I just got back from attending this year's Gen Con in Indianapolis, while at the same time Dan was running the Canton Games vendor booth at the World Boardgaming Championships (WBC) outside of Pittsburgh. Needless to say, things have been a bit crazy at the store lately. They always are around convention season.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us and been patient with us at the shop while we juggle so many plates. This year has been a year of records, uncertainty, and firsts for both the store and the industry, and I want to put my debrief of these conventions in context.
I can't talk about anything else I want to talk about without first mentioning the big T-word: tariffs. Many people more knowledgeable and smarter than me have already written and talked about how tariffs have been upending many industries, including the hobby gaming industry, where the things we sell are too niche to produce solely in the U.S.. Dan was even interviewed for NPR's Planet Money podcast to talk about it. So I won't go too much into explaining the why, but I will say that, as a result of tariffs, game publishers and manufacturers have been forced to take huge losses, restructure, back out of promises, and even close up shop.
You can already see the effects on our shelves, although we've worked hard to make it less noticeable. Product prices have slowly started going up due to the tariff fees that have been passed down from publisher to distributer to us, and, unfortunately, we have to pass them on to you, the consumer. We operate on extremely thin margins as a small business and local game stores (LGS) and just cannot afford to eat these costs. Our selection of games is slowly changing. There are a lot of games that we've wanted to bring you, and we just can't. We're stocking fewer expansions, fewer of all the hottest, newest games, and more of the things that we know we can consistently get and sell. And some of the things that we know will sell, companies aren't producing enough of for the demand. We've had to switch up our sources for some products to save money. We've changed up our secondhand game policies so that we have more and better quality games to offer you there.
There's just all around so much uncertainty around what we can order and when, if ever, it'll actually get here, which has made it incredibly difficult to plan for the future. And I mean even the near future like how to stock for the upcoming holiday season, or even how to staff our store the past few months. Dan has said more than once, that all this uncertainty is like dealing with COVID again from a business standpoint.
And yet...
Gen Con had the highest attendance ever, with the most exhibitors ever, despite a number of exhibitors dropping out. Our booth at WBC had our highest ever sales this year. Every month of 2025 so far has had better sales for Canton Games than the previous year, with June being our best month in the history of the store. We're running more events with higher attendance than ever before and getting more foot traffic on a daily basis than we've ever had. We've been able to re-organize more than half of the store to get more shelf space and walking room, create a new RPG section, and hire a 4th staff member, making this the biggest team Canton Games has ever had.
It's been a weird year, to say the least, with a lot on my plate in my first year as assistant manager. To say we're dealing with the growing pains is an understatement. Despite having an extra staff member, our amount of work and our to-do list is growing. But we are excited for the future of the store and the hobby. It's so cool to see so many new faces coming in and discovering the joy of gaming. We have lots of plans for the store, like even more new events and a slow process of clearing out all of our bulk Magic so there's more open play space in the back room. We're working even harder to continue to curate the best collection of games that we can, even if that means more researching than we're used to and spreading out our sources, and to offer as many opportunities to play games and try new things as possible. So thank you again for your patience and your support!
Without further babble from me, here's my favorite highlights from Gen Con and things I'm excited to bring back to the store:
Compile
Compile was maybe the game I was most looking forward to seeing at Gen Con this year, and most unsure if I'd actually see it. Compile: Main 1 released at last year's Gen Con, and it's easily been my most played game since. I heard someone describe it as "a little bit of Magic, a little bit of Smash Up, and a little bit of area control." It is a fantastic 2-player, dueling card game, where you play as two AI trying to learn human concepts, changing the rules as you cover and un-cover your cards. I got to see an early preview of Compile: Main 2 at GAMA, an industry expo show for publishers, manufacturers, and retailers, back in February. And then shortly after, Greater Than Games, the company behind Compile was all laid off by its parent company (citing cost-cutting for tariffs as part of their reasoning). We had no idea if Compile 2 was ever going to happen. To my surprise, the team had, 3 weeks prior, re-spun up their old company, Luma Imports, plan to have both versions of Compile out this fall, and had air-freighted a limited amount of it to Gen Con to sell. So I have my hands on a copy of it now, have already played it and love it, and will be putting in direct preorders for it this week so we can get it to the store!
Riftbound
I have an embarrassing thing to admit: I am a League of Legends (LoL) player. And I was already very excited to try the new LoL TCG: Riftbound. I'm new to TCGs and just started playing Magic last fall. I got to play a demo game at Gen Con, and I think Riftbound is going to be my new TCG of choice. While you can play it one-on-one, it's designed to be multiplayer with "battlefields" you're fighting over. It's well-designed, has beautiful art inspired by the LoL Netflix show Arcane, and is so much fun to play in the way it really captures the feel of playing the LoL champions in the video game. I think it's going to be great for both LoL players and non-LoL players. I'm glad I pushed for the store to preorder this, and I don't think we preordered enough.
Punch Bowl
I've been following the release of this game since I saw it at the Runaway Parade booth at Gen Con a couple of years ago. This is the first year they've had it available to play a demo, and the Kickstarter goes live soon. Like all of their games (Fire Tower and Smug Owls), the art is absolutely beautiful, and the pieces are so fun to play with. Who doesn't love the idea of filling up a little cocktail glass with pretty fruit pieces? It's kind of a deck-builder in reverse as you're trying to use your cards to get rid of your ingredients in just the right order in the right cocktails before they're served into your glasses. It's satisfying, immersive, and cozy, while still being very competitive. It'll be a little bit before it's available to sell, but I can wait to share this one with other people!
Mini-Painting Classes
I've been having so much fun running paint nights for the store that I thought it was about time I take some formal mini-painting classes myself while I had access to so many professional miniature painters at Gen Con. I've been mostly self-taught up to this point. Wow, what an eye-opener. I knew I had a lot to learn, but my brain was exploding a bit. I took three separate classes, including a master class on blending. It's going to take a lot of practice to get the hang of the techniques I learned, and it was humbling to be the student instead of the teacher for once. But I'm so glad I tried it, and I'm really grateful to have gotten some better language to use about painting while I'm sharing with other people during paint nights.
If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. I love my job. I love sharing what I love with other people, and though I don't have the time to write up these blogs as often as I'd like, it's a really great way to share my thoughts on what we're doing without talking the ear off of everyone who walks into the store. And I'm so excited to continue this upward trend and see where we can go from here!
-Steph
