Noah Dove

Review of Berkeley Game Distributors

When I set foot in the store, my first experience ...

When I set foot in the store, my first experience was the clerk asking me to please put my ice cream treat that I'd brought in behind the front counter. No food in the merchandise space. Of course, they didn't want people getting their filthy fingers over things, I can understand. I was even willing to shrug it off as a weird store policy and a bad first impression, but it turned out to be part of a larger problem.

The front of the store is laid out relatively open (for a game store), with the "safe" items like puzzles and conventional board games up front. Even as it moves through the gradient of spiel des jahres games to MTG to 40k to historical mini wargames, things are kept to look very clean and mainstream. Meanwhile, the playing space has been completely shoved into the basement. There, the regulars can be kept out of sight/sound/smell entirely, lest their presence disturb the mom casually walking in through the door looking for a puzzle. As if all those sweaty neckbeards were just as bad for the sale as ice cream dripped on everything.

It even permeated into the conversations I heard. More that people were allowed to show up for the scheduled warmahordes tournament than a place where people came to throw some dice in a pickup game. Nowhere were there people just hanging out (there wasn't any space on the main floor allotted for it), or just playing games, or having fun. There didn't seem to be a sense of community, and if there was, they seemed all but careful to hide it.

Instead, the whole thing was devoted to being exactly one thing - a soulless retail space. An IKEA except for European game designers instead of European furniture makers. Walk through the path, buy your stuff, don't touch anything, don't be weird. You almost expected there to be a cafe awkwardly wedged into the corner to offer sanitized chic like at a Barnes and Noble.

In the end I stayed long enough to rifle through some confrontation minis and 40k books, but I didn't buy anything. I'm all for supporting one's local game store (and I do), but this place doesn't seem to be one - it's more that games are what happens to be on sale at a generic Berkeley boutique. If there's nothing more on tap than what the store manager decides he wants to let you get your grubbiness on while you're buying something it would be one thing, but if you're nothing but a display case for the newest expansion to Carcassone, then I'm sorry, but you're competing with Amazon. Who offer that same expansion at half the cost.