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Greetings and salutations peeps! Is it just me or has October FLOWN past? This month, we have been feeling quite satisfied as our little cafe has been slowly building in terms of customer base and average daily takings. It’s been exciting seeing the numbers rise and remain steady rather than suddenly peak and fall away just as quickly.
Magic Draft
At the start of October we hosted our first Magic The Gathering draft, which for anyone who doesn’t know, is an event where all participants get three booster packs and draft the cards in groups of six or eight and play a mini tournament. Drafting consists of opening a booster pack, choosing a single card to keep then passing the rest to the player on your left. After this has been done for the three booster packs, players then play against each other with the decks they have built with the drafted cards.
It goes on for a while. I’ll be honest, I left early and left Blair to deal with it, which he was fine with by the way. Regardless, it was quite the success for us. It brought in a few new customers and allowed us to rise through the ranks of the Wizards Play Network. We made it to ‘Core’ membership this month, which means we finally get promotional material (token cards and promo packs) which are given out to those who come and play Magic in store on Fridays.
Fireside Gathering
I didn’t think anyone played Hearthstone anymore, so when we organised this event with a young man called Ben (who actually ran it) I wasn’t expecting many people to turn up. However, it was surprisingly popular with people coming down from Glasgow to attend. I subsequently discovered that we were one of very few ‘Taverns’ in Scotland; the only other one I know of is in Dundee. So it was a pleasant surprise to see so many people come down for the Fireside Gathering.
Halloween
The next event on the calendar was, of course, Halloween. Or rather, the Saturday before Halloween because this year the 31st was on a Tuesday and, well, what use is that to anyone? Anyway, it came round to Saturday and we all got dressed up and played some games, including a few 15 player rounds of Ultimate Werewolf which was absolute chaos, nobody knew anything except the Seer who was promptly eaten on a few occasions.
Everyone’s costumes were excellent! We had a human sized crow (complete with actual crows feet. Watching her try to walk in the prop talons was particularly humorous). We also had a Hawkgirl and Supergirl filling out the superhero contingent, we had The Dude (The Big Lebowski) abiding in his comfy clothes, wishing he was bowling no doubt. We had a gypsy fortune-teller, a skeleton, some dead people (with excellent makeup jobs) and a ninja.
I dressed up as the guy from the Power Grid box but my absolute favourite was Blair’s costume. He shaved his beard, leaving only his moustache and donned his mum’s leather jacket and became Freddie Mercury. I couldn’t even look at him he was so funny. The resemblance was uncanny. It should be noted that Blair’s mum is at least a foot and a half shorter than him so the leather jacket, as you can imagine, was ill fitting to say the least. Still, it brought a good few others and me a lot of joy.
Quiet moments
Occasionally the café has quiet periods, which Blair and I have taken to filling with either playing a game, which is great, it allows us to keep educating ourselves about the hobby and in turn we have more knowledge to impart on customers who are newer to board games. It’s something we should be doing. Recently though, our friend Bryan, The Dude, brought in some Nerf guns. So now when the café is quiet, we play with Nerf guns. It’s in no way a productive use of our time.
In other news
We got a facelift! Since we opened in June, we’ve wanted to finish painting the storefront and, thanks to our landlord, we got it done. Now, instead of the slightly bluish walls and aged turquoise/green window shutters, we have brilliant white walls with vibrant red shutters and it looks amazeballs. A million times better. We’re really happy with how it’s turned out; it finally looks like professional business premises. Almost as if we know what we’re doing…
Coming Soon to Unboxed
We’ve been toying with a few new ideas, one of which has been some tabletop inspired t-shirts. With the help of my talented design team/wife we’ll be selling these t-shirts in store soon. To keep things fresh we’ll be trying to get new designs every month or two. They should be a lot of fun and hopefully our customers will like what we’re trying to do.
Wrapping up
A lot has happened in October, so much that I’m not even sure I covered everything but feel free to call me out on that. As always, we are still very much enjoying being a part of this community. We only hope to get better at what we’re doing and improve the café bit by bit. We still have a lot of work to do.
I hope you’ve enjoyed issue 7, thank you for taking the time to read it. I hope to see you all soon.
Happy Gaming.