Mourning Another Lost LGS
Mr. Chompy Bits, one of the old Malifaux models that I painted this week. More shots of him on my Instagram.
Once upon a time, there was a tabletop gaming store in Longmont, Colorado. It wasn’t in a great location, crammed into a corner of a strip mall between an HVAC outlet and a Snarf’s. It didn’t even have room on the awning for a marquee. But it was the only store in this little town that sold miniatures, and as a result, it accumulated a small but devoted community.
Warhammer was the drug of choice, of course, but those boys only made up about 40% of the total, as opposed to other shops where the quotient can approach 85%. There was a solid contingent for a number of smaller wargames, and I was in the market for something less mainstream. Space marines bore me, okay? I’m sick to death of soldiers, frankly, no matter where you put ‘em - soldiers in space, soldiers on alien planets, soldiers in Candyland, soldiers in nightmarish hellscapes and dreamlike psychological vistas… spare me, please. Why is it necessary to diminish property values in every glorious fantastical setting we can imagine by jamming in a generic Master Chief knockoff? Do gamer boys quit playing if they don’t see a piece of dry white toast wielding a worryingly well-rendered weapon every six seconds or so?
At any rate, that’s how I stumbled into Malifaux. There are some soldiers in Malifaux country, some, but they’re hardly your generic gun-porn stars, and the rest of the army is utterly batshit. They got gamblers dealing eldritch drugs, necromancers and ninjas, cowboys in powered armor, manifested dreams come to chew on your brainlobes, spell-eating insects and ghosts that make you sad, rum-running goblins who ride exploding pigs. All the things you never knew you needed!
The great thing about this store - as with many Local Game Stores - really was the owner. The man knew something critical about running a game store that stunningly few proprietors seem to grasp: that his product required more than one person to enjoy, and so before he could begin selling very expensive plastic to nerds, he first needed to convince those nerds that they’d have other nerds to play with. So he set up a table in the back, by the paint and primer section, with a spinning paint rack and a stack of tile coasters for palettes, and any time you could roll up with your models and paint them right there in the store, no charge.
It was a master stroke, for a number of reasons. Miniature paints are expensive, first of all; those little pots are five to seven bucks apiece, and you can’t paint even a single model without a wide range of colors and consistencies - to do a good job, you really need a full collection of paints, and after you’ve spent $40 on a box with three tiny plastic mans in it, three tiny plastic mans that aren’t even assembled yet, you may find yourself a little salty about laying out a further few hundred to make them pretty. So providing the paints let people enjoy their models who otherwise might not have bothered to buy them, knowing they could never have them in full color.
It also meant that people who might have paid their money and then gone home to work on the minis were instead sitting there in the store, chatting with friends, ready to jump into a game at any time. Wargames are long, usually, forty minutes at the low end, so if you want a game, you have to nail the perfect moment when there are people present but not yet committed to a lengthy siege. Most people ain’t got time for that. With all the players sitting around painting models for hours, more games got started, more people got involved, and more models got bought. He certainly made far more in sales than he spent in providing free paint.
And finally, it meant that the owner and other power nerds who had been playing and painting for years were always around to coach new players. I voiced my boredom with Warhammer to the owner, and he pointed me to Malifaux, and then later when I was beginning to paint my passel of ghosts and dream-creeps, he peeked over my shoulder and gave me pointers. He essentially offered a crash course in miniature painting complimentary with your model purchase.
It was amazing, and I ended up going there pretty much every week, just to sit and paint, listen to dorks banter and debate the merits of various units. I ended up enjoying the painting more than the play, and started painting other people’s models when they didn’t feel like it, which is clearly how we’ve ended up here… where I print models on our 3D printer at home and paint them for no reason at all, without even the excuse of a game to preserve my innocence.
Hannah, another of the old Malifaux models. She’s a librarian, and she made that mech suit to help her reach books on high shelves.
I also ended up here because… well, you already know the ending of this story. It’s a story we see every week, it seems - another LGS closes, another chain store opens in its place. One Saturday I stopped in to find the owner solemnly saying his goodbyes. Games Workshop, the massive makers of Warhammer, had opened a store in Boulder, just fifteen minutes away. With them siphoning off easily half his business, he couldn’t hope to make rent anymore. We buying exploding pigs and sad ghosts weren’t numerous enough to outweigh Games Workshop’s thundering market share.
It was grim. It hurt my heart to watch him pack away the brushes, hand out paint-caked tiles as souvenirs to a few of us. I hadn’t made a lot of friends there, not real friends anyway, like the kind who’d come to your house, but I had felt like the store was my friend, the place and the community he’d built there. Inside of a week there was no trace of it, no new renter clamoring to replace it in that neglected corner of the strip mall, just crop circles on the carpet and tape dangling from the walls.
What is it that they take when this happens? What is it that’s lost when a capitalist apex predator charges in and tramples the ecosystem? It’s these little interactions, these tiny webs of give and take. These communities are so fragile - we’ve all got real lives, after all - and I watch them scatter like mice when Games Workshop arrives, blazing, to flood the space with sterile light and drive all us little parasites out of the corners. It’s so clear that their customers are a loathsome burden to them, each of us merely a vehicle to convey our wallet to the register. The game is not a game, the painting is not art, the players are not people. We are all just plastic, waiting to be cut apart and reassembled.
Part of my current painting setup. Those are not all the paints. Oh no. There are more paints.
So… that’s depressing. And there’s nothing to do about it, really, except what I’ve done, which is to begin making my own models, and finally assemble that enormous collection of paints I could never afford before. I’m realizing that there’s more that can be done with this medium than just more soldiers in space, or even ninjas and necromancers - there are things I want to do here that aren’t about assembling an army. And I’m learning to paint in new ways, my drawing and pastel work informing the acrylic painting, and the 3D painting informing my drawings in interesting ways.
Recently I ran out of other stuff to work on, and dug into an old box full of Malifaux models. Half of them are still ashy black, primed but never painted after the store shut down. I pulled out a few. They’re different from the stuff I’m making now - less detailed than my 3D printer can manage, and more fragile - but they’re still beautiful, and I still like them. It feels right to finish them now, a kind of continuation of that store’s legacy, letting the things I learned there continue to have utility even though the place is gone.
So I think of that store whenever I sit down to paint. I don’t even remember the owner’s name now, but he set me on this path, because he was kind, and enthusiastic, and welcoming to newbies. He cared about what he was selling, not because it made him money - it really didn’t, obviously - but because it made a community.
I think that’s what developers like Games Workshop might have forgotten about this whole scheme: the money was a tool. We were gathering it for something. Its purpose was to create the community that you just destroyed, so you could stack more money. Grats on your high score, I guess? You must be that guy at the top:
