I often think about a thing that happened when I was still a kid and pretty new to Warhammer.
There were this FLGS located pretty much exactly inbetween my school and my home. I didnt do very well in school, my grades were okish but I skipped class A LOT. Oh the joy of being a girl with comically autistic traits in the 90’s, my baby brother got a diagnosis, I got a “why are you so weird, stop it”.
But I spent a lot of time in this store, and im genuinely surprised they let me do that. I was a kid, I couldnt buy very much. I just sat there and painted or played a few games. And sometimes I got to build stuff for the store (very exciting). They even convinced me to send in a contribution to Golden Daemon (I did not win, not even close 😂)
Even back then I was obsessed with oldhammer stuff. And the store owner who had been into nerd stuff for decades thought that was really fun and says something along the line of “hey I have a few first edition WHFB armies in a box in the basement, if you want tou can cone down with me and look at them.
So there I go, 14 year old girl, with this 40+ year old man into a shady ass basement to look at minis.
And the minis were soo awesome, he was a very good painter. He also found a “how to paint minis”- pamphlet from like the 80’s and gave it to me (boy do I wish I still had it)
But like, what was I thinking. If he had been any kind of shady guy, things could have ended so badly. I cringe just thinking about it. And I wasnt a naive kid either, ever since I hit puberty at like 11 ive had grown ass men grope me on the street before. I knew all about “bad men”.
But shoutout to that store for being one of the first places in my life where I felt appreciateed and not not a burden. Where people would greet me excitedly whenever I showed up. My guess is they saw a lot of themselves in that lonely and weird kid.
I would link to it, but it closed down over a decade ago, and I heard the owner passed away. And that is such a damn shame because the world needs more people like him. That creates safe spaces for the weird and the lost.
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I got a job at my Friendly Local Gaming Store about three weeks ago, and I've been really loving it! The pay isn't great, but it's a lot more than minimum wage, and the hours aren't full time, but it's letting me ease back into working after months of just lying around in a depressed fugue state.
It's Extremely chill, too- I keep joking that no more laid back, chill retail environment could exist, except maybe a head shop or dispensary. And since they get robbed FAR more frequently than Tabletop Gaming stores do, it probably evens out.
But the absolute coolest part is that ours is the LGBTQ+ friendliest gaming store and community that I've ever encountered, and we very much pride ourselves on that, and take a No Tolerance policy to bullshit and bigotry. And yesterday, this beautiful transwoman who'd been in earlier that week for the first time, came back in with her girlfriend. And I wasn't even working behind the counter that day, I was out at a table playing a game with friends- and she came up to me and told me "I literally came back to this store because of you, this is my girlfriend, he's the one who told me about Lesbian Board Game Night" and it was literally the single greatest, most rewarding customer service experiences of my life. Like, sure, organization is nice, teamwork is important, sales skills are yada yada yada. But NOTHING compares to the feeling you get knowing that you make the store feel like a safe place.
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The Nowhere’s Store Saga
Alrighty folks, it’s Storytime. I, along with my business partner, a couple of employees, and a handful of very dedicated volunteers, am building (quite literally) a Friendly Local Game Store and geeky community center in Springfield, Missouri! And hoo boy, it has been a journey. I’ll be merciful to the scrollers and put most of it under the cut, but click through to see the adventures we’ve been on for the last six months of dealing with a decrepit old building full of mysteries!
But first, a little begging for money. We’re so close to being open, but we’re also doing it as working class folks who don’t get on well with banks, so we’re dependent entirely on personal loans and crowdfunding. If you’d like to help us buy ceiling tiles along on our journey, please check out our GoFundMe!
First, a little background. I grew up in the gaming community in my hometown, getting my first job in the industry when I was 16, working as a Dungeon Master for a game and comic shop called Dragon’s Lair, which became my home store and the center of both my social and professional life. When Dragon’s Lair closed down in 2010, I bounced from shop to shop for a little while, looking to replace the sense of community that Dragon’s Lair had embodied. Nothing ever quite set right for me. Either the place felt too much like a store, where I felt uncomfortable spending time there without constantly buying stuff, or it didn’t have enough space, or it didn’t cater to the markets I cared about, or I just plain didn’t like the people behind the counter. So eventually, I got enough, and decided that I was gonna start my own store! With blackjack! And hookers! Actually, probably not those last couple things, because the license fees are outrageous.
So Nowhere’s Store of Forgotten Lore was conceived. It took a few years to get to the point of being able to actually pull the trigger, but the circumstances that came with the pandemic forced our hand, and we started building Nowhere’s Store into something real.
After a couple months of sitting around a table at a pizza joint and hashing out details, a metric fuckload of paperwork, and a lucky break involving a rock in someone’s shoe, we finally had a place. It’s huge, and the price is fantastic, but... Well, we had our work cut out for us. What we found when we got there was this:
Our building had been a carpet wholesale place since the 1960s, and had seen a lot of use and abuse over the decades. We found all sorts of unpleasantness in our ceiling and our walls... and our floors... and any other available (or unavailable) nook and/or cranny. Some highlights include:
Shoddy construction on carpet shelving that would have held literal tons of product. This particular bit, helpfully labeled by whoever Shawn was, fell. the fuck. off. while someone was working on that shelf.
See this wall? No you don’t, because that’s not a wall, it’s a Wall-Like Object. It is merely the suggestion of a wall, because a real wall wouldn’t be held in place solely by two screws and a single piece of goddamn corner molding.
Alex’s tool chest here was hiding a broken and open window, which solved the where the fuck is all this humidity coming from??? question we had for the first couple months. Why there was a chest-high window in a former-bathroom-turned-closet, the world may never know.
This is our office, which as you can see, was tastefully paneled in 1980s wood paneling and brown shag carpet stapled to pegboard. Because sure. The shag was removed immediately, but the paneling remains...
For those of you unfamiliar with the Holy Trifecta of Jury-Rigging, that is baling twine. Which was the only thing holding up a length of electrical conduit that was suspended from the ceiling. That’s definitely safe and up to code.
Thankfully, most of the above has gone bye-bye, and we were able to start actual construction.
Once the sham-walls were out of the way, this is what the front of the shop looked like. All you see before the beginnings of the new wall is strictly retail space. About 2,500 square feet of space for games, comics, and collectibles. But that’s only about a third of our space.
This is our reading lounge. Until we get the rest of the shop completed, it’ll be our primary gaming space, but the end-goal is a space where people can just come in and hang out, read some comics, or just spend some time with other members of the community. It’ll be themed after a 19th century explorer’s club, and that big brown panel in the back is in the middle of becoming a false window, where we can display landscape scenes to move the lounge from the African savannah to the windswept deserts of Mars, and anywhere else we can imagine.
Speaking of gaming space...
This is Sparta gaming space. Roughly the same amount of space as the front of the shop, this is going to be our tournament space. Enough room to host a full-scale Magic tournament, with a couple board gaming groups or tabletop RPG parties as well, without breaking a sweat. We’re even putting in a back counter so that those participating in a tournament don’t have to schlep all the way to the front counter to buy some chips.
But Nowhere, you ask, I’m self-conscious around crowds, and Magic players are loud. I wouldn’t want to run my D&D campaign in the middle of so many people. I hate your shop and I hate you!
Well, aside from being oddly aggressive, my dear strawman, you’re also...
Wrong!
With our social media mala for scale, what you see before you is one of our three private game rooms! Through a secret door (yes, really), is a second section of the store, which will be dedicated entirely to private gaming spaces, all available to our community for free! Not available in Alaska or Hawaii. Void where prohibited.
There’s two concrete walls and an air gap between this section of the shop and the rest of the place, so it’ll be noise-free and, due to the struggles we dealt with trying to run games during lockdown, will be set up for streaming, so that any member of your groups that can’t make it to the shop can remote in via Discord or other apps and participate just like everybody else.
Now, up to this point, everything’s kinda looked like... well, shit. It’s looked like shit. Bare concrete, shockingly unsafe walls, and janky construction throughout. But we’ve been busy these last few months, and now it looks like this:
We’re installing the slatwall right now, so apologies for that being in the way, but look! Walls! Carpet! People! I’m actually in this picture, there in the hat, writing this very post.
That whole wall there, that runs the length of the retail space, is going to be dedicated to comics. Our manager, Stu, is a fixture in our local gaming and comics community, and has been The Comic Guy for 30+ years. We’re really excited to see what he does with it, as he’s been given free reign to do with it what he pleases.
Our manga section is my business partner’s baby, and he has great plans for it, starting with the massive X-frame display you can see behind me there.
The back wall will be dedicated to tabletop RPGs on one side, and board games on the other. We plan on carrying things that are hard to find elsewhere, including niche miniatures and tabletop games made by people other than Hasbro.
Our counter, which will be where the slatwall is now (the counters themselves are in the back right now), will be split between card games and collectibles.
And speaking of niche, hard-to-find products, one of the things I’m most excited about is our local creator display. We have a floor display that’ll be a showcase for local artists, authors, and other creators. We want to show our customers that they don’t need to order things from half a world away to get affordable, handmade crafts, and we want to show our community that we’re willing to put our money (and our floor space) where our mouth is, and regularly stock local creations.
We’re opening in stages, but the front will be ready for stock within the week, and we should be open very soon. However, like I mentioned back at the beginning, we’re running low on funds, and we’re looking to the community for help in the final stretch. Whether you’re local gamers, friends of the staff, or just people who want to see a community-centric place like ours exist in the world, please consider donating to our GoFundMe. We’re also amenable to loans, so if that’s more your speed, feel free to email us at
[email protected]
Whelp, that’s it for now! Thanks for spending your time on this post, and happy gaming.
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