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What’s a Responsible Game Store to Do?

By Ben Calica / Leave a Comment / D&D, Magic, Main Page, Updates

I’ve been struggling with the right thing to do at the shop to be good ducks right now and it is very tough. We don’t wanna be over the top, but we also really want to make sure we keep people safe and do our part to help as we can. And we can also see how we can shift the business so we are still around when the cough’s clear.

Last week we replaced our usual tablecloths with the not as pretty ones we had that we used for parties, since we can clean/disinfect them. And before we did the magic draft where we passed the cards around we had everyone use disinfectant hand wipes. Seemed a bit overly cautious at the time, but not so much at this point. We are trying to figure out the best ways to make events at the store as safe as we can, including lots of disinfectant and even limiting the number of people at the events to insure more space.

We also know that we actually have something to offer to help so that people who are stuck at home as an alternative to video games or getting utterly sucked into phones. We are going to look into trying figure out how to get people games in ways that don’t necessarily require coming into the store. And we are looking at creating game events for (limited) amonts of kids during the days when they are off school. We don’t want these to be lots of people coming in and out, instead we need it to be less people who are staying with a small group for the day.

So here is what we are doing as of now:

Friday Night Magic will be 4 pack sealed instead of a draft:
For the next few weeks everyone will get a “prize” Pack with the normal 3 and then the prizes will be promo packs for the top 4 players. Since we now have the Mystery Packs ($5) in, and were gonna do the drafts for $20 anyway, this should still be plenty of fun, sort of a Chaos Sealed. –Limiting to 26 players to insure there is enough space to have between people.
We are gonna be suspending the Pokemon League for the next 3 weeks at least. Don’t think there is any way to insure the little ones keep their fingers out of eyes, and mouths between playing/trading.
Enforcing the 6 person max for D&D so there can be space between folks at the tables.
Well–don’t be sick. 😉 We are all doing our best through this, but one of the biggest things is if yer coughing etc, don’t take the chance. The truth is that a pretty good percentage of the folks who come to the store are young enough that they will likely be fine though this, but that don’t mean that they might not inadvertently pass it on to another kid. No big deal unless they end up inadvertently passing it on to their grandma. So to protect all our grandmas…don’t take the chance…

D20 Recommended Games

By Ben Calica / Leave a Comment / Main Page, Misc

Recommended games	Who is it good for
Planet	All , Families	From the makers of Dr. Eureka and Photosynthesis comes a game that is like a 3d puzzle version of King domino (another recommended game)…simple yet pretty interesting. see video review here
Godsforge	Tweens and up…anyone who likes MTG	Godsforge was Ben’s fav game at the last big game store owners show. It’s kind of like Magic meets Yatzee. Extremely well designed and just a ton of fun. Extremely highly recommended and a great game for magic players when you don’t know what they already have.
Tiny Towns	Adults, Famlies, Party	This is one of the first games I’ve seen where people can just enter and leave the game without it being a problem. Sort of like town building Tertris, the goal is to get the best score by making interesting combos of buildings with the block that the next person in line picks in turn. Want a better score, stick around a do another card. Need to go check the pies, let someone else hop in. The game is great and it is easy to imagine it being played by different people all day, with the top score on the fridge whiteboard.
Cover Your Kingdom (Cover your Assets follow on)	All	When the all time fav game in the store (Cover Your Assets) gets an “absurdly ruthless spinoff”, you think it isn’t going on our recommended list? Preview here
Trekking the National Parks	All
Mice and Mystics	All	Redwall meets self running D&D in this coop family game that is great to play with parents and kids together. More info here and here

Coop games/Legacy Games
Dark Souls Board Game
Mansions of Madness
Hogwarts Battles
Gloomhaven
Terraforming Mars

On Sale	Reg Price	Sale Price
Ogre	$
Terraforming Mars

(April fools)Wizards adding unusual requirements for Magic Players to attend events

By Ben Calica / Leave a Comment / Features, Magic, Main Page

Earlier this year, Wizards introduced so changes for those of us scheduling events that actually made a lot of sense. They let us start setting age limits for the events. (It used to be that if an event was sanctioned for Magic or D&D, that those events had to be open to all players.) Seems pretty inclusive, but what that meant was that we couldn’t do a kids only event and prevent an adult for attending, or if we wanted to do an after hours, grown-ups only event, stores wouldn’t be able to do that.

However, Wizards has been making some other decisions that have been somewhere between confusing us and, honestly, making us pretty upset. This latest on is clearly in the confusing category, with a little in the latter. Apparently some internal research they have done has indicated that a better metric for determining appropriate levels of developmental maturity has to do with physical growth over chronological growth. I guess it has been known for a while that girls are more mature at an early age then boys and that often is connected with early growth spurts.

As a result, we are waiting for a package coming from Wizards that is a 6 foot plus stand-up that includes a measuring tool for us to use to determine who is allowed in the adult/mature events vs. the less developed. For those who come from groups that tend to shorter stature or who have genetic dispositions in that direction, there is a section on the Wizards site to apply for exempted status. The cards will apparently take between 2-3 weeks to arrive, but we will be able to look it up on the Wizard website so it shouldn’t cause too much disruption to attending the events.

I want to make a personal comment on this. It is not what I would choose and I could ignore the requirement I would. I think it is utterly foolish, first to trust this kind thing, no mater how convincing the research seems, and then to create such an elaborate plan without testing it locally somewhere first. It’s truly unbelievable.

So why is Yugioh Banned at D20 Games, anyway?

By Ben Calica / Leave a Comment / Features, Game Guides, Main Page

I just got an email from someone looking for a place to have his 12 year old son to come and play Yugioh, and I was about to tell him the tale of why it is banned at the store, and why I recommend steering him away from Yugioh when I realized that it’s been a long time since I told the story and it was probably worth putting it where everybody could see.

Yugioh is one of the big collectible card games, and was a pretty big part of the store when I acquired it back in 2011. We would get 40-60 people coming in on Sundays, and it represented about 1/3 the business of the store. But I gave it a partial ban in 2012, followed by a complete ban after we had the big break in that almost killed the store.

So Why Ban Yugioh?

So with all due modesty, I’m a good guy, and have a firm but gentle touch with people, including tweens and teens. (I used to teach Karate to kids.) I can pull people aside and talk to them about behaviors that are not ok without shaming them or making them feel angry or resentful. And I spent a lot of time getting to know the community, participating and getting to know the individual players. But our Yugioh days contained 90% of the trouble we had at the store. It seemed any deck or cards left attended would be stolen the moment someone’s back was turned, we had a huge amount of issues with people taking advantage of others in trades, bad language and people getting really angry, sometimes to the point of fights over games.

After the break in, I went to a big conference of game store owners from around the country and was shocked to find out that the problems we had had were present at stores as far away as Philadelphia, and were only with Yugioh. I spent a long time trying to figure out why this was…it was just a game, after all. Finally I came to a theory, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I became convinced it is correct. There seems to be a fundamental design flaw in the game end’s up not only fostering, but training bad behaviors. Those have become part of the tone/culture of poor behavior/ethics that riddles the Yugioh community.

Yugioh-Magic “fixed”?: Yugioh was invented by a guy that was an old Magic player. He hated the idea of what’s called set rotation. (Basically, only the last couple of years of cards are used in the most common competitive format.) He wanted all the cards that were created in his game to be used all the time. The problem with that has to do with the nature of collectible card games. See the cool part of these games is that there are basic rules, but the new cards get to introduce new rules that change the game. That’s really great, but as you get more and more rules, if you aren’t careful, you get combos of the card that just came out with a card from 5 years ago that becomes powerful enough to break the game. Games like Magic the Gathering and Pokemon spend a huge amount of time looking out for these kinds of combos, but Yugioh doesn’t do quite as good a job. Add that by having all the cards available to play with, after a few years the game started to be defined by these game breaking combos. What it meant was the best decks don’t just win, they utterly crush not so great decks.

Badly training the Young; So here is where things start to go wrong. Imagine you are a 8 or 9 year-old, taking your first deck to go play with your buddies at school. You don’t just lose, you get crushed. You go home to your parents, tears in your eyes from the humiliation. If your parents have means, they come to a store like we used to be and buy better cards so they don’t have to see that look again. If not, the kid has several choices.

“This game is stupid, I’m not playing it anymore”. Probably a good choice, but kids aren’t usually wired that way.
Trade for better cards. This seems good on the surface, but the cards they need are worth many, many times what the cards they have are worth. So they end up learning, at a pretty early age, to take advantage of less knowledgeable players. This is something we deal with directly in all of the collectible card games, and when a kid gets taken advantage of, they can either decide to talk advantage of the next person or to never make anyone else feel as bad as they do now. It is one of the fundamental building blocks to becoming an honest person or not.
Stealing: See the deck that beat them in the kids backpack….

This isn’t the majority of kids that end up down a bad path, but it is enough that starts to seriously influence the ethics of the community. There are a couple of additional things about the game that complete the story.

Lotto Packs. All collectible card games have the “oh, what’s in this one” aspect that has been part of collectible cards since baseball cards. It’s true of Magic, Pokemon, etc. But Yugioh is an extreme with this. It was well known that of a box of 24 packs had about 8 that were were worth anything at all. It was totally common to watch people open packs, look for the ultra rare and throw the rest of the pack out if it wasn’t there. With this level of gambling mentality, it affects how people view the ethics of trading.
Turn one win fury: With all the combos that could win the game running around, it becomes almost a coin flip to see who finds their combo first. If you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on your deck and your opponent gets his combo out first and locks you down, people tend to get, shall we say, cranky. This is why we had so many near fights during tournaments.
“Dealing” trading cards: Because the cards that make these auto win combos are so critical in playing, they become fairly valuable. Add this to the culture of it being ok to take advantage of other people during trades, and you get people that are acting almost like the not so great version of dealers with the valuable cards.
Unclear Rules=different kind of players. The unspoken truth of the kids who really learn to play Pokemon and the Magic players is that it tends to attract fairly intelligent people. Trying to figure out how to make different rules work together is a super interesting and challenging thing to do. The rules on the Yugioh cards can be so difficult to understand and obscure that instead of people figuring out their own cool things, they hear from someone else how that new cool deck work. That means that you get a fairly large percentage of the community that plays just for the chance to beat each other, or to try and make money off their wheeling and dealing for cards. There is often a more aggressive group of players that joins then what you would imagine would be attracted to playing a non gambling card game.

Not all Yugioh Players are bad, but enough: I’m not saying that this affects everyone, or even the majority of players. But it does change the tone of the community, the ethics and how they treat each other. I believe this enough that even though Yugioh was a full third of my business, I made the decision, as both a store owner and a father to ban the game utterly from the store. This was not something I did lightly or without a great deal of thought and consideration. Not only no sales, but no Yugioh cards are allowed at the store, and I actively do my best to encourage kids away from playing the game. I’m sorry for the good folks who like the game, but after 5 years, I have never regretted it, and to answer a frequently asked question, will never bring it back to the store. (I could use my access to sell it online and make a decent profit, but once I believed it was a bad influence, as a dad, I couldn’t do even that.)

But my kid wants to play Yugioh: For parents who’s kids (frequently Pokemon players who are looking to move on) are getting interested in Pokemon, I would strongly suggest gentle urging towards Magic instead. (You can bring them in and I’ll provide parental support. I may be the Peanuts “wah, wah” parents to my own kids, but for other kids, I’m the guy behind the counter at D20. I can use that bully pulpit to help with this so they don’t just end up seeing it as forbidden fruit.) Magic was the first of the games, and has the good stuff of the collectible card games, (social interaction, really using your brain, etc.) without that level of negative side effects. Probably the best feature is they can do what is called limited play. (Basically show up and do events where they play with the cards from the packs they get as part of the event. Everyone starts even, and it is a chance for them to play with the packs they collect. There are even team events that can be played with a buddy or even parent.) You still want to make sure they trade fair, and are get interested in the playing, not just opening packs, but it’s a good choice I have no problem recommending. Tell you the truth, I hesitated talking publicly about my observations about Yugioh, because I didn’t want that to get generalized unfairly to the rest of the collectible card games.

So I’m addicted to phones too–An(other) open letter to D20 Kids & Parents

By Ben Calica / Leave a Comment / Features, Main Page

(Kids, don’t read this*. It talks about some things being done in the mobile industry that are designed to manipulate people into doing things for the sake of advertising and in app purchases that are actually leading to medical level changes in the way our brains work, leading to some pretty bad stuff.)

There is an elephant in the room, and it is hard to get his attention because he has his trunk stuck in his smartphone. There are a whole bunch of really smart people working really hard to use every psychological trick they can to get me to spend as much time as possible on our cell phones.

And they are winning.

Fun that makes me feel bad. I didn’t like it before when it just made me feel bad. And I now like it way less that I’ve come to understand it is affecting my sleep patterns, how well I think, and acting like a drug, trading little moments of feeling good but leaving me sense of feeling depressed and out of control. So I guess I fit into the classic definition of being addicted, knowing that something isn’t good for you, not wanting to do it, and doing it anyway.

Ain’t just me. The much bigger problem is that I talk to kids and parents everyday, so I know I’m not alone in this. In fact it’s so universal that most of us have just thrown up our hands as the new way the world works. But there is something about it that has felt more serious for a while, so I’ve started to look at it more carefully and what I found was a much bigger deal then I thought. In a world where it seems like there is a crisis a day, it seems almost foolish to raise up a hand and try and point to a place where you think you see the damn starting to crack. But I don’t raise my hand like this often, and I’m raising it here…raising the hand, waving the red flag, pulling the fire alarm. I don’t even want to list the level of damage/danger here, because I don’t want to get written off as hysterical or overreacting…so I’m just going to ask that you trust me enough to read all the way through this over-sized tome, and if you end up feeling like I do, come and help me figure out what to do about it.

I’m a dad, and I spend a huge amount of time trying to get my kids to spend less time on their cell phones, and we get into a ton of fights about it. “You don’t understand. Your generation doesn’t get it. I am being social, just with my friends on the phone and not with you.” etc, etc, The very process of trying to get my kids off the phone so we can have better time together generates fights that leave everyone mad in their corners, not being social at all. (Does this sound familiar to any of you?) As parents, its pretty obvious to see the difference in how our kids feel and behave when they are not on the phones so much, but trying to do something about it is way harder then it should be. Besides, everybody is going through it so maybe it’s not really a thing, just us having to adjust to a different way of being in the world. Or maybe there is something very serious going on and we in the middle of it so much that it’s hard to see what’s going on.

Hi, I’m Ben and I’m… I’m going to make two statements, one about me and one that is so outrageous that I’m either an utter fool, or it’s a very big and very real deal.

I’ve been having real problems controlling myself with my phone too. I’ve been trying not to says addiction, but if it looks like a duck and clicks like a duck…its probably an addicted duck.
In 10-20 years people will look back on this time as an actual health crisis, the way that we look back on the cigarette industry.

Digital Nicotine. So I’ll say that second part again, and try and explain what I mean. When we look back in 10-20 years at this time, people are going to be looking back on this time the same way that we look back on the health crisis caused by smoking. It’s almost impossible now to imagine there was a time when people didn’t recognize either the addictive power of cigarettes, or realize how much suffering/ death it was causing. And to imagine that there were people in that industry, who once they understood both the addictive nature of what they were doing and what it was doing to people, spend huge amounts of money, hiring the best people they could, to discredit the scientists, to increase the addictive properties of what they were selling and to focus the most sophisticated techniques possible to not only get people to smoke more, but to get to teens and pre-teens and get them to try smoking, knowing that once they did, they would likely have customers for their (admittedly shorter) lives. (Smoker’s average lifespan is 10 years shorter then then those who never smoked.

We should have known better hall of fame: There have been a number of times in the past where we did mindbogglingly stupid stuff without realizing the effects. It’s almost unimaginable that back in the 50’s people had no idea that smoking was actually bad for you. There were dancing cigarette packs in the commercials of TV shows, and ads talking about the health benefits of one brand over another. Not to mention the X-ray shoe store boxes: You know how when you get an x-ray, they drape your body with lead covering and step out of the room while they flash the x-ray for the shortest imaginable time, because they know that long exposure to x-rays has a high likelihood of caucusing cancer.

There was a period where you could go into a shoe store and put your foot in a machine. To put that in context, the a dental x-ray would expose you to 0.005 mSv of radiation, 20 seconds in the foot box would expose you to ~48 mSv. Oh, and did I mention the day my high school physic teacher brought in a nice blob of Mercury in a film canister for us to pass around and play with to show us metal that was in a liquid state at room temperature. But hey, we didn’t know better and with the exception of the cigarette, when we figured out it was bad for us, we stopped.

The cigarettes were a different story, for two reasons.

They were chemically addictive.
There was enough money to be made that there was a whole industry dependent on, well people being dependent.

I’m not addicted…what is addicted anyway? There are a lot of definitions for addictive, but the best one that I know if is something that you do, that you know is bad for you, can see the bad results, part of you is aware of it and knows you shouldn’t do it, and you do it anyway. You can feel two voices warring inside of you, one that knows better, and the other that will use any tool at its disposal to have you not think about any negative consequences, and will rebel against anyone who might get in the way of doing it. There’s a whole brain chemistry thing with the parts of the brain that are set up to reward us for doing things that are good for us, getting hijacked by things that provide the same sensations but without the benefits.

So how does this have anything to do with cellphones, or more specifically smartphones? I’m going to do more writings about this in the year to come, but it turns out that when you hire a lot of the smartest people in the world to try and get people to spend as much time as possible with your apps, to basically figure out how their brains work and try and stimulate the parts of the brain that will get them to do something over and over again, that you are creating addictions. That’s not quite digital nicotine yet, because what’s the harm being done? It’s just people spending some of their free time on their phones…what the big deal?

Getting Mad. Here’s where I start to go from nice guy, kindly store owner Ben, to quietly furious and determined to do everything I can to do something about this Ben.

Here are a number of the affects that the wrong kind of/too much time on the smart phones has been having. ( Everything on this list makes sense from observation and has credible studies behind them.) One note before reading this list. I think it’s really important for each of us to be able to be honest in our own observations in how we are being affected. Really smart people have been working very hard to get us addicted to these devices, and it’s going to take a huge amount of effort and willpower to break that. I don’t know what all the steps are, but the first is being strong enough to really look at what is going on with ourselves. I will be adding more links/references to this list as time goes on.

All the list contributes to and pales in comparison to the last item.

Health
Safety
1. Distraction while driving is massively increasing…killing about 1/3 as many people as drunk driving.
Cognition-changing the way our brain functions
1. Significant reduction in ability to maintain attention and focus.
2. Memory drops-Brain shifts to not store things that the phone has stored/access to
3. Notifications cause shockingly high drops in productivity
4. Neurological changes based on different stimulus creates same neurochemical addiction as most drugs.
Homework/productivity
1. Even just having the phone next to you—with the notifications off, reduces capacity to think/focus.
2. Notifications lead to significant drop in focus/productivity
3. “multi-tasking” consuming other media while working reduces how effectively you think.
Social
1. Smart phone use is decreasing face to face time and skills, connected to depression and sense of isolation
2. People withhold connection/trust from other people who are engaged with phones, even if they are just on the table
3. Issues around smart phone use are causing stress and barriers between parents and children
Depression and Suicide
Smartphones becoming common among teens is the only significant/attributable change leading to a 25-30% increase in teen unhappiness, depression and Suicide that has been growing side by side with smart phone use from 2010 till the present.

And the last one is what has pushed me over the edge. I can’t step back and do nothing anymore. But I also know that there have been thousands of people who are extremely smart, who have gone through great efforts to make this problem much harder

then just triumph of the will. So I’m going to do my best trick in terms of solving hard problems…gonna get as many other brains (and hearts) as I can working on this. And that includes the kids too… So look for more, comment, share and show up. It’s too important not to.

*Of course I wanted you to read this. See, I’m smart and a little manipulative too. (When you get addicted to something, one of the effects is a splitting of the voices inside you. There is the voice that can see what is going on and wants control back. And there is the voice that feels it needs that endorphin rush that comes from the behaviors, that will do everything your smart mind can think of to deflect anything that might give the first voice a chance to take control back. )

The Secret Life of Adults (and other kids)-The “right thing” if someone dies

By Ben Calica / Leave a Comment / Features, Main Page

[This article is part of a series where we reveal stuff that adults or kids don’t usually admit to each other. Mostly it’s me fessing up to my secret thoughts or stuff I’ve done that maybe I shouldn’t have.]

One of the people at the store just lost their Dad, and my heart is kinda breaking for them as I write this. I’m (like everyone else around him and his family) trying to figure out what the “right” thing is to say. And I want let him know that there are tons of ways that are normal to react to this, that there is no “right” way for him to feel, that whatever he’s feeling, it really is ok. The truth is that everybody has a hard time figuring this out.

It feels like you should know the right thing to say or do when you find out about a loss that is just to big too imagine. If is a friend or someone we love, we tend fall back on “I’m so sorry for your loss” and “Is there anything I can do”. And if it is you, you accept those words in a blur, unable to believe that the rest of the world is still going on as usual when everything has just completely changed. Trying to figure out the right thing to do or feel makes a really tough time, much tougher.

If you are going through this, and this is intended for our friend, this stuff comes at you as it comes, and it’s all ok. All the cliche stuff has some basis in truth, but the order of what you are going through, and when or if you go through it is different for each person.

For some people, it hits them like a hammer to the gut right away.
For others, they feel bad that they don’t feel “enough” at the beginning.
Some people reach out to their friends and loved ones for support, others don’t want to talk about it.
Some take great comfort from the people who reach out, others snap back at them, because how can they understand?
Some put on a brave face to show that they are ok, and that no one needs to worry about them.
Some focus all their attention of taking care of the others in their family who are hurt.
Some just put all the feelings away to deal with later
Some just cry until they can’t cry anymore
Some write or draw or do anything else they can to either process or distract themselves
And a thousand other things…

…

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Win with Grace, Lose with Style, Play for fun…The rules of the store and The Elections… (Or, don’t listen to them, listen to me…)

By Ben Calica / Leave a Comment / Features, Main Page

Win with Grace, Lose with Style, Play for fun…The rules of the store and The Elections… (Or, don’t listen to them, listen to me…)

I can’t believe I need to write this, but clearly I do. The election is about to happen, and regardless of the outcome, it’s important to know that not only have the people running acted in ways that we shouldn’t emulate, that honestly, if they’d been in the store, we would have had a little private chat about the rules.

(I actually work hard to keep politics out of the store….there are certain issues, particularly those with deeply held personal beliefs, that once you start engaging in, it becomes hard to see someone who disagrees with you as anything beyond someone who is “other”, and this is a place for treating each other with respect so we can have (gasp) fun with each other. I’m not going to change that policy now. I have my own preferences, but I won’t push them on anybody.)

No Bad Language: This rule extends beyond just swearing, but to smack talk in general. Basically anything that is aimed at the purpose of making someone else feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or to attack their self-worth or self-confidence is just not ok. It doesn’t do anything besides make the other person like you less and poisons the ability to talk with each other and have fun. Sure we compete and do our best to win, but none of that requires or is benefited by being mean.

Given that, I do feel like I need to say something about one aspect of all of this. The idea of elections is to choose people, in the case of the legislators (the law makers) who will act on our behalf to make the laws that will allow us to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And in the case of the president, that person is the citizen that we choose to act on our behalf in making sure those laws are enforced, in being our face to the world, to act when disasters happen, and to protect us and those we feel need protecting on our behalf. They are both part of the check and balance of power on each other, come up with by our founding fathers who saw just what went wrong when all the power was in the hands of one person with the kings that ignored the will of the people, or with the will of the people when the passions of a moment turned them from people to the mob, as happened in France, who’s persecuted turned to persecutors, filling baskets with the remnants of their vengeance.

No Roughhousing or unwanted physical contact: Not a place for grabbing, hitting or physically hurting other people. (And no, if another player says that they will pay to get you out of trouble if you go and hurt someone that is annoying them, you’ll both get kicked out.) Hurting someone, or encouraging someone else to hurt someone is utterly unacceptable.

The law makers are supposed to be our avatars….working together on our behalf, and the President should be the best of us, the person who we most trust to do the right thing when the clock is ticking and to lead and inspire us.

Good sportsmanship: If you win or you lose, reach across the table, shake hands and say good game. Those who do will have fun every-time, not just when they win, and get a chance to learn and get better. Nobody wants to play or even be around someone who comes up with excuses why they didn’t win, particularly before the match even begins.

There has been behavior that has happened, over and over again in this campaign that, far from inspiring us and giving us things to aspire to, is so bad that if it happened in the store, I’d have to pull someone aside and have a quiet talk about treating each other with respect and trying to work things out. For my young players, who’ve done so well at bringing out the best in each other, at turning away from teasing, name-calling and bad sportsmanship, know that for many of us adults, we are also looking in disbelief at presidential candidates who act with the language of frustrated little kids.

In terms of our Senators and Congresspeople, if we just wanted to have you vote on party lines, not actually talk with each other about the merits of each law, we can do that. You guys can sit on the side, writing petitions, and we’ll vote from home. Or we can just send one of those pecking water bird toys that hits the same button over and over again.

There are a lot of things wrong with the system at this point. Hidden money making it so our representatives need to give access to those with bigger pockets, often over doing the right thing for those of us who elected them. Legislators living in such fear of being singled out and attacked by their own parties, that the idea of reaching out to the other side and talking things through puts them at real risk. Would any of us act that way? Do we want those who are acting for us doing that? (Here is an amazing video about what has happened over the last 50+ years in congress)

Rise of partisanship in congress…

https://youtu.be/tEczkhfLwqM

But what we have to do is remember that the system was set up by some pretty smart people, (people like us), who tried to figure out the best way to do things and to set up systems of checks and balances that would keep things stable while they were working, but allow for changes (amendments) if something was clearly not working the way that they intended. If you get frustrated, remember that, and then work to understand why and make things better.

And one final thing. Every one of you that comes to the store on a regular basis, behaves better then what we are seeing in front of us. So if that little voice inside says, “this isn’t a good person to try and be like”, pay attention to it. You’ve been part of creating a good an welcoming place at D20, so as far as I’m concerned. you are doing good so far.

Ben

P.S. For those of you who are voting, I won’t suggest who you vote for, but would ask one thing: None of this is as simplistic as it is portrayed. Don’t get stubborn in either direction because of what someone else tries to tell you to do. Take the time to really look at the candidates and decide who you want to represent and act for you for the next 4 years once all the ads are done and it is just working at the highest pressure, most intense job in the country, and who you would least like to see in that role. We’ve seen from previous elections that they are not all the same and who is there has real and lasting consequences for all of us. And go and vote….

So I shoplifted as a kid. An open letter to my D20 kids about shoplifting..

By Ben Calica / 3 Comments / Features, Main Page

“I couldn’t understand how I went from feeling such a good feeling of being clever and getting away with being better then the system to having what felt like a physical pit in my stomach and a flush of shame that I was convinced would never, ever go away…”

The other day, we caught some kids figuring out how to scam the card machine at the store. These weren’t bad kids, but it didn’t even occur to them that they were stealing, or if it did, they didn’t draw the line to the wrong of it. So I decided to pull out a story that I’ve only told a few people about what happened with me when I shoplifted at about the same age that these kids did.

Stealing and shoplifting are a fact of life for a store like D20, and what you would only know if you actually did the books at the end of the month, is that while the stealing is a fairly small percentage of our sales, so is the profit that we end up with each month, and that little bit of stealing here and there, really hurts us a lot.

But that is never my first thought when we catch someone stealing, particularly a kid. I know, from personal experience, that moment in time can be the point where someone chooses what kind of person they want to be. This is the time when …

So I shoplifted as a kid. An open letter to my D20 kids about shoplifting..Read More »

The Case for Family Game Night

By Ben Calica / Leave a Comment / Features, Main Page

The case for Family Game Night.

I see a lot of families come into the store and see how they interact with each other.

“It’s his/her thing” There are a lot of kids dropped off with parents who through their hands up in the air about understanding the games the kids are playing, but are just happy their noses are out of screens.
“If only they knew…” There are kids who have no idea that their parents sill have 10-12 year-olds living inside that are a little surprised every time they look in the mirror and see adults looking back, who used to play when we were kids and are a lot cooler then they can see though offspring-tinted glasses.
“Alright..enough you two!” There are parents who have the weary look of having tried to get the kids playing with each other or them and had such a bad time with tantrums born of games being taken as some sort of form of personal attack.
“Game on!” And then there are parents who’ve somehow, by joyful force of will or family legacy, who have incorporated regular playing games together as a family into their lives.

There is something beyond special about these families. I’m truly not saying that as the dude who sells board games, but there is something about they way these families interact with each other. An ease of conversation, a gentle teasing that goes both ways, that creates a sense of longing and envy in me every time I see it. And it makes me determined to do whatever I can to try and help foster that in every family, including my own. I’m resolved this year to do eveything I can to help make a culture that says that in our community, in Alameda, that we pick one night a week to look at each other’s faces, rather then our screens, that we put down the lists and logistics for a couple of hours in exchange for interaction, connection and hopefully a bit of laughter. That we realize that time we spend on this is not bonus playtime, but the work of making ourselves and our kids, the people we want to be.

Of course I’m going to push games into this slot, because that’s what I do, but obviously the same connections can come from hiking, playing sports, or building a rocket together. Just get away from the screens and look each other in the eyes.

Here are a few hints/observations that I’ve seen for those who have been able to make this work:

Get regular. A lot of the resistance to getting off screens or spending time together goes away when that time is considered sacred. It will very likely be hard to get this going at first. Part of what I want to do is have the kids be the ones who are pushing for this and rewarded in the store for making happen.
Get out of your comfort zone. Let different members of the family pick the game each week and have everyone look at it as a way to find the most fun out of the game. Sometimes only finding the one game that everyone likes becomes almost impossible. Besides, if you only experience that smallest section of that intersection, then no one gets what they most like,and everyone else misses out on tasting something new.
Teasing ok, shaming not so much. A lot of hurt feeling get hidden under playful poking at each other…if you need to set some limits on this, do so a head of time.
If competition is a problem, go co-op. Fair play and good sportsmanship are super important, and can be incredibly draining and no fun to deal with as referees each time you play. There are a ton of great games where the game itself is the opponent, and each of you are working to beat it together. These games are great for this situation.
Advice on request only: One thing that can kill games for everybody if one of the players is the “You should do this” guy. People like to be smart for themselves, so instituting the “Can I give you a suggestion?” rule is a very good idea, particularly when you team it with “its ok to let other people make mistakes…its just a game”
Designate a “prepared guy/gal”. If you are going to be playing a new game, make sure somebody is assigned to be the person who checks out the game before everyone plays to be the rules jedi. Nothing bores players more then trying to puzzle out the rules of a new game together for 50 minutes before you play.
Share the mantra: Model for the kids the D20 Mantra
- Win with Grace
- Lose with Style
- Play for Joy
Share joy, not expectations. A lot of parents get frustrated when their kids would rather stick their heads in the screen then do the things the parents wish they could share. .
For the parents…lighten up. 😉 We get so locked into being parents that we forget what it is like to be kids. Be kids with your kids…show them what that’s like. And related to that, don’t turn up your nose at some of the games the kids like if they have adolescent humor or even violence. They are adolescent, and conflict as one of the things that makes games (and) entertainment fun is utterly normal. (Shakespeare’s characters knocked each other off with stunning regularity.) I’m not condoning hateful or truly offensive stuff, but just remember what it was like to be a kid, and also remember that while when we were kids, we tended to play in gender separated groups, that as familes, we need to cross a lot of things we might not normally like to find common ground.

What I’m going to do to get this started is create a pledge card for the store. Anyone who pledges (and really means it) to do a family game night at least twice a month, I’ll give them a special in-store goodies (or discount) tbd. If this rings true with you and seems worth it, I’d like to ask for help in trying to make this something bigger then just the store in the community. My goal would be to have Alameda take some pride in being a community that has committed to this, and let’s see what kind of results it has on our lives. If you want to help and have ideas, email me back and we’ll set up a time to get together and figure it out. The best things I’ve ever done, have been done by cool people around me.

Have a great week and go play. 😉

Parents back to school Guide for Trading Card Games

By Ben Calica / Leave a Comment / Features, Game Guides, Main Page

Or how to send your kid off to school with their beloved trading cards and get both back happy and whole…

Private Note to (fellow) Parents: Ok…now that school is back in session, a few parent to parent bits of advice about collectible card games during the school year.

First…what are TCG’s (Trading card games)? Imagine making a game with baseball cards, where the what’s on the card can affect the game. The games are played by putting together decks of cards to battle each other.

What is good about the games (from a parent standpoint?) If you strip down the fantasy elements and pictures, what you get is math, logic, motivated reading and a chance to get the kids face to face, not face to screen. They are also great motivators for getting homework, chores and other needed carrots to counterbalance our sticks. See our other post, the Guide to Trading Card Games, for the full skinny. But the rest of this is specifically to help us parents in understanding the deal, and getting ahead of potential issues that might come up. (You may notice that we don’t include Yugioh in our list of these games. Yugioh is a very popular game, but we do not encourage kids to play it, and in fact have banned it at D20 Games, something we did not do lightly.)

source chzbgr.com

Trading Issues: 80% of issues between kids that come up with kids at school regarding cards have to do with what end up being unfair (either intentional or unintentional) trades between the kids. Some of these cards can be worth real money, and nothing makes a kid feel worse then discovering that an older or more experience player took advantage of them. As we say to the kids: there is no piece of paper that is worth a friend.

We have three specific bits of advice for the kids regarding this:
- Trade-backs are ALWAYS ok.. Make sure that your kid understands to always make the agreement that it is ok to trade back cards within a week or so, provided that the cards are still in the same shape, This way, if they go back home and find out that it was a bad deal, like they got pressured, or if they just want their cards back, they can do it.
- Check prices if you aren’t sure; For Magic cards, we use Channelfireball.com for our pricing (though we do $1 min for rares and .50 for other cards). Or for Pokemon (and if you aren’t sure) you can always look on eBay. (BTW..always look at Sold listings, not regular. You can see what people really buy things for.) For Pokemon, we use the Sold listings on Ebay.
- If bad trades happen, remember the feeling, and be a good guy: No matter what you do, there will come a point where there is a rotten trade that will make your kid feel just horrible. Believe it or not, this is a key (and good) moment for them to have under your care. They have the choice next time to take advantage of someone like they were taken advantage of, or to make sure to never make someone else feel the way they felt.
Avoiding Stolen stuff at school: Kids will want to bring in their cards to both play with other kids and to show off their good cards. Inevitably, when they aren’t looking, something will disappear, and much badness and sadness will ensue. A few ways to avoid this are the following.
- Names in deck boxes….make sure to put enough info not only on the outside,but on the inside to make sure the decks can get back to you guys. (The outside tends to rub off)
- Card sleeves…These cost about $4 and not only protect the cards (and keep decks from disappearing into the big mush of cards back home) but keep kids cards from getting mixed up with the person they are playing with. It also provides quick identification if a card starts walking away.
- Side-Loading Binders: Lots of kids bring their good cards in the same box as their deck. What happens is that while they are playing a game, someone comes over to look at their trades, and while the kid is distracted, a card or two gains feet. Bringing in a small binder for the trades/show off cards is a better idea. We strongly advise getting binders that have what are called side-loading pages. Rather then putting in the cards in slots in the top, and having the turn it over, dump out problem, these go in from the sides in a way that doesn’t fall out. More importantly it is kind of tricky to get the cards out, making it MUCH more obvious if someone is being a little light fingered. Remember, just as with the deck boxes, make sure there is enough info somewhere inside the binder to get them back to you.
Keeping Score: A huge number of silly fights happen between kids because they try and keep the score for the games in their heads. At some point, inevitably, you will get the “but you are at 6! No, I’m at 13 argument that leaves each kid thinking the other is a lying jerk. Paper, Dice or even some special deckboxes with score wheels built in are a great solution to this.
Losing is just fine: Reminding kids that every time they lose, they learn something new is great. Kids will often get so tied up with the social value of winning that they get tempted to cheat, not really putting together how much worse the rep they will get for cheating.
Packs are great homework/housework motivators. Kids that are playing Pokemon or Magic are always seriously motivated by getting to open a new pack. While my own kids may hear me with the “wah-wah” sound of a Peanuts parent, for other people, I’m the guy behind the counter at D20, a bully pulpit if there ever was one. Give me a nod and I’m happy to back-up whatever you are working on. Tying a pack a week to getting the homework done is a great way to do some positive motivation. (We’re working on something more official as time goes on…keep tuned)