How Community Drives Success in Board Game Retail

Jason Hsieh (01:24)
Hello, welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed. I’m your host, Jason Hsieh, and today we’ll be exploring stories and insight behind one of the store owners, who is owner of Castle Period’s Game and Book, which is one of the largest game and comic stores in Illinois since 1990s.

Scott Thorne (01:42)
1990, not the largest, I wish, but no. We’re the largest in southern Illinois.

Jason Hsieh (01:49)
So, and I think you sell everything from board games to role-playing games to comics and collectibles, and you have decades of experience in the retail game industry and I’m really excited to uncover what we’re going to discuss today because, like I mentioned, pre-interview, you are my first guest in the, on the retail store that dedicated to board games. And I think that’s a lot of interesting insight that you can share with our audience. So first of all, I guess, can you share with our audience

What inspired you to start the store back then?

Scott Thorne (02:21)
Certainly. Well, we started off as a role-playing game store. I played Dungeons and Dragons when I was in college. And it was a fascinating game. When I decided to go back to get my master’s degree at Southern Edward University Carbondale, I realized there’s no game store in the area. There was one store that had about 12 feet worth of board games on the shelf And I

had some money from my previous job decided to invest that into opening up a store I found a small storefront that I could afford for at the time. It was was 250 bucks a month. yeah. Well, you could open up a store on the shoestring back then. I started with about $25,000. could not open up a anything like a decent business for that kind of money today.

Jason Hsieh (02:58)
Okay.

Scott Thorne (03:10)
And so was a little hole in the wall place It was about maybe 500 square feet Tiny compared to today’s stores, but we served a niche in the community We started off focusing on role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Supplies for that Then as demand increased, we expanded into miniature games And then when Magic the Gathering

Jason Hsieh (03:16)
Okay.

Scott Thorne (03:35)
hit the market in ’93, we moved into added on collectible card games. Really get big into board games until around 2000, 2002.

and then we got into toys far later than that because it was a we were looking for additional Products to add to our marketing mix. So we started adding toys probably about 2012

Jason Hsieh (03:59)
⁓ okay, I see. And since you have been in the industry for so long, I guess, based on your observation, how has retail, I guess, board game and gaming industry overall has changed since you originally opened the store over 30 years ago?

Scott Thorne (04:15)
Okay, well, at the time that I opened and until about the late 80s early 90s there were two basic styles of board games. There was the American style board game, is exemplified by Monopoly. they involve like they’re fairly random. you’re playing Monopoly.

You roll the dice, the dice dictate what you do. You do not have, you can make decisions once you land on the board, but you have no real control about where you were going. You are as likely to land on Marvin Gardens or go to jail as you are on Boardwalk or Cry of Shark Place. Dice control it. In Euro-style games, there is much less luck and much more strategy.

Jason Hsieh (04:51)
That’s true, yeah.

Scott Thorne (05:01)
Settlers of Catan or Catan as it’s now. Are you familiar with Catan?

Jason Hsieh (05:05)
Yes, yes, yes, I do.

Scott Thorne (05:06)
Catan was probably the, Catan, no, not probably, there were less war games like Axis and Allies, Tactics, Waterloo, Napoleon, Leipzig, that had been created back during the 1950s. And those were games that relied more heavily on strategy and how you placed your counters on the table.

they were a very niche market because you had to want to refight war, ancient wars, or even modern ones before getting into that. Catan was the first of the euro style heavy strategy, less dice reliant. There is still some randomness in Catan with rolling the dice to see which resources are generated each year or each turn. But your movement, ⁓ you

Control completely and that was that opened up the flood of what we call Euro games to come into the U.S. And after that we had more games like Carcassonne a ticket to a ride World coming into the market. And then they have stores like mine generally are going to focus on the euro style board games the heavy strategy board games

Whereas big box retailers like Walmart and Target, it will follow for focus more heavily on the AmeriStyle board games.

Jason Hsieh (06:29)
That’s very interesting and I see there’s a lot of like resurgence in the board games. What trend have you been noticing recently in your store?

Scott Thorne (06:39)
Well, we’ve seen a huge upsurge in board games. Board games used to be back around 2003, less than 1 % of our sales. We dedicated one shelf. well. Board games. Yeah. Now we have got probably about 30, about 30 to 40 feet of shelving devoted to different board games.

Jason Hsieh (06:51)
Okay.

whoa, okay.

Scott Thorne (07:03)
So we devote a lot, develop, we devote similar amount of space to role playing games. we devote probably 60 feet of games, supplies, miniatures games. So it has grown significantly, but at the same time, since we are a retailer, we don’t want to focus all of our energy on one area.

and I know a store, the show I was telling you about that I was just at this past weekend? There were stores, they were telling me 25 – 50% of their sales came from Magic The Gathering, Pokémon collectible card games. That has a ridiculously high number percentage.

Jason Hsieh (07:41)
you

You still sell a lot of Pokémon cards nowadays?

Scott Thorne (07:48)
not as much as we did back in 2002-2022-2023. During that period, there was a huge boom in Speculators were coming in, they would clean my shelves out whenever I got a shipment. They were even planting tracking devices on trucks that were servicing Wal-Mart and Target stores.

the

Jason Hsieh (08:24)
Good luck, okay.

I see.

Scott Thorne (08:39)
and 2025. Interestingly what I’m hearing from a lot of stores in the industry kids are not playing Pokémon they are buying the card packs their collecting the cards and they’re trading with other people but they don’t play the card game

Jason Hsieh (08:55)
Really?

well that’s weird, okay? Yeah.

Scott Thorne (08:57)
I thought so well it appears it is more the appeal of collect because we get in kids six seven eight years of age buying back and When I asked them what their type what type of deck they like to play if they want to run a water deck or a grass They have no idea they collect and trade the cards. They don’t play

Jason Hsieh (09:15)
Very different in Japan I don’t know have you visited actual Pokémon Center in Japan? They have tournament in Pokémon like battles and car tournament

So that’s the fun part about the car.

Scott Thorne (09:27)
But recently it’s been more about the collecting. I try to do searches on YouTube for looking to run to stream people playing Pokémon in the store. Everything I find is people cracking open boxes and talking about what the value of the cards is and nothing about streaming people playing Pokémon.

Jason Hsieh (09:47)
I see, that’s a very interesting transition.

Scott Thorne (09:51)
And

that’s what I’m hearing from other stores as well. They’re with exceptions, of course. You can never generalize or you can always find exceptions. But in general, most stores I’m talking to are telling me that they’re mostly their Pokémon is focused on people coming in and buying it, not playing with it, at least not in the store.

Jason Hsieh (10:10)
I see, I see. Okay, that’s a very interesting observation. And I want to change the topic to Kickstarter, because in the recent Kickstarter, there’s also a huge boom in board games. You will see a lot of the successful campaign that raised half a million, a million dollars, all in…

Scott Thorne (10:27)
Just just brave, 14 million dollars.

Jason Hsieh (10:29)
yeah, that sounds crazy.

Scott Thorne (10:31)
Role play gaming based on the works of Brandon’s the author Brandon Sanderson Brother wise games launched it it is the largest Kickstarter ever funded in the gaming industry and third largest Kickstarter ever

Jason Hsieh (10:48)
Yeah, so that actually lead me to an interesting question. as a retail store owner, how do you decide which Kickstarter board game to even considering purchasing for your

Scott Thorne (10:58)
Well for one thing as a retailer I need a retailer level. If we put Kickstarter up there, if I am going to pay the same price as an individual who is backing the Kickstarter and getting the game themselves…

there’s no reason for me to support a Kickstarter. I need a retailer level that gives me multiple copies. Now in exchange for a a lower price for it, I expect to buy more copies of the game. The Kickstarter I back for the Cosgrave RPG, I’m getting four copies of basic set.

Jason Hsieh (11:15)
Cool.

So that’s it? Only four? Okay.

Scott Thorne (11:35)
Well, that’s all I need. It’s a $400 Kickstarter, I don’t know. So I’m going to have to sell them for around $200 apiece. I have no idea how many people are willing to shell out $200 for a role playing book.

Jason Hsieh (11:46)
Yeah, that’s pretty high. Yeah, ticket item.

Scott Thorne (11:49)
The new edition of Dungeons and Dragons is released it’s fifty bucks for

Jason Hsieh (11:53)
yeah, yeah, yeah,

Scott Thorne (11:55)
$200 for a set of role playing stuff… That’s kind of hard especially there was a game called Gloom Haven that was kick-started. It was a really popular one and even Gloom Haven was $150 and it came in this large chest. It was about oh a little less than a meter long About a quarter of a meter wide it weighed several kilos

Jason Hsieh (11:57)
Yeah

Interesting.

Scott Thorne (12:23)
and that was only 150 bucks.

Jason Hsieh (12:25)
So do you like just like kind of how do you get in the knowing of okay what is trending on Kickstarter? What are the most?

Scott Thorne (12:37)
⁓ There’s a website called Boardgame Geek every time I logged into Instagram or Facebook. The downside is there’s so many Kickstarter out there.

Jason Hsieh (12:46)
Yeah,

it’s a lot. Yeah, it is a lot.

Scott Thorne (12:48)
a lot of them, like I won’t fund a Kickstarter comic, a comic book Kickstartering

Jason Hsieh (12:53)
I see,

Scott Thorne (12:53)
People who really want the comic book are going to buy it through the Kickstarter. That’s a problem with gaming Kickstarters, but there’s enough people who decide later on if they want the game that I can probably sell something like that at four copies. I’m certainly not going to try to bring in 24 copies of a book that’s going to have to sell for $200.

Jason Hsieh (13:17)
Yeah, that’s a very risky investment as well. And actually, since you mentioned about comics, you have something very unique, which is you also sell comic books as well as war games and others.

Scott Thorne (13:29)
Most comic shops at least sell some gaming products. Usually Magic the Gathering, Pokémon. Collectible card games don’t have a huge footprint.

Jason Hsieh (13:40)
I see. How do you balance your inventory between the categories then?

Scott Thorne (13:45)
We’re fairly diversified we are roughly about 10 to 12% board games on a big release we’ll see collectible card games like magic and Pokémon hit 25 % but usually it’s around 10 to 12%. Toys are generally 5 to 8 %

Jason Hsieh (14:04)
Yeah, because you are not mainly a toy store. And I think the audience that you are targeting is almost more of an adult audience.

Scott Thorne (14:11)
There was a presentation at Aster that called them kidults

Jason Hsieh (14:15)
Kidults yes, yes, yes, kidults That’s actually a word for it.

Scott Thorne (14:18)
Yeah,

a lot of our customers are in their 20s, 30s and 40s coming in to buy games for their families. We’ve been in business long enough that I have people who play, who bought stuff from us, usually Pokémon, back in the 1990s, and they’re bringing their own kids in here now. they’re a second generation to the hot.

Jason Hsieh (14:39)
Interesting. Yeah. So I guess the my next question is what challenge have you faced over the last 30 years with the rise of all the gigantic online marketplaces like Amazon and now Walmart is also coming up with their own online marketplaces. How does that impact your business and how do you adapt to that

Scott Thorne (14:59)
It’s certainly not as easy as it was before Amazon that but on the other hand I’m doing far better than I did before Amazon. Part of the problem is or part of the situation is well with Amazon if I want to play Catan or Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride I can do it on an online platform, but that’s not nearly as much fun as doing it in person to person and

Amazon is good, but they’re not going to get it to you that night. I have got the product. You can walk in, you can buy it and walk out with it that day. If you have the itch to do it. We also do a very good job of curating. If you buy on Amazon, you don’t have anybody to indicate, to talk with about the product.

Jason Hsieh (15:41)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And do you also allow your customer to like do a test play your

Scott Thorne (15:46)
We have a game library that they can play games here or they can rent games to Take home with them if they buy the game we discount them their rental price off the prices game

Jason Hsieh (15:57)
I see, I see. And what are some of the strategies that you do nowadays in 2024 to bring more people into your store?

Scott Thorne (16:04)
Well, advertising is that that’s always the big problem. How do I get more people in? We have got about a thousand fifteen hundred regular customers spread out or we get in about 30 between 40 to 200 people a day on average. It’s not great foot traffic, but it’s certainly not bad.

Jason Hsieh (16:24)
I see. is it 100 % retail? Do you do a little bit of online?

Scott Thorne (16:29)
Oh yeah

we sell online but most of it we sell online is collectible stuff. Because the problem with online selling is that it is very easy to discount. Products we put online are commodities. The only way to so we differentiate by putting hard to find items up in our store. I have kicked around the item, the idea of putting an online store with newer products because the much like here, the benefit is we curate the product. We have got stuff that you probably have never heard of. Most of my customers have never heard of squishables, for example. You’re familiar with the squishable line of plush?

Jason Hsieh (17:16)
Yeah, yeah, they are huge.

Scott Thorne (17:19)
Yeah so most of my customers are not familiar. They come in here…ooh this is so cool a Loch Ness monster plush moth man, plush wizards and reapers. They haven’t seen this stuff before. The thing about buying online is if you don’t know it exist, it’s really hard to find. Walking in in a brick and mortar store you’re getting exposed to games, toys..

Jason Hsieh (17:40)
Yeah, that’s.

Scott Thorne (17:47)
Most of my customers will never have heard of your line of toys. So if I have it in the store, then they come in, because they’re going to get exposed to it, they’re to know about it. Or they have a chance to learn about it. Which they won’t. And so that is the thing. You get exposed. It’s much like just flipping. Do you read magazines?

Jason Hsieh (17:52)
True

I read some toy magazine, yes.

Scott Thorne (18:09)
You’re flipping through those pages, you’re going to be exposed to things. Whereas if you go searching for it online, you’re only finding stuff that you’re looking for. Going into a store, reading a magazine, you’re finding information. You had no idea it was out there. My customers have no idea that squishables exist. As a result of going to the Astra show, we brought in the Palm Pals from Aurora.

Jason Hsieh (18:35)
okay.

Scott Thorne (18:36)
Never knew anything about those and we’ve gone we ordered it brought him in about a month and a half ago We’ve sold throughout half our order. It’s because this is so cool

Jason Hsieh (18:45)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Scott Thorne (18:47)
that

we curate and we give customers the opportunity to be exposed to products that they may never have heard about.

Jason Hsieh (18:54)
And the other thing that’s unique that you can do that Amazon can never do is doing like a small community event only for their local community.

Scott Thorne (19:02)
You can do in-store gaming. Tonight we have a group of people back in the back playing Dungeons & Dragons. We also have another group of people playing the Disney Lorcana card game.

Jason Hsieh (19:12)
okay, haven’t played that one before, okay.

Scott Thorne (19:14)
But it’s another collectible card game, this one has a Disney theme about it.

Jason Hsieh (19:18)
I see, I see, I see. I actually went to a few local meetups here in Phoenix. It’s just meetups of people, a whole bunch of us gathered together and bring out board games and play. It’s always fun. It’s a different aspect. think especially the board game is all about socializing with other people, right? And that is really hard to recreate virtually.

Scott Thorne (19:39)
Hard to recreate online. And do it, it’s not nearly as much fun as defeating your opponent face to face.

Jason Hsieh (19:41)
Yeah,

Of course. Yeah, it’s very, different, the dynamic. And I think as part of your store, I guess, do you also use a lot of like social media trying to promote the store and try

Scott Thorne (19:59)
Not

as much as I should. We’ve got a Instagram chant. We’ve got Instagram. We use Facebook. We use Twitter X. I haven’t used TikTok yet or YouTube I have some of the staff on monitoring discord channels. Yeah. But I.

Jason Hsieh (20:12)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott Thorne (20:18)
leave it to people who are more savvy in it. I don’t really want to start up a YouTube channel or a discord or a TikTok because there’s so many of them out there. Yeah, that is the problem that you have to deal with. I mean, your podcast, how do you make people to find your podcast?

Jason Hsieh (20:39)
We have an email list of the subscriber, about 2000 currently.

Scott Thorne (20:44)
I’m actually listening to podcast.

Hi guys, everybody should listen to this episode of the podcast.

Jason Hsieh (20:49)
But again, our podcast is very specific. It’s a B2B business podcast, not a consumer-based podcast. So I could never be a Joe Rogan, know, like Joe Rogan have a million.

Hahaha

Scott Thorne (21:02)
denying things Okay Monopoly start arguing that monopoly is the greatest board game ever made What sort of controversy you get out of that?

Jason Hsieh (21:13)
I think sometimes you need to be controversial for the part. Yeah, to get attention for sure. and I think we’re kind of kind of writing down today’s interview. I know I might my team did some research about you also write for a few articles. I it’s called.

Scott Thorne (21:32)
website called icv2.com

Jason Hsieh (21:34)
Yeah, and I think your column is called Rolling for Initiative. Can you talk a little bit about your writing and your work over there?

Scott Thorne (21:40)
That’s a phrase you hear a lot in role playing games role for initiative. So, They used to have a couple of columnists on there They wrote about the comic book industry, but I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look at ICV2 but it focuses almost equally on comics and games and they didn’t have a Anyone writing about games or business matters. So I have some but

I must have been back around 2011. If they would let me write a weekly column and originally I did it free and then eventually they said they liked the material I wrote enough that they started paying me.

Jason Hsieh (22:18)
Okay, okay, okay. That’s a good side gig

Scott Thorne (22:21)
It’s

not a great not a huge amount, but I’ve been doing it every week. I got maybe missed one week since 2011.

Jason Hsieh (22:29)
been doing that for quite a while. What do you usually write about?

Scott Thorne (22:32)
Usually I try to write about either new releases in the gaming industry. Last week was the gifts. So I pointed out potential good gifts. Unfortunately, that really doesn’t attract a lot of attention. People would rather hear one controversial issue, not Joe Rogan level of controversy in the gaming industry is

monetizing table space.

Jason Hsieh (22:59)
Table space tell me more ⁓

Scott Thorne (23:01)
Okay,

well, we a lot of game stores. Yeah, I don’t know the like the board game store that you went to a board game meetup, right? And in a store was editor friend’s house. Okay. How did they did that bar make money off of you while you were in there playing games?

Jason Hsieh (23:09)
Yes, I did.

It was at a bar.

Yeah, because we all ordered beers and drinks.

Scott Thorne (23:21)
goody, we had a bunch of drunks playing board games. Yes.

Jason Hsieh (23:23)
Yes, that was fun!

Scott Thorne (23:24)
Absolutely. Most board game stores don’t have bars. So we sell snacks. There are some, I was in a board game cafe over the weekend and they had a space for, they were selling sandwiches and bread and coffee. But in general, the controversy is if you don’t have a place to sell like liquor or you don’t have a cafe,

Jason Hsieh (23:28)
⁓ true.

Scott Thorne (23:48)
but you set up tables to set to for people to play at, should you make those tables free to play at or should you charge a table fee to play at them? people are using your space, especially if they bring say a board game in from outside your location, they come in, they bring in their own copy of Carcassone, they set it up on your table, they play it, they pack up and they leave.

They’ve used your space, they haven’t spent any money in your business.

Jason Hsieh (24:20)
Yeah.

Scott Thorne (24:21)
What do you do? Do you let people just come in and play like you did at the bar or do you charge them a fee? Okay, you want to use our tables. It’s going to be $5 to use them for say three hours per person. Yeah, because you let the table sit empty or do you but you’re not getting it you’re trying to use them to generate revenue or you try to generate revenue off of them.

and chart and see if you can get people to pay for the use of the tables. Currently in the back, the Dungeons and Dragons game we’re running, I compensate the DM for running it. And we charge them five bucks a person to play every week. Because that’s one way we’re trying to monetize the table space. Now I have to pay the game master, but

As long as we’re making more money from the table fees, then we are the compensation we’re giving or paying him out. On the other hand, the Lorcana, Disney Lorcana players back there don’t pay anything because in general, we make enough money off of them. The cards and packs they buy for the card game on a regular basis that we’ve determined that the income generated is worth

letting them use the tablespace at no additional charge. while we were charging them $5 a week, but we decided to drop that fee since we kept seeing steady sales of Lorcana Similarly, we host Magic the Gathering games and Pokemon.

Jason Hsieh (25:46)
Do you also provide some drinks for them?

Scott Thorne (25:49)
They have to buy their own drinks. I’m not providing them drinks. They can buy. I’m providing them free table space. I’m providing a scheduled time for them to come in and show the place. We schedule Lorcana play. We schedule Magic the Gathering play. We schedule board games. And we have certain time slots set aside for those. So if somebody comes in, they know they can find somebody who’s going to play Magic, who’s going to play Lorcana, who’s going to play board games.

Jason Hsieh (26:13)
Mm-hmm got it got it

Scott Thorne (26:15)
So

generally we don’t charge for that. If I have to pay somebody to host an event, then we charge for that.

Jason Hsieh (26:23)
I see, I see. So looking ahead, where do you see the game retail industry heading to in the next few years?

Scott Thorne (26:30)
okay i said i think we’re see more a i created games and there right now there’s a big controversy is it at the clear appropriate to use a i generated art in gaming products is it okay to have rule books written using artificial intelligence is it okay to create a comic using a i art and a i writing

So that’s going to be a made, we’ve got lawsuits right now suing companies, the AI Chat GPT, example, suing them for appropriating art and writing from the web to add into their model. So that’s going to be a major controversy. Amazon seems to be declining. It’s still an important competitor, but we are seeing a decline in it. We’re seeing more manufacturers,

putting MAP, minimum advertised pricing into place. We’ll see if that has any, are you familiar with the concept of MAP?

We’re seeing more people putting that in the game industry. We’re seeing a movement to net pricing among some companies. So that makes it harder for people to advertise discounts on the internet. I think we’re going to see, especially among mid-level game publishers, we’re going to see increase relying on crowdfunding. Fund their games even though…

Jason Hsieh (27:43)
For sure, for sure, for sure.

Scott Thorne (27:55)
They don’t, we’re not going to top tier companies are not going to be relying on crowdfunding. It apparently is mid and lower tier companies that are.

Jason Hsieh (28:03)
Yeah, actually a lot of low tiers is relying on crowdfunding.

Scott Thorne (28:08)
Yeah. And a lot of them, especially I don’t know how it is in the toy industry, but in the game industry, it is fire and forget. We fund our game, we put it out, we get our money, we take money and then we launch our next Kickstarter. Yeah. You don’t make product for retail. you want the game, if you’re a retailer and you want the game, you have to back the Kickstarter. That’s a problem

Jason Hsieh (28:30)
Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Yeah, then that’s not a sustainable business model either.

Scott Thorne (28:38)
Because

all you have to have is one misfired Kickstarter campaign and you’re in trouble.

Jason Hsieh (28:43)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure, for sure. So anyway, thank you so much for being on our podcast interview today. Where can people find you?

Scott Thorne (28:52)
People can find me online at well at castleperilous.com on Twitter at Castle Perilous Games on ⁓ Facebook at castleperilous on Instagram or they can reach us at castleperilousgames@gmail.com or do a search for Castle Perilous on the innerwebs.

we’ve been in business since 1990. ⁓ We’ve had the website up since the early 90s, which is also a problem because my web we had a one of the reasons you should have control of your own website. Why I like websites instead of and I’m digressing here a bit, but I why I like websites over social media is Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok all dictate how your

Hosts and a lot of stores in general rely heavily on them if you control your own website You get to control what it looks like so they can find us at castleperilous.com, castleperilousgames@gmail.com

Jason Hsieh (29:51)
Got it. Well, thank you again for being on the show. And for our listeners, thank you for tuning into today’s episode of toy business unbox podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversation and find it insightful and inspiring. And if you like what you have heard, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform. So you never miss an episode. We really appreciate your support and we love it. If you leave us a review and share the podcast with your friend and colleague for more resource tips and latest update in the toy industry.

Visit our website at toy-launch.com. Join the conversation and connect with us on social media using #toybusinessunboxed. And we’ll love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future episodes. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joy through toys. And this is Jason Hsieh signing off on Toy Business Unboxed podcast and we’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much, everyone.