Chapter 4 - Waterloo

I probably started looking for a game store when I got roped into Magic: The Gathering and I needed to buy cards. You couldn't really find CCG products outside of a game store-- maybe a few token booster packs at Toys 'R' Us and the dusty corner near the paperback books in Wal-Mart-- and today the situation is relatively unchanged. Toy stores tend to carry more of these games now, but they focus more on the kiddie card games like Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh!

Most game stores live and die based on their CCG sales. It's the only "safe" product to stock because you know it'll sell, and due to the games addictive, collectible nature, sell quite rapidly. Not nearly as many people play RPGs, and the product doesn't move off the shelves like cards. Once you've bought Dungeons & Dragons, you own it, and you don't really need any more of it. Board games are a money sink. Many of them are quite good, but they're expensive and collectors are a very fringe group, even among gamers. The only other product that sold well were the Games Workshop miniatures on the Warhammer and 40K line.

eBay and Amazon.com have basically delivered a deathblow to the small-time FLGS because you can get as many cards as you want delivered to your home, and cheaper.

Waterloo was an unusual little shop situated in Old Gilbert, a historical throwback to old Arizona architecture, sort of like what might happen if you took the town of Deadwood and moved modern shops into them. On the exterior, it looked like the Old West. With stoplights. I remember there being quite a controversy when the bar across the street put up a neon light.

It was just about everything you'd imagine a lonely nerd lair might look on the inside: an underlit, shadowy basement with an uneven (borderline dangerous) flooring, poor air conditioning, and dusty, smoky shelves. Imagine the shop in Gremlins where the old Chinese guy sells off Gizmo, only darker.

The owner, whose name I could never remember, chain-smoked to a hilarious degree, which couldn't have been good for the printed products stored inside. And that place was constucted of old, splintered wood, packed to the rafters with paper products. If he'd dropped one of those smokes the place would have gone up like Mrs. O'Leary's barn.

It was a great place, unusual even for a game shop. It was called Waterloo because it originally started stocking miniature Napoleonic War soldiers-- not for a game, just for hobbyists. A full quarter of the store sat disused for as long as I was there, stocking those little French dudes. The rest of the store was dominated by the RPG products, but they never really sold that well either. That's why I liked Waterloo: the RPGs sold so poorly that I could find almost any rare, out-of-print book I wanted buried somewhere in there.

It was a forty-minute drive, so I typically only went there with an agenda. I spent most of my time in the storage room in back playing RPGA modules and chatting with its resident group of counter monkeys. They were a surly bunch, fond of making ultimatums and talking ill of people behind their backs. The third edition of D&D was on the horizon and it gave them something to bitch constantly about instead of their normal topics of conversation: how much they didn't like the other players in their Warhammer 40K group, how cheesy the Space Marine army is, and arguing about the most disgustingly unbalanced O.C.C. in Rifts.

If you didn't follow that, believe me, it's not worth understanding.

A lot of old gamers go that way, eventually getting terminally pissed off and hanging around the back of game shops telling newbies how much their games suck while playing really obscure wargames or German board games. A lot of people mistake them for grognards, but real grognards tend never to leave their basements because their wargames usually require a table around 10 square yards in area and take approximately a month to finish.

You think I'm kidding.

Like any group of chatty gossips, gamers do more than just sit around a table and whine. They do other things while whining, rather like a sewing circle. These guys played a lot of 40K, so most of the time they took up the large central table and painted their dozens of miniatures together. It's a common hobby among miniature wargamers. It's a slow, exacting process that takes steady hands and a lot of spare time, and most people who do it perfer not to do it alone. The process also normally takes good lighting, and how they did it in the cave-like confines of Waterloo without giving themselves permanent eye strain still puzzles me.

I tried my hand at it, but never demonstrated any appreciable talent. It requires patience and artistic talent, of which I have neither. I foolishly decided to play an Orkish army, one of the most difficult armies to paint because they have a lot of exposed skin (skin tones are hard to paint) and bared faces (eyes and faces are also hard to paint on such a small scale). Not only that, Ork armies are normally very, very large and a 2000 point army can have around a hundred individual pieces, not counting vehicles. If I'd had any brains at all I would have played Necrons-- spray paint black and you're done.

The only decent figures I've ever painted were a team of Skaven (rat-people) for Blood Bowl, a game about violent American style football played by fantasy races like elves and dwarves. I don't know how I did it, and I couldn't do it again. I've played Blood Bowl exactly once about ten years ago. With my brother. Let's just say that's one purchase I regret.

I never worked there and I rarely spent more time than the tight four hours necessary to play an RPGA module, mostly because it was so hot that I couldn't stand sitting there for very much longer. The place was already a nightmare of allergens and B.O.; I didn't need to suffer any more heat stroke than was absolutely necessary. Remember that the summer temperatures in Arizona top out at around 125 degrees. So I don't really have any great stories.

Those came when Michael's Magic opened, a place about fifteen minutes closer where the nerdy pecking order had not yet been established. Geeks can be rather territorial about their stomping grounds, but loyalties will shift on a dime on things as small as driving distance or whether or not the owner stocks Dr. Pepper. I won't say I felt unwelcome at Waterloo, but it was never my turf and the gamers there weren't the welcoming sort. That can become a problem when the established store lurkers hang out all the time but don't really like each other.

So began the invasion of the Wizards of the Coast.