Rolling the dice

Men-At-Arms Hobbies is an easily missed small store on Long Island, N.Y. Nestled in a small commercial complex almost exactly in the middle of Suffolk County, I've driven past it on more than one occasion.

Years ago, I tracked down what is reputed to be Henry Kissenger's favorite game, Diplomacy (pre-Hasbro Avalon Hill), and some out of print material from the now-defunct games manufacturer Iron Crown Enterprises. Bigger than it looks from the outside, James Katona's store was packed with model kits, Dragon 12-inch figures and strategy games. The back corner of the store was home to a row of tables where wargamers would gather on evenings and weekends.

Today, those tables, littered with scenery ostensibly for Games Workshop's fantasy wargames, fill half the store. The selection of model kits has shrunk in favor of miniatures, rulebooks and WizKids' new Mage Knight lines.

It is only a reflection of the economic climate that the fluorescent lights over the game tables are turned off when not in use. The soda machine is gone, too—another casualty in the effort to keep bills small in a flagging marketplace.

"You have to find your niche, and Games Workshop is our niche," Katona says. In today's market, a retailer has to be a lot of things to a lot of people, he explains, as one customer in bike shorts inquires about new model kits. In Middle Island, a little town Manhattanites bypass altogether in their jaunts between the city and the Hamptons, fantasy wargames are more popular than gluing scale B-17s together. Katona offers to order whatever the biker may need.

"Kids have so much to do," Katona says, as the customer spots a kit he hadn't seen earlier. Games Workshop, he adds, is an innovative company. It's keeping kids interested. "It takes a lot of energy. You must have expertise and the time and energy to sell the product." Ask Katona about any product in the store, and he's played it, built it or can name several dozen other SKUs the company has made.

The biker buys the kit and some paints as the UPS delivery man rolls in several big boxes. They're all from Games Workshop.

He might be the Ian MacKaye of the game industry.

The latter, a member of seminal punk bands Minor Threat and Fugazi, co-founded Dischord Records in the early '80s to self-produce and self-distribute his band's music. Without major label support, music videos or radio play (outside of the occasional college station), MacKaye's do-it-yourself record company has blossomed into a successful, if modest, enterprise.

Four years ago, Eric Poses filled the trunk of his car with a board game he invented, Loaded Questions, and drove from store to store in a 16-week, cross-country trek to promote and distribute his creation. He listens to jazz, not punk, but his DIY philosophy is closer to that shared by the spikey-haired set.

To date, Poses' one man, face-to-face sales effort has yielded more than 100,000 copies sold. Citing the difficulty of rounding up four or five players, he designed Loaded Questions to be playable with as few as two players. The former copywriter at an ad agency recently completed another tour that included demos at 14 FAO Schwarz stores around the country. Demos have been another big key to the game's success. "You have to have (games) visible," he explains. Getting retail employees involved is equally essential, he adds, since it enables them to give a quick overview to a customer about how a game is played.

Consumers typically "want to buy what they've heard about, so word of mouth needs to spread," for a new game to become a success, Poses says ("Games like Tribond and Uno took years to catch on," says Endless Games co-founder Kevin McNulty). His grassroots approach has earned him a steady distribution base (80 percent of the retailers who snapped up Loaded Questions in '97 are still buying).

Loaded Questions, after all, is best described as a party game: light, fun, harmless entertainment. Glenn Drover, Jr. will attempt to break into the market this fall with a pair of strategy titles—not something one could easily whip out with a bag of peanuts on the red-eye. The president and founder of Illinois-based Eagle Games received Avalon Hill's Tactics 2 from his parents one Christmas and was soon hooked on Risk and Axis and Allies. Top that with a keen interest in history, and you've got a strategy game buff.

For a weighty bit of irony, consider that, in an industry rife with strategy games for PCs and video game consoles, Drover left the computer game industry to pursue the three dimensional kind. The move seems almost anachronistic. "Board games have a social aspect you don't often find in a video game because (in the latter case) you are playing against a screen. Board games are also tactile: It's real versus flat," he says. Moreover, he believes toy soldier collecting is entering a new renaissance. Drover hopes the same appeal of Conte miniatures will draw customers to his American Civil War and War! Age of Imperialism games this fall, each of which will contain several armies' worth of miniatures and a gigantic game board (46 inches by 36 inches).

Strategy gaming is a niche market, but Drover hopes the three sets of rules included in each game (basic, standard and advanced) will hit with a wider audience without leaving the hardcore gamer behind. Girls, however, "probably won't be interested," he concedes.

That's reason enough for Endless Games co-founder Kevin McNulty to steer clear of strategy games. "We target mothers. She's our best spokes(person). She sees Password, it brings back fond memories of the TV show and she brings it home to play with the family." McNulty hopes to weather the current economic climate with staples such as Family Feud, Kismet and Tickle Bee and a selection of SKUs for a variety of age groups. Two new games, Pop Smarts (pop culture trivia) and Two Out of Three (color and shape matching), bolster the 2001 line. He likens a company's product range to a mutual fund, "If one thing goes down, hopefully another goes up."

Store owner Brian Newman expects game sales to increase this holiday season because of, not in spite of, the economy.

Expensive dinners will be out, says the owner of four Game Daze stores in Arizona, and people will be looking for entertainment in the home. Newman anticipates Blink by Out of the Box (the makers of Apples to Apples), Take Away by Jax and Simpsons Monopoly by USAopoly all to be hot gift items. In the meantime, Dungeons and Dragons 3^rd edition by Wizards of the Coast and "family games you don't see at Target or Toys R Us (from manufacturers) like Endless Games" have done well for his stores.

Retailers say card games, especially those from Gamewright and Out of the Box, are also consistent winners. "They're a good price point and you can play a full game in 15 minutes," says Gwen Karnes, sales assistant at Learning Tower on Long Island, N.Y.

Cranium is still a big seller for Learning Tree Toys, Books and Games in Oklahoma City, Okla. "We were the first (store) in our city to carry it," boasts Patty Tepper-Rasmussen, co-owner of the 5,500 square foot store. Gamewright and Pressman are equally strong (only Pressman's traditional games—she'll leave the company's licensed product such as Scooby-Doo Snackin' Action Game for the mass marketeers). Learning Tree also stocks a considerable number of SKUs from International Playthings. "We carry all their stuff," she says. "They're games no one's heard of so it's important that our staff know how to play them." In fact, she adds, "we don't buy anything we don't know how to play." Getting games out of the box and into the open isn't enough. Staff must become familiar with the many titles. "Our staff can tell a customer how to play (a game) in 20 or 30 seconds," Newman explains. If the game is out, one or two rounds of play will help a customer decide if the product fits his or her need.

At Toy Factory in Jacksonville, Fla., for which games have not been a big category, Manager Kenneth Box finds products on the borderline between games and puzzles do better. Tangoes by Rex Games (in which players race to make a shape with geometric pieces), tavern puzzles by Uncle's Puzzles ("big Father's Day item or for men's birthdays") and murder mystery games and puzzles (by University Games and others) are all solid sellers. So, too, is Set by Set Enterprises. It's a game in which players must find visual patterns on three cards among the 12 laid face up on the table. "The niece of one of our customers has a learning disability which makes it difficult for her to play many games, but she's terrific at Set and regularly beats most of her relatives," Box says. Many teachers in the Jacksonville area buy it to play in their classes.

At Men-At-Arms Hobbies, Katona is cutting open a shipment and checking his inventory.

For the fall, he will stock much from the new Games Workshop lines: Cityfight (a rules supplement covering battles fought in cities for the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000), Codex: Tau (which details rules for two new races in the WH40K universe, Tau and Kroot) and, of course, the Lords of the Rings tabletop wargame (a boxed set with rules and 48 miniatures and an assortment of smaller boxed sets and blister packs).

He looks forward to the holiday season, which he expects to be good. In the meantime, it's hit or miss. One customer goes to the counter with an armful of paints and miniatures. Another takes a few laps around the aisles and leaves.

"You have to have a passion," Katona says. He surveys his store: rows of miniatures, out-of-print games stacked on top of packed shelves, the dark game room which will come alive on the weekend. "I like what I sell."