SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
I met Lucy and discovered Wild Ways on a trip to Newark and she has kindly contributed to our blog. You can read about my trip here. I asked Lucy to explain how her shop and club came about and her philosophy of gaming as a hobby and a business.
In 2010, I decided to work for myself. I'd been working between Early Years education and the charity sector for years and, in both, as time progressed, the human element was taking more of a back seat to paperwork, box-ticking and targets. I didn’t like it. So, with £500 of overtime money and what was left of my last pay check after paying bills, I left my job, rented a small market stall in Lincoln Central Market and filled it with second-hand books: one of my passions. It went well, thankfully, as there was no plan B! I sold lots and the credit exchange service meant I was getting more books than I had space to store. Living in Newark anyway and a little tired of getting the train at 8am every morning, I quickly sought out a small unit in the Upstairs of the town's Edwardian Buttermarket and opened up what was then called Belle’s Books. I bought in a small line of new children’s educational books and some giftware and, for 2 years, I was able to slowly take on the 2 units next door too, started a book club and cultivated a steady stream of regular customers. I loved every minute of it, the chats over the counter, recommending great reads and spending time with people that loved the same things I did. Then something happened - quite by chance -that made my business and, I have to say, me as a person, that little bit more complete: Table-Top Gaming. A customer traded in books en masse, 11 boxes full, and, in the bottom of one, I found something I hadn’t come across before. It was a heavy A4 hardback. Looking through it, there certainly appeared to be fiction elements, but there were also drawings, of all kinds of mythical creatures, and what look to be charts with ‘Stats’ written at the top of one. Not knowing what it was, I found something similar online and priced it up, gathering it was a form of game in a book and put it in a window display. Strange things started to happen. A veritable collection of mostly bearded males started to stop by the window and spend ages looking in; they would go away and appear later in the day with friends. On further examination, they all appeared to share other attributes, mainly science-fiction related slogan t-shirts and carrying back-packs. A couple came in picked up the book, flicked through it excitedly, started chatting away and asking, can we get anymore? do we have anymore? were we stocking games? Followed by long drawn looks of disappointment when I said: ‘No sorry’. On the third day, a tall man with short blond hair and glasses came in, picked up the book looked it over and smiled, then asked the same question: Do you have anymore roleplay books? I said No, admitted I wasn’t actually sure what it was, that it seemed like a whole other literary world to me and, off the back of that, he said, ‘Well, if you can close up for half an hour, lets grab a coffee from the café opposite and I’ll explain everything!’ Three coffees later, I found out all about the amazing world they call table-top gaming. In the coming days, more (what I now know to be) gamers appeared, asking if we could start stocking games, that they’d love somewhere to go and meet others, that they were having to game at home, in garages or spare bedrooms, but would like more options and certainly more space.
Within the month, our first box of games had arrived. With it, 20 or so Gamers, who would turn up almost daily to look through them and not leave until they were done buying and talking, so, by the end of the second month, we had made arrangement with the café opposite to borrow a few tables, so they could essentially, bless them, move their arses out of the sales area and go play some games. We rebranded as ‘Wild Ways’ and the septagram, the seven point star that has a deep personal meaning to me in terms of the values it represents in my personal culture, was what I wanted above the door. Value-led, in all things. I didn’t want it any other way. Today, that first group of 20 people has turned into over 300 people, including a 50 strong under-16s club and whole families that have come through our doors, and, wonderfully, stayed. We’re now in our 9th year as a book-and-game store and table-top club. Me and the tall blond-haired coffee drinker are in our 5th year of marriage and 3rd year of parenting our beloved son and official shop toddler, Tristan. We now have over 2000sq ft of space that we’re diligently renovating to fit the ever-increasing number of gamers and number of games. We do and stock the full range of games, have 4/5 roleplay groups in a week. Nearly everyone plays Magic the Gathering, for which we’re an official play store. We have our Sunday wargamers, our regular dedicated board games days, with new games being introduced all the time to our board games library, which can be used as part of the membership. We charge £25 for the year: once its paid, you can use all of our facilities, our gaming boards, scenery, painting station, table space, be taught new games, priority access to tournaments, private roleplay space, you name it. If we have space and time, we provide From day 1, we’ve always been gamer-led. If someone wants a product ordering, a game to be played, we source it and run it. It means the business we have built is sustainable, as we’re happy to adapt, and always, always, put ‘our guys’, the customers who have become our family, first. We still sell second hand too, except we’ve extended the credit exchange to all games, comics, graphic novels and trading cards. Everyone helps anyone else, our TOs and Game Patrons teach and support one another, taking the lead in introducing new club members and help our little ones find friends and choose games If you take anything away from this post, I want it to be this: you don’t have to play the ‘business’ game to do great business. When you make money from a hobby, you naturally attract like-minded people together. There is an innate imperative with something as valuable, as useful as table-top gaming to build community and build it well, because that’s how passion survives. The older teaching the younger, sharing those experiences of gathering round a table, telling, stories, rolling the dice. Communication is an inbuilt necessity, friendship the best and most naturalistic result. Wild Ways is a second home to our gamers. I know that because they tell me, and still 9 years later I get a tear in my eye. Most of these people I see on a daily basis. I’ve celebrated as many of them have got engaged, got their dream jobs, passed their GCSE’s. And then of the other side of things… Last year, I stood side by side with them in a church pew helping to celebrate the life of one of our 16 year-olds who unexpectedly passed away after suffering an asthma attack at home. He had been a member of the club since he was 13. He loved us and ‘his club’ and we him, so he was buried with his favourite Magic deck, was carried out to the song Wild One and I don’t know what made me cry more, the occasion itself, or seeing my guys, a couple in their Wild Ways t-shirts gathered together supporting one another and his devastated mum at the grave side. We all went back to the club after, played games and cried As members of this community, you have an opportunity to make a difference, every time, to sit down to play. You can make it something that brings laughter and brings people together or you can make just another excuse for someone to go away defeated in more ways than one. Games help us, for a little while, come away from the day-to-day and the bonds it often brings with it. They let you engage in a world, and with others, in a way that can't help but make you smile, and forget, for a little while, the worries in your head or the bad day at work This is a safe space. We keep it that way. No power gaming allowed. Respect shown to all, regardless of who they are or how old they are. Me and my husband aren’t afraid to take the lead in demonstrating how it should be and, on the very rare occasion, something is said: if a negative behaviour appears to be one that has settled in and stayed, as it were, that person doesn’t get to come back (to date only 4 people in 9 years). Build the club, the community, the nerd family you want, by your choice, to commit to kindness. Because, in those darker moments, it's knowing there’s those places to go, those happy fun memories of ‘your club’, ‘your friends’, that can make all the difference. Please, protect them
P.S. ... I said I don't roleplay often. My best creation to date was Lonesome, a Bayou-born, alcoholic female goblin with hat-related kleptomaniac issues who rides a giant rabbit that can only turn right due to having survived (kind of) myxomatosis ... they wont let me play her.
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