You might have heard I’m opening a tabletop game parlor.

Starting a 'Third Place'

Michael DiBaggio

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Apr 30

“I’m bored.”

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Well, I wasn’t just talking about it, nor have I stood idle since my last post. The last few weeks have involved a lot of manual labor, financial expenditures, and confusion as I tried to get various accounts with wholesaler to buy stock. And a lot of stress. But things are looking up!

Don’t take my word for it. Take a look at the great faux-marbling that my wife and her Goddaughter did the other day!

That’s about half the painting done, which is good, because I hate painting anything but miniatures (and sometimes I hate painting them, too, to be honest).

We had some unexpected catastrophes today, like my kids locking the door to a room with no key—an excellent use case for a prybar!—and my wife spilling an entire coffee urn onto the floor, which involved a bit of panicked cleaning. But we solved those problems, started flattening out the modular tabletops, and hung some of our awesome assortment of historical and sci-fi/fantasy banners.

I’m especially pleased at the one which we chose to directly face the door, so that it is the first thing you see upon entry:

And what’s that in the corner of the above image? Is that a… ping pong table, I see?

Yes, yes it is.

But it’s not all furniture and decorations. We got our first stock, too! Lots of books…

And miniatures, paint, and other wargaming goodies…

And we still have several orders incoming. We’re stocking a lot of great wargames and RPGs. As you can see, we’ve got a lot of Wargames Atlantic — almost every set they currently make, in fact, including the two new boxed sets, Baron’s War and The Last War. We’re also stocking some of the truly fantastic Archon “Dungeons & Lasers” line, Firelock’s Blood & Plunder (& Crowns & Valor…), Grey For Now’s 02HundredHours, Oathmark, Stargrave, and Frostgrave miniatures, tons of excellent terrain from Pegasus Hobbies, exciting paint sets from Army Painter, AK Interactive, and ProAcryl, most of Goodman Games’ Dungeon/Mutant/X Crawl Classics line, board games and RPGs from Atlas Games, and more. And that doesn’t even touch on the 500+ board games, RPG books, wargame manuals, and classic gaming magazines we have in our library.

We also got our website up and even a shudder Facebook page, so like and follow if that’s your thing.

There’s lots to do, but we’re getting closer now. We hope to open by mid-June, but we’ll see how things turn out.

Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank those who supported me in this endeavor, most with words, but a few with work and money. So far we only have one Marshal of the Empire, the great Loren Dean, so I want to call him out for special attention. I’ve never met Loren before in my life. In fact, he lives on the other side of the country. But he believed in our ‘third place’ idea so much he donated $250. Because of his noble devotion to the cause, Loren will be elevated to our Wall of Honor. And if you’re so inclined, you can join him by making a Founding Member subscription to Splendor of Fire.

Or if you prefer, you can donate by Paypal, too.

And if you have based gamer friends within a few hours drive of St. Clair, Pennsylvania, tell them about us and encourage them to drop by. The Victor’s Spoils expects every man will do his duty!