SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
I drop in Black Lion Games whenever I go back to my old home town to visit family and friends there. It's an easy-to-miss shop on Buccleuch Street, near the University. Seemingly following the tradition of FLGS (Friendly Local Gaming Stores), as established by Newark's Wild Ways, the shop front is completely unadorned. However, it does break with convention by announcing its identity with an ageing notice board beside the door. Argh. The Grocer's Apostrophe seeps into Gaming... On the sunny afternoon in April when I turn up, the shutters are down. Have they closed? No, assistant manager Stu has just been next door getting a coffee and hurries back to let me in. It's nice inside. Airy and bright, with well-stocked shelves - though Stu is at pains to point out that, had I turned up the very next day, I would have found the shelves overflowing with the haul from Conpulsion, Edinburgh's very own Games Convention. It's heartening to see stock like this. When I first discovered Black Lion, it was a set of shelves in the basement of a retro-fashion store called Flip. What was I doing in a retro-fashion store, you might well ask? Well, I was younger then and had delusions of vintage style consciousness. I think I was looking for a leather jacket. I found Liam's stall instead. It's not been a stall for a long time (and Flip closed in 2007) but there's still one shelf that commemorates those humble beginnings: the vintage roleplaying games and the cardboard boxes of second hand modules and indie rulebooks that demand to be browsed. There were lean years in "the new premises" (as I still think of it). I remember coming in to nearly-bare shelves when stock had to be sold to fund new orders. It's not like that now. Business is holding up. There are evening clubs for Magic: The Gathering and Keyforge. Not a bare shelf in sight - and this is before the arrival of the Mighty Haul. I chat away to Stu for quite awhile. He's immensely friendly and knowledgeable, speaking with equal enthusiasm and insight about Monopoly (further to our evening of playtesting the world's most popular boardgame) and unknown (to me) indie RPGs like Apocalypse World. Stu (on the right) helps out another customer You get a real sense from Black Lion that the hobby's in good shape. A youthful enthusiasm has given Liam and his friends a livelihood, perhaps a vocation. They outlasted Flip and its vintage T-shirts anyway. After all that, it only seems right to buy something. Here's a thing on a high shelf, out of the shrinkwrap and unpriced: a game I've never heard of by Donald X. Vaccarino, the guy who devised Dominion. It's a timey-wimey worker placement game called Temporum. Stu looks it up on BGG, checks out the reviews, counts out the components to check they're all there, then baggies up the cards and meeples for me.
What a gent. That's how to make a sale!
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