I don't think the Seattle-San Diego parallel is an accident, either. Both cities had a post-war military boom, with the former becoming an aviation nexus and the latter a naval epicenter. Their explosive growth happened concurrently throughout the 1960s and 1970s, hence the parallels. Later was when they diverged, with the 1990s seeing Seattle become the world capital for software, and San Diego going all-in on its resort-town geography to capture much of southern California's convention, transportation, and communications industries.
In any case, there I was, right in the middle of Queensrÿche's Empire, hand on heart and everybody listening in the silence, and I had a Monday afternoon to explore, so naturally I went to a bunch of game stores.
Maple Bar Games in University Place is a store after my own heart, an ultra-efficient deployment that's exactly how I would build DSG if I were doing it over from day one. MBG offers broad coverage of Magic and some ancillary TCGs, enough seating to run core events, and a respectable video game stock. Aesthetics were solid and pleasant, and parking was ample. As with many of my peers in this industry, the owner is a friend of mine, so he and his adorable kindergarten daughter joined me for the rest of the day's excursion.
Pink Gorilla Games near the University of Washington was one of my must-see stops. Not because I expected it to be some massive monument to import and retro video games, but because Pink Gorilla is tightly focused on doing just those things, and I've been in both fandoms since my youth. Kelsey Lewin has two locations for the Gorilla, the other one a microboutique downtown, but today I wanted to make sure I got to the original storefront, the "Metal Jesus Home Store." It's small by FLGS standards, under 2,000 square feet from what I could see. But every inch of it, floor to ceiling, boasted a gorgeous array of video games, accessories, collectibles, plushies, and related aggregalia. They even had a Gachapon machine to amuse the kiddo.
Meeples Games on the west peninsula of Seattle proper is an upstairs boutique that combines cozy earth tones with delicious cookies, and honestly if you can't appreciate that then we can't be friends anymore. Two owners visited yet a third owner we knew and we got the grand tour, including a fully functioning kitchen tucked away right in the middle of the store's publicly-accessible footage donut. By now the rain was pounding down pretty heavily, and to everyone else there this was basically invisible, but I was absolutely experiencing the travel since Phoenix gets about five inches of rain a year (but it sure is somethin' the day it falls). The 7-11 next door even had my orange cocaine drink, so after chasing the cookie with that, it was off to dinner at...
Mox Boarding House in Bellevue, one of three locations, is just as silly and excessive as everyone says, and yet it's impossible not to be impressed. The sheer capital magnitude of Mox is worth the visit. Everything you would think a Disney Store of board games would do? Mox does it. Large staff census, direct customer approaches at regular intervals, demo tables, splash tables, nooks, theme aisles, general gameplay tables, a rentable room that could be used for a wedding reception if you needed it to be (and probably has been), and of course a full restaurant. The "Mox Tacos" were acceptable, and coming from an Arizonan that counts as an endorsement.
There were at least five more places I can think of that I wanted to drop in on, and I penciled that in for Wednesday, and then of course it ended up not working out and I headed home on an earlier flight than planned, for which I have to give Delta props, they made it easy and trouble-free.
Tuesday was the big day at Wizards, from morning through evening. Due to a non-disclosure agreement I actually won't be sharing most of what I discussed with them! But I observed some things that I think we all benefit from understanding -- store owners, employees, and players alike.
Information flows in peculiar ways in and through large corporations, and Wizards is absolutely one of these, even though it rose from gamer circles and humbler digs. Their headquarters is just an office building, though admittedly with some extremely cool decor. It's so much "just an office building" that you only see the one angle of it from the WPN article photos because the other side of the complex is occupied by other businesses and has their logos hanging up. (Mitsubishi Aircraft is one of them.) But to those of us out in the world of Magic and D&D fandom, the Wizards HQ takes on something of a mystical quality. It's basically Hogwarts! And it's easy for us to forget that the people there, while sometimes celebrities of a sort in our particular niche, are also just folks with jobs who go to work, and possess no supernatural powers of divination. They use everything they know to create good products, programs, and marketing, and then they count on scattered, imperfect, and sometimes unreliable information to figure out how things went.
I intuited that one of the key things I could bring to the table was a self-aware perspective, a willingness to provide unfiltered information without adversarial assumptions. Wizards endures a bombardment of negative feedback from players and store owners alike because that's the kind of information that is most likely to find a conduit back to them. It becomes difficult for them to ascertain what worked (beyond what sales numbers reveal) and also why the parts that worked, did so. Imagine if an athlete had to accept all the invective that is customary to their profession, but when they succeeded, there was silence instead of cheers. They can read the scoreboard, but it can be hard to tell what they actually did right. While not perfect, I do get accurate reads on a lot of what worked for DSG and trustable reads on what went right among my inner circle of peer friends. I hoped this might be a goldmine for the various internal teams I met with, a way that I could tie concrete examples to things they were wondering if we had seen happen, and if so, how much of it, and in what way(s).
You can do your part too, by completing the various surveys publishers like Wizards send out. And from what I remember of survey implementation when I was in government employ, I can speak with professional authority that Wizards's market research is well-executed. People like to down-meme Mark Rosewater when he refers to "market research" as having told Wizards that something is so, when that person's local game store or play group maybe doesn't do it that way. Well, then tell them! But tell them when they solicit the info, because the feedback channels they set up are meant to improve the quality of the information that gets to them, and make it actionable. Publishers absolutely do take those responses seriously and they can make a difference in what your favorite game offers next in its future releases.
I delivered a substantial presentation in the afternoon, complete with a question-and-answer session that had me really wishing I would just bite the bullet and get hearing aids already -- I have a hereditary doom to become stone deaf if I survive into retirement, and the hearing loss is already noticeable -- and fortunately I managed through it with the help of a patient and friendly audience. Wizards paid me actual moneydollars for this component of the visit, and as such I have a professional obligation to keep that work product exclusive to their private use. They did film it, so if they opt to share any part of it, that is obviously perfectly all right by me. For those of you whose curiosity is overwhelming, I'm afraid I can't be of much help, other than directing you to my various publicly known spheres of expertise and their related subject matter.
After a nourishing catered dinner, I joined my audience for an activity I do far too little of anymore. I played Magic. You heard me.
To be specific, I drafted Mystery Convention Edition. The only way to play this set right now is at select MagicFest events; the Mystery Retail Edition has slightly different contents and releases in about three months. I hate chaos drafting, but was pleased to learn that the level of curation in the Mystery set makes it draft and play more like a cube. Cube drafting is one of my favorite formats of Magic to play these days, so you might imagine how surprised and happy I was to make this discovery. I had little enthusiasm for Mystery after the initial reveal, but having played it firsthand, now I suspect it could end up being a genuine hit. We'll find out in March. A lot is still left to learn, such as cost and availability.
I couldn't do much more after that, because 45-year-old Bahr doesn't have the energy of these bright, outgoing youngsters anymore. I enjoyed meeting my company reps, both past and present, as well as the content team I've worked with to bring you WPN retailer support articles, and on top of that, a veritable who's-who of familiar names and faces and people whose particular work I've either enjoyed as a player, sold as a retailer, or both. (And of course Nelson Brown, our WPN retailer liaison, who channels Spuds MacKenzie levels of exuberance without breaking a sweat.) A few of the longer-tenured Wizards staff were even re-acquaintances from my Level 3 Judge days. One of my hosts and I swapped family stories, discovering to my delight that we had a lot in common. And whilst moving from meeting to meeting, the introductions kept right on going. I recounted that DSG had seen better-than-par sales of one of the other games Wizards produces, which of course summoned a smile from the person in charge of that product line. It was just that kind of visit, and I did my best not to waste it.
The final day was, unfortunately, not contributory to the narrative. Because I was out of town, naturally an inordinate number of things cropped up that demanded my specific attention, and in recognition that I'd be struggling to enjoy a day touring more game stores and/or grunge-related tourist traps with that cloud building overhead, I turned in the rental car, swapped my flight, and got my desert-dwelling bones back to the wasteland from whence they came. It all worked out in the end, and my kids got a kick out of their Pink Gorilla t-shirts.
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