| Title | Labyrinth Games and Puzzles is mom-owned awesomeness on Capitol Hill |
| Author | Chris Hornbostel |
| Posted in | Features |
| When | January 29, 2014 |
Normally in this space there'll be a review of a game, and as a potential player you can decide whether or not it's something you might want to play in the future..
Read the full articleNice report, just don't show your face in the first store again. And get a private phone number, there can't be too many Hornbostels in town ;)
You'd be amazed at how many of us there are. ;)
It wasn't my intention to tear down anyone's store (too much, anyway) which is why I left names out....but the store I was fairly unkind to has far harsher criticism elsewhere on the internet anyway. The stores near me do a bang up business and have loyal, happy customers, and seemingly many of them. With that one exception, they're nice stores. They're just...sort of piled together. Someone described Labyrinth's game selection as "curated", and I love that word because it's so perfect and I was pissed that someone else had used it and thus I wanted to leave it out of this story. It's a very deliberate selection of games, and feels deliberate, and feels like it was put together by people who know the very latest things going on in the hobby.
Generally I think I lucked out in regards to the staff at my local game stores. I drive a little bit out of Melbourne to a place called Melton (think of it as a small town that'll one day become an outer suburb of Melbourne), where the guy running the local game store there taught me how to play magic when alot of other stores didn't seem to have the patience for my retarded questions. Even though I now live on the opposite side of Melbourne, I like to make the journey for significant cash purchases from him - with the latest being asking him for a BG suggestion that I could play with my gf.
Melbourne-wise after I learned MTG and started playing it more, alot of the places seemed less intimidating. There's a few shitholes here and there, and some stores I refuse to give any kind of business based on their initial attitudes from years ago - but the little stores that are basically run and staffed by a passionate owner are really great places - which I've experienced in more than one city around Australia and what I feel is the underlying piece of this article.
A very cool article. If I lived anywhere near that area, I'd certainly check it out!
Weird newline here:
"come with me
when I need him to."
Corrections:
"their possibl[y] nasty habits"
"a nic[e] Mancala board"
"a toy stor[e] on Capitol Hill"
"Has that posed an[y] particular challenges"
