600 prize pool with maybe a $200-$300 first place card that could slot nicely into many decks)

My preferred solution (and the one we’re going to try first), even though it may not be our final one, is to have each event be a deck-building challenge. One of the tougher parts of this is getting everyone informed early enough to give folks time to build appropriate decks. The second, less certain element is figuring out how many of our casual folks have collections large enough to handle a variety of challenges.

To test and see what folks think, for our next Commander event on March 5 (Jay will be in charge per usual, I’ll be out of town that weekend) the deck rules are: Tribal Non-Blue Decks (With at least 2/3 of the non-land cards being creatures of the chosen tribe). Several of the pre-con decks fit this bill (vampires, werewolves, etc) out of the box.

Please, please, please let us know what you think. A healthy Magic scene is very important to the ongoing health of the store, and we’re willing to direct resources to making a fun and vibrant scene for the majority of players.

We are very excited that new Mystery Dice by Small Town Dice (the first business venture of Dagny, Libby, Astrid and Daddy Truman) are about to be available! For most folks, knowing that is about enough, and you can stop reading…however I wanted to explain the birth of this secondary business.

First things first, I want to apologize to all the folks that were let down by the Mystery Dice received this Summer. We want the best for our customers, and I was sad and irritated at the changes made to the inventory we most recently received, and I make no excuse for it. This entire new business is us saying we are sorry, and is our best attempt to fix it going forward!

Please note Small Town Dice (and yeah, I just now saw the acronym, doh!) will be supplying awesome dice to STG, with over 250 styles in stock or en route. Small Town Games should shortly have the largest selection of dice in Middle Tennessee! The only reason it is delineated from STG is that it will also be an online business (which is almost ready to launch).

Mystery Dice for the first part of the year were the #1 non-CCG product in the store, by a wide margin. Everyone loved them, and I loved working with the company we were buying them from (Foam Brain Games).

Around July, when we first started trying to get our ducks in a row for Christmas, I worried Mystery Dice might go out of stock due to the supply chain issues, so I placed a huge order (250 sets) to make sure we didn’t run out for the holidays.

The challenges started after that…we received the dice from that order and started selling them. Very quickly we noticed that the variety of dice in this bigger order (my largest previous order was 50 sets) was very small. In many cases, people would open multiple sets of the same dice set consecutively. I even went and pulled packs from different parts of the shipment, with the same results. For what had been our best non-CCG product, this was concerning, but having worked with Foam Brain, I assumed they would jump on the problem and fix it, maybe offering to have us ship back a big portion of the shipment and reship them with a greater variety of dice.

So I went on to FBG’s Facebook page and wrote a little note, asking if they’d help me resolve the problem. Their response was less than satisfactory, them simply saying there were supply chain problems and they didn’t have many different sets to offer.

Having been in eCommerce for many years, IMO they should have simply stopped selling Mystery Dice until the problem was resolved, and should not have shipped out hundreds of units of an inferior product than everyone here was used to. There was no offer to have us exchange some sets or anything. Having made a significant investment in a large quantity of dice that were now not selling, we were stuck.

Very soon after that I hatched the idea of Small Town Dice. If the company I wanted to support wouldn’t support us, I figured we could do it ourselves. I knew it would be a significant investment and a ton of work to deliver the quality that I wanted at the price I wanted, but I think we’re there. Plus, I thought it would be a good way to spend some time with my daughters.  I want them to grow up working and learning and being creative, so I thought this would be a good way to start them out. Dice and fun, colorful, inherently mathematic. I really wanted to launch a whole lot sooner than we have, but as with everyone, life is busy.

So my twins have both been hard at work helping me inventory and organize our new dice bin system at STGAD, and I just got our first batch of Mystery Dice labels printed. Now all that’s left is to pack them up and bring them to the store!  Astrid, our youngest, will be doing the packing to guarantee overwhelming Mysteriousness!

So how are the new Small Town Mystery Dice better than the previous version?

First, when there is a middle-man, there is always the cost associated with that middleman. So instead of buying from Foam Brain, we are now purchasing from Foam Brain’s manufacturer as well as several other new sources of product.  This lets us offer a better product at very close to the same price.  More dice, the same or better quality, just with our Brand on them instead of theirs. Yes, we have to buy lots more because we are getting them wholesale and that’s tied up a bunch of capital, but I think its worth it to serve our peeps and to launch this new venture.

The biggest bonus is we are getting to bump the quality of Mystery Dice significantly. Where Foam Brain used to offer only a specific tier of acrylic dice and metals, our Mystery Dice have a much broader band of pricing, from their same cool acrylics, but up to and including what are normally $15 and $18 resin sets, including the first time we’ll have occlusion dice (dice with things inside of them!) in the mix. This also allows us to guarantee there are no duplicates in each 50 or 100 dice sets, woot!!  On top of that, we are adding some much higher end metals to the mix for the solo metal dice, including from new $30-$40 high end sets that aren’t even offered in the store yet. Also cool, for our initial run, 1 in 10 sets will have an awesome collectible tiny metal sword. And as the icing on the cake, 1 of the 100 sets will be a full set of semi-precious Turquoise Dice that are just stunning (MSRP $70). As I said, Astrid is packing these, so I won’t even know where those dice are, and you are just as likely to get it in the first pack as the last. We’re bumping the price to $10.99, but these packs of Mystery Dice are packed to the gills with much higher value (over double).

I hope that all makes sense!  If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know!

So if one hasn’t noticed, sales are not something we do a lot of, for a lot of reasons. However, when there is a good reason, we’ll do a good sale.

This weekend (Feb 26-27) is that time!

So how big a sale are we talking?

40% off everything in the sale, cash only. For many items, this is essentially at our cost. We just want to break even on these so we can use that capital to bring in products people are more excited about.

So what’s the deal?

Now that we’ve been open a few months, we have a better handle on what people are looking for. We want to do our best to serve those needs. However, to do that, we need to rearrange our space and clear out some things to bring in new things.

So we are running a one-and-done sale, meaning once we do it, its over. I’ll take any of our remaining sale inventory after to our warehouse and clear the rest of it online over the next 10 years or so.=)

So what’s on sale?

The criteria for what we are selling is this: any items which we have not sold any copies of since opening. Why? I don’t feel right selling something to someone for less than I sold it to someone else.

The good news is there are a LOT of great board games that meet this criteria. When we opened the store, I did a ton of research and brought in only the very best games. Meaning, if its in the store, its popular with a lot of folks, for good reason. We will have a ton of AAA, hugely popular games on sale…they are just not popular in our town.=)

For compliance reasons, I can’t tell you what many of the games are, but if you walk in and ask, I’ll be glad to let you know. One notable section I can let you know about is our entire Pathfinder selection will be on sale.

So what are you bringing in?

We plan on expanding our Warhammer section, with both additional miniatures as well as a full Citadel paint rack. We already have some of the smaller ETB boxes en route, and we’ll offer any good kits Games Workshop has on the lower end of the pricing scale. Please let us know what armies you would like us to focus on! We will also continue to bring in all new WoTC D&D titles, as well as a selection of 3rd party D&D products.

We already have an a shelf or 2 worth of HABA children’s games in a box at the warehouse, which many parents have been requesting. We also want to carry more educational/home school style games based on Civics and History. Again, if anyone has a suggestion of where we should start, let us know!

We also plan on starting a small puzzle section, again likely a shelf or two to start just to see how it goes. If you have a favorite brand or topic, let us know what it is!

Anything else to know?

The main reason for us to do this is so we can better serve our community. If there are things you’d like to see us do or offer, please let us know. All of these changes are to better fit what we’ve heard people talking about in the store.

Even if we don’t carry a particular product, we’ll be glad to order it for you. We offer 10% off all special order items, as it won’t end up taking up floor space.

If you’d like us to put a sale game on layaway for you, we’d be glad to do that with 40% down.

I wanted to make sure our Grand Champion and Master of the Arena, Lauryn, Queen of Fire, had sufficient chance to bask in her awesomeness before we did an after-action report of the tournament!

First, I hope fun was had by all!! If not, and if your issue is not addressed here, please shoot me or Chris an email!

This was the first time we have done something like this, and we learned a lot! We found some issues that definitely need addressing to make everything run smoother next time, and with hope that will make it even more fun the next time around.

1 – We recognize and acknowledge the challenges with the coins and the Deck of Dragons. For future events, there will be a limit of 1 store coin used per character. This should create a much smoother experience while still maintaining the fun parts of the deck. Chris will also be going over the cards and making sure everything is 5e kosher; the last D&D game I DM’ed was 3.5, and it showed, sorry y’all!

2 – Tournament length and bracketing – This was a LONG event. With potentially a lot more folks showing up next year, our thought is to do bracketing tournaments on the weekends before the main Championship. Our thought would be to do 8 person brackets on the first, second, and third weekends of the month, with 4 from each bracket advancing to the finals. Then we could do one big, final tournament of 12 optimally. This will also help in that folks won’t be sitting around waiting for their turn to play, which I know was not fun for some folks, and I do apologize for that.

3 – Board size vs. number of players. With 8 players, the big table we were on was too big to create consistently quick interactions. It also allowed some hiding, which while I think is fun and appropriate, it should be a more ‘lick your wounds’ kind of hiding as opposed to ‘I’m going to sit out of the game for 15 rounds’. A smaller play area, or a larger number of players in the same area, should help with all of those issues.

4 – While I love that two people picked up the Necklace of Fireballs, I’m sure we could all imagine what it would look like if all 20 players had them.=) While we definitely don’t want to do away with cool magic items like that, we’re looking for a way to limit the potential abuse of what could happen if everyone took them. One way would be to allow 1 each of the rare magic items and maybe do a draft for them during the bracketing tournaments. Another way would be to do a draft for the rare items, with position being determined by ‘store support points’, which would be some mixture of the number of events attended throughout the year and purchases at Small Town Games (which means I also need to work on our loyalty program!). We will flesh this out at our Everhold Teams Tournament some time in March!

5 – A side note on the coin/Deck front. It should be noted that all 3 players in the top 3 only spent a single coin (and I’m not even sure if the Barbarian did that), and in one case, that was a gift from a friend and not even an intended purchase.=) So while they can have powerful effects, we did find that those who had a lot of cards from the deck were regarded as 1st-line enemies by many other players, which ultimately limited their lifespan!

All in all, I thought it went well, and it looked like fun was had. With hope these changes going forward make it even better! Again, if you have ideas or suggestions, feel free to let us know! Ultimately, this is all about fun and good sportsmanship!

Ho ho ho!  Welcome to the 12 Days of Small Town Games!  For a very limited window (12 days, November 27 to December 8!), we are offering the best entry-level games at 20% off.  If you or a member of the family are wondering about this board game thing, these are all products that would be great to introduce you, grandma, or baby sister to gaming.

1. King of Tokyo – my go-to game for new players, and one I have taken to calling Kaiju Battle Yahtzee!  Recognizable mechanics, giants monsters, and quick game play makes this a hit on every table.
2. Catan – The board game that brought more gamers into gaming than any other!  It is still among the most popular and most played games.
3. King of Tokyo Dark – Like King of Tokyo, with a couple of new elements to add a new layer to your monster-smashing goodness!
4. Ticket to Ride – Playable with kids as young as 6, but still plenty of depth for granny also.  Plus, TRAINS!  Even with no experience, you can be playing this with your family in under 15 minutes.
5. Dominion – The first, and still rated by many as the best, deck-building game.  Plenty of expansions, tons of strategy, and where winning feels really good.  The base box gives tons of different options, and this is a game we used to play 4 or 5 times in an evening.
6. Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza – Hand slapping fun for everyone, TCGCP is crazy, and one of the most popular party games available!
7. Marvel Champions – Similar to Dominion, but it’s a cooperative experience (meaning the players are playing against the game, not each other) and oozes great Marvel theme. It is a bit more complex in its game-play as well, but we have a great Marvel Champions teacher in the store that would love to show you how to play. It also has tons of expansions and replayability.
8. Pandemic/Pandemic Legacy – For those without fear, Pandemic is the grandaddy of co-op games.  It is slightly heavier (Gaming lingo for a little more complex) than the first 6 games, but still readily accessible to almost everyone, and often the first game folks pick up after Catan.
9. Dungeons and Dragons Stranger Things Starter, D&D Beginner Box, and D&D Essentials are  the first steps for those kids asking to learn D&D (and we’ve had dozens of those in the store so far).  Parents, Start Here!  There are tons of players here in the store, so you’ll never have to wonder if your child can find a game.
10. For those that know someone who would love a game, but aren’t sure what to get them, we have beautiful Small Town Games Challenge Coins, with a face value of $5 each. Any purchase of $25 and up in Small Town Coins and you’ll get a free Santa Dice Bag to carry them in! The ultimate stocking stuffer!

We have always been impressed by HOPEtown and their consistent demonstrations of love for those in our community who often have nowhere left to turn. Through servant-hood and generosity, Frank and his volunteers provide a consistent example of how to be the hands and feet of Christ.

In our own small way, we hope to come alongside this great ministry through High Scores for HOPEtown.

First, on our opening weekend (October 30-November 1) Small Town Games will be running our first annual High Scores for HOPEtown retro gaming tournament. For $5, you’ll get three plays on our mini-arcade units for the old-school classics Asteroids, Pacman and Joust. You can play 3 of the same game, or one game of each (and if we’re not busy, you’re welcome to hang out and just play to your hearts content or try to explain to your kids how to use a controller that doesn’t have 97 buttons and knobs!).

Sunday night, we’ll declare our Small Town Champions. All proceeds from the tournament will go to HOPEtown. The high scorer on each game will receive $50 to spend at Small Town Games and their names will be enshrined on our High Score Board.

Ongoing at Small Town Games, anyone will have the opportunity to attempt to dethrone one of the high score leaders. For a $5 donation, they’ll get 3 attempts to break a current record. All donations will go to HOPEtown, and anyone who is successful will earn a 20% off coupon and 4 free Table Tax coupons (explanation forthcoming!).

If you have any questions about our tournament or about Small Town Games in general, please drop us a line at toby@smalltown.games. Thanks y’all!